Atheists scoff. Evangelicals sing on high. Many in the middle of these two polar opposites are a bit bemused and a little confused. A replica of biblical Noah’s massive wooden boat, along with a 1,500-seat restaurant, has been built — far, far away from any significant body of water.
Across Ohio, radio commercials for months have beckoned the faithful to Northern Kentucky, and “Ark Encounter” is finally opening on July 7. Its creators predict anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million visitors will make their way to Williamstown, Ky., about an hour south of Cincinnati. Former president Jimmy Carter took a tour in June.
The builders are Answers in Genesis, or AiG. “It will be one of the biggest attractions outside Disney,” according to AiG president Ken Ham, a native-born Australian who is iconic to some and controversial to others.
In regard to the 510-foot-long, 50-foot-tall ark — with the first phase of the project costing more than $90 million — AiG has been the butt of jokes, most notably from science itself, say AiG critics.
AiG is also behind the (in)famous Creation Museum not far from the ark in Petersburg, Ky. AiG believes the Earth was created 6,000 years ago in seven days. Not only were there mammals and birds on Noah’s ark, but reptiles, as well — large, vicious ones, such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which also begets their explanation of the existence of dinosaur bones.
T-Rex models
Photo: Provided
Cincinnati-area atheists are mobilizing against the ark, and protests are in the works. They say not only is the ark dangerous because it breeds ignorance, but also that the world is laughing out loud.
“They are telling people the Earth is only 6,000 years old, evolution is not true, global warming is not true,” says Jim Helton, president of Tri-State Freethinkers, which advocates for the separation of church and state. “They are anti-science as they come, which just makes Kentucky dumb.”
The “Christian Apologetics” or the “Young-Earth Creationists” of AiG are not backing down. Apologetics means “reasoned defense,” and AiG has a crack unit of Ph.Ds defending (and promoting) its belief that creation, evolution and science are compatible. Its leaders say their theories at the very least should be considered by mainstream science.
“There is an enormous amount of evidence for creation and the flood,” stated AiG’s Dr. Andrew Snelling, a creation scientist and geologist, in the publication Creation 14. “Also, the opposition to that evidence and to the clear teachings of the scriptures, Peter reminds us, is because scoffers are ‘willingly ignorant’ — it is a spiritual issue.”
On the fringe of the debate, some local Christians, such as the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, while offering nothing official, say that some biblical scriptures should not be taken literally. But a priest from the Archdiocese suggests the Bible could use a little promotion as Christianity retreats in America and atheism surges.
“Yes, the ark is helpful in that sense,” says Father David Endres, academic dean for Cincinnati’s Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, also known as The Athenaeum of Ohio. “You can be driving down the road and see a church steeple, and it’s a visible reminder of God. And if anything is a visible reminder of God, it can be helpful.”
Giving the Ark Encounter even more buzz has been the political battle surrounding its creation — a true brawl between the separation of church and state.
Kentucky wrestled with giving an $18 million tax break to AiG’s ark for six years, first awarding it, then rescinding after the state discovered AiG would hire only Christians to work for Ark Encounter. AiG responded with a lawsuit saying this violated its First Amendment rights. A federal judge in January ruled AiG may receive the tax subsidies and also upheld AiG’s right to hire its kind of Christians.
U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove acknowledged AiG is an obvious religious organization but has a secular goal of generating tax revenue through tourism. Tri-State Freethinkers cried foul over the ruling.
“Here’s where it gets real shady,” Helton says. “The ark itself is a nonprofit (Crosswater Canyon, an affiliate of AiG). Nonprofits can discriminate in their hiring practices, and you can give donations to the boat and write them off on your taxes. The ark is surrounded by a for-profit company (Ark Encounter, LLC). So they have a nonprofit surrounded by a for-profit. So they are double-dipping and getting the best of both worlds.”
How AiG raised the $90 million for the ark is pretty near biblical and somewhat dizzying. In addition to $30 million in donations, the project has been constructed with more than $60 million in municipal bonds. Those bonds are payable from Ark revenues, but, should the project fail to be sufficiently profitable, money from a Tax Increment Financing district established by the city of Williamstown could be used to pay them off.
TIFs leverage future tax receipts that would typically go to general municipal budgets toward specific improvement projects — usually, but not always, on public property. They are usually issued, and in some states only issued, to blighted and vacant urban areas or brownfields.
