by Paul Braterman
According to the anthropologist James Bielo, such places as the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter provide sacred infotainment, in which visitors imagine that their own lived experience is Bible-based. This requires an illusion of authenticity, with no concern for biblical accuracy. Thus, when Bielo sat in on the planning stages of the Ark Encounter video trailer, he found much concern over the appearance of the pegs being used to hold the Ark’s planks together, which looked like something you could buy at a modern DIY store. That mattered because it didn’t fit the illusion. But no one really cared that Noah was incorrectly described as “righteous,” rather than the highly ambiguous “righteous in his generation,” which is what the Bible actually tells us. Ken Ham had okayed the script, so it must be fine theologically. Ken Ham, founder and at the time CEO of Answers in Genesis, owner of the Ark Encounter, is zealous in his support of one particular version of biblical literalism, but such zeal does not leave room for even the possibility of ambiguity.
As infotainment, consider how the Ark Encounter describes the lives and lifestyles of Noah and his family on board. We are warned that the designers have used artistic license, but assured that nonetheless what we are offered is completely compatible with the biblical account. Technically, that may be true, but in spirit it is totally false. We are not being given an account of the Biblical ordeal, but scenes from a wholesome contemporary sitcom. There is a library, containing scrolls and tablets, where Noah relaxes and Shem studies. It contains a couch, which Noah built during the flood. There is also a commodious kitchen with a wood-burning oven, used for baking bread, rolls, and other things. An equally commodious dining room, where they can all relax in the evenings after having fed the animals.
Noah’s wife is called Emzara, a name that as Ark Encounter states does occur in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees, but the names given to the wives of Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Ar’yel, Kezia, and Rayneh) are completely arbitrary. Ark Encounter gives these wives appearances suggestive of the nations said to be descended from each of the sons; European for Rayneh, Middle Eastern for Ar’yel, and a mixture of East Asian and African for Kezia.
They are all given characters and back stories. Emzara is an expert on caring for animals. Japheth excels in farming (there is an indoor vegetable garden, by the way, getting its light from the window), makes up songs, and looks forward to exploring. His wife Rayneh is artistic and enjoys sketching the animals, and painting designs on pottery. She is a skilled seamstress, responsible for many of the tapestries (!) on board.
Shem helps his mother with the animals, and they have discussed breeding techniques (is there a thought here of the hyper-evolution that is going to be necessary to turn the “kinds” [1] on the Ark into distinct species after the flood?) He spends his free time in the library, and meditating on God’s grandeur. Before the flood, he had studied the movements of the stars and how they show the seasons (echo here of Genesis 1:14: “And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years”). His wife Ar’yel had originally attached herself to the family after hearing Noah speak, and loves her profound discussions with Shem about the nature of God.
Ham is a brilliant engineer, responsible along with Noah for the fresh water and sewage systems of the Ark. He keeps weapons in his room because earlier he had been savagely mauled by a wild animal. Kezia had learned healing skills from her mother, and tended to Ham’s wounds, so they became close and eventually married.
The division of characters between the three sons is a faint echo of the blatantly racist division put forward by Henry Morris in The Beginning of the World, according to which (as I have described here earlier) Japheth would excel in matters of the intellect, and Shem in matters of the spirit, while Ham was confined to mundane and practical matters and would never become their equal. The suggestion that the differences in physical appearances between the three groups of descendants could have originated with Noah’s daughters-in-law (since they could hardly have originated with his sons) raises the interesting possibility that Noah’s grandchildren practiced brother-sister incest, since that is the only way to prevent those differences from being diluted within a generation. But Ark Encounter does not go into such embarrassing details.
And not a word of all this is derived from the Bible. It comes from the “non-fiction” sections of the Remnant Trilogy novels about Noah, by Tim Chaffey and K. Marie Adams (Master Books, 2018). Tim himself is used as on the Ark Encounter as model for a pre-Flood giant, and holds the formal position of content manager for the project. He is obviously well qualified to tell us about conditions on the Ark, since he has several degrees in theology, the most impressive of which is a Doctorate in Ministry from Shepherds Theological Seminary. This Seminary is accredited by TRACS, , the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, which as I have discussed before requires the teaching of Genesis as simple literal fact. Master Books is a spin-off from the Institute for Creation Research, and specialises in Young Adult fiction and non-fiction, as well as material for homeschooling. They recently published Who Am I?, by Martyn Iles, now Executive CEO of Answers in Genesis, a guide to human personality (reviewed here), which advocates female submissiveness.
Chaffey’s discussion of Emzara’s love of animals possibly derives from John Woodmorappe’s Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study (ICR, 1996), critically reviewed here by the geologist and former Young Earth creationist Glenn Morton, and uncritically cited with approval in Answers in Genesis’ Pocket Guide to Noah’s Ark. According to this, in preparation for the Ark, Noah and by implication his wife may well have kept a menagerie, in which they trained the animals to go in and out of their quarters when told, to defecate in specified areas, and to use chamber pots. This useful volume also provides the proof that there were dinosaurs on the Ark; as land animals, they had of course been created on Day Six, and Noah had been instructed to take him a breeding pair of each kind of all creatures that drew breath, dinosaurs obviously included. How many dinosaurs? Woodmorappe defines a kind as roughly equivalent to a genus in traditional classification, and for the reasons stated he has to place all known extinct kinds, as well as existing kinds, on the Ark. This gives a total of around 16,000 pairs, of which around 800 are dinosaurs, with a further 150 belonging to their pre-Jurassic ancestors. (There is no consistency in this regard among creationists. The Ark Encounter itself sometimes equates kind with family, so that all bears can be represented by a single breeding pair.)
I have no doubts that Woodmorappe it is completely sincere as he goes into enormous detail, including an estimate of how long it took on average to remove an animal’s daily excrement (7 seconds). His book runs to 300 pages, of which one quarter is devoted to a list of references from an amazingly diverse list of sources, many within the primary scientific literature. These are followed by four pages of study questions cued to the text, which start out easy enough: How could dinosaurs (including the largest sauropods) have all fit on the Ark? (Answer: Noah could have taken on board juveniles, weighing only about one tenth as much as an adult. A mere one to three tons). But we advance to highly technical questions about methods for restoring genetic variation after the Flood, where the answers include the possible role of retroviruses, and the effect of stress on mutation rate. It is safe to say that only a tiny fraction of the book’s intended creationist audience would be capable of understanding the questions, let alone understanding and evaluating the proffered answers. But that’s not the point. They can pick up this weighty volume (more than 1½ pounds), and believe the author when he concludes the work by saying that “the oft-repeated pseudo-intellectual arguments against the Ark are without foundation.”
I’ve missed the most important point. Late in my drafting of this article, I came across an article by William Trollinger on his Righting America website, placing this happy family in their proper moral context. We are being invited to admire a group making themselves very comfortable within the Ark while perhaps millions (or, according to Answers in Genesis’ curious demographic calculation, billions) are drowning just beyond its walls. As he had pointed out earlier, the Ark Encounter even has a symbolic door, marked with a cross, highlighted as a Keepsake Photo location, where visitors are invited to take selfies. The completely unbiblical implication is that had they been there, they would have been allowed to enter.
I, of course, would not.
The correct comparison is not with this or that TV show, but with The Zone of Interest, a 2023 film based on Martin Amis’ novel about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, enjoying their lovely house and garden situated right against the camp wall. The story told by Ark Encounter is not only totally absurd, but morally atrocious. And, as the popular paraphrase of Voltaire tells us, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
I thank Sue Trollinger, Bill Trollinger, and Tim McIver for essential background information, with special thanks to Sue for the photographs.
1] Young Earth creationists admit evolution (which they refer to as adaptation) within the created kind, so that each created kind can give rise to a range of species. This gets round the fact that we can observe evolution in action, and also explains how the whole of animal diversity could have been fitted onto the Ark, since we would not need a breeding pair of each species, but only of each ancestral “kind.” But diversification from kind to species after the Flood would need to be extremely rapid, since by the time of Abraham, a few centuries later, we already have the species that we have today. And, mysteriously, it is within the same time interval that all the species that we do not have today would have gone extinct.