Over a 20 to 30 year agreement, the TIF captures the new or incremental tax revenue, such as increases from property values or sales, which could be used to re-pay the loans or to build future improvements to the park. The TIF is authorized by the state and administered by cities and counties. Critics say TIFs divert taxes away from city services, such as police and parks, and raise the shadow of corruption as developers seek sweetheart deals from local government.
In rare cases, TIFs are issued to build projects on vacant land to encourage more development and create jobs.
This apparently was the case for Kentucky and the city of Williamstown when it granted AiG a $62 million TIF. The mayor of Williamstown never returned requests to comment from CityBeat. The city of Williamstown and AiG agreed that for 30 years, 75 percent of Ark Encounter’s real estate taxes will go into the TIF district, and those funds could be used to repay the $62 million in bond funding.
There are more head-scratching financing maneuvers that will pay for the ark. As part of the TIF district, Ark Encounter’s as many as 900 employees will pay a 2 percent “job assessment fee” on gross wages. That money will go to paying off the project. “There is no reason to give AiG free money,” Helton says. “This is not even a separation of church and state issue. This is just a dumb financial move on the part of the state of Kentucky.”
Helton adds that the $18 million in state tax breaks (to spur tourism) didn’t happen until Republican Matt Bevin was elected Kentucky’s governor in November. The tea-partyish Bevin during his campaign supported the tax incentive for AiG. Not long after he won the election, says Helton, heads began to roll within the governor’s office and the Kentucky Tourism Development Finance Authority, which tasked with assessing tax breaks to attract tourists.
“Overnight, while no one was looking, he replaced all the people who opposed and stood in the way of AiG getting this tax incentive,” Helton says.
Keep in mind it was a federal judge who ruled for AiG in its lawsuit, but Gov. Bevin’s office said the state would not appeal. Coincidentally, the new governor made four new appointees to the Kentucky Tourism Development Finance Authority’s board. Laura Brooks, spokesperson for the tourism development office, says no one was fired because they were against the subsidy.
“The new board members were appointed to replace members whose terms had expired and a member who no longer lived in Kentucky,” she says.
Not intimidated by a state government or a religious institution with deep-pocketed donors, the 1,000-plus members of Tri-State Freethinkers had planned to purchase a billboard near the ark to get their message out: Ark Encounter is based on a horrific event where many people perished.
Through crowd funding, they raised enough money to purchase the billboard space from Lamar Advertising. Depending on how much you gave, a donor could have his or her own face photoshopped onto the billboard showing their watery demise. Lamar Advertising, however, finding the ad too controversial, backed out. Protests at Ark Encounter will happen, though, says Helton.
Nevertheless, AiG told CityBeat that it will extend an olive branch to the protestors.
“Ken Ham wants everyone to come aboard the Ark in Williamstown — even those who want to protest,” says Melany Ethridge, AiG spokesperson for Ark Encounter. “He is hopeful that people who consider themselves tolerant and freethinking will be open-minded enough to want to learn more about the account in the Bible that is often censored from the public arena. AiG would expect that true freethinkers, using their critical thinking ability, would consider the possible validity of our beliefs and not try to shut down our view just because they disagree.”
There are Christians who disagree with AiG’s interpretation of Genesis, but not with the fervor of the Tri-State Freethinkers — for instance, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and its superiors at the central governing body of the Catholic Church, the Vatican.
Father Endres of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati says there’s one very important person who also did not take the Bible literally. That would be Jesus, he says.
“There’s evidence that Jesus himself read the scriptures spiritually and figuratively, as opposed to literally, at times,” Father Endres says.
Jesus, of course, was reading from the Old Testament, which Genesis is a part of. Father Endres says a good example of Jesus not taking the Bible literally is in the Gospel of Luke when he returned to Nazareth where he was raised. Jesus was at a synagogue reading a passage from the Old Testament about how God had anointed the prophet Isaiah to help the poor. Jesus told the crowd: “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
“Jesus said he was the fulfillment of the passage,” Father Endres says. “That would have defied a literal interpretation of the text by those in the synagogue who were ‘literally’ expecting a different messiah.”
During the first 400 to 500 years after the death of Jesus, he says, many early Christians approached the Bible much differently than current-day Christian Apologetics or Young-Earth Creationists. “They devised a different lens or way to read the scripture,” Father Endres says. “They developed a way to look beyond the literal text itself to see what kind of spiritual or allegoric message is there.”
While the Tri-State Freethinkers believe Noah’s ark is representative of an “angry and unloving god” inflicting an uncalled-for aqua apocalypse against mankind, Father Endres says the Catholic Church interprets the great flood as an “invitation” from God. “The basic message of Noah and the ark is fidelity to God and also God’s protection,” he says. “God makes a covenant with Noah. And Noah, through his fidelity to God, is saved. If you think about it, this is what faith is based on. An invitation to God through fidelity.”
Helton says the No. 1 question he gets about AiG is: “Why don’t you just leave them alone?”
“These are the same type of people trying to get the Bible taught in public schools,” Helton says. “These are the same type of people who say teach abstinence-only until marriage for sex education. Kentucky is a top-10 state in teen pregnancies, and my teens go to school in Kentucky and they don’t learn about condoms and contraceptives.”
As an atheist, Helton says he feels horrendous about the ark. He also feels sorry for liberal Christians.
“AiG makes all other Christians look like bigots and ignorant,” he says. “And that’s why the rest of the world is laughing at us. They’re saying, ‘You’re still having evolution debates?’ ”
AiG says the Tri-State Freethinkers are mistaken. AiG does not have a political agenda — just a religious one. They strive to represent the Bible — exactly how it was written, of course.
“Answers in Genesis is often misrepresented as trying to get creationist teaching into public schools,” says Ethridge. “AiG does not lobby any government agencies to include teaching of Biblical creation in public schools. If teaching of creation were mandated, it would likely be taught poorly and possible mockingly by a teacher who does not understand what the Bible teaches and who believes in evolution.
“AiG’s efforts, like the Ark Encounter, are done at a grassroots level to influence society. Our various outreaches are intended to show people that the Bible can be trusted in its history and teachings, including Christ’s message of the gospel.” ©
A Most Mysterious Deluge
The Tri-State Freethinkers argue Noah’s ark is a myth with no basis in science. But, ironically, there is growing evidence that Noah’s massive boat and its crew of humans and animals might be a far-distant factual event with a 12,000-year-old warning of a future apocalypse.
British author Graham Hancock is a former Economist journalist who began writing books on ancient civilizations, “pseudoarchaelogy” and “archeo-astronomy.” Some mainstream academics have dismissed his work, but Hancock’s books have sold millions of copies nevertheless.
His books include The Sign and the Seal, about the Ark of the Covenant, given to the Israelites during their exodus from Egypt. And there’s his 1995 cult classic Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization and its 2015 sequel, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization. Both books theorize that civilization and culture were brought to mankind by an advanced race of man lost to history.
Providing evidence to his theory are the striking similarities of the gods that many cultures of antiquity revered. These gods interacted with the ancient cultures before the great flood and after.
According to Hancock in Fingerprints of the Gods, more than 500 flood legends are known around the world, from Australia to Germany, from Mexico to Egypt, and, yes, even from the U.S. Nearly every part of the world has a deluge myth passed along from their cultures of antiquity.
Hancock writes that the flood myths are easily recognizable and all have strange parallels to the Biblical flood. “Some patriarch, forewarned by some merciful god, rides out some universal flood in the same storm-tossed ark and whose descendants repopulate the world.”
In 1995, he asks in Fingerprints of the Gods: “Through these myths the voices of the ancients speak directly to us. What are they trying to say?”
In Magicians of the Gods, Hancock presents a theory behind what he believes caused the earthly deluge.
At the end of the last Ice Age, over 12,000 years ago, a giant comet entered our solar system, he postulates. The comet broke into multiple fragments — some struck the North American and northern European ice caps. The tremendous amount of speed and heat from these mile-wide fragments liquidized millions of square kilometers of ice.
A second series of impacts occurred 11,600 years ago, he writes. This is the around the time Plato gives for the destruction of Atlantis, he adds.
His comet-induced deluge theory is radical thinking. But it is supported by a handful of mainstream scientists, including R.B. Firestone, A. West and J.P. Kennett.
Hancock believes this Earth-shattering comet remains hidden within our solar system and threatens Earth.
Of course, this is all theory. However, what science can’t readily explain are the “warning” myths before the flood and whether a “mother culture” helped mankind thrive again following the deluge.
Who these “gods” were — or if it were God himself — is a mystery that will probably never be answered.
For more information about and tickets to the Ark Encounter, visit arkencounter.com.
