Christian theme park proprietor with reproduction Noah’s Ark preaching creationism 100 years after landmark trial | EUROtoday

In the rolling hills of northern Kentucky, a colossal construction rises, a testomony to 1 man’s unwavering perception within the literal reality of the Bible: a full-scale reproduction of Noah’s Ark.

Ken Ham, the driving pressure behind the Ark Encounter theme park, often guides guests by the big picket vessel, emphasising its spectacular dimensions – one and a half soccer fields lengthy,

“The biggest freestanding timber-frame structure in the world,” he proudly proclaims.

Inside, throughout three expansive decks, life-size animal fashions stand inside picket cages, alongside meals storage urns and different displays.

Ham explains that the meticulous design goals to display the feasibility of the biblical narrative, arguing that Noah might have constructed such a complicated ship and sustained hundreds of animals throughout a months-long international flood that worn out the remainder of humanity.

The Ark Encounter serves as a bodily manifestation of Ham’s broader mission: to advertise the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.

He contends that the Earth is a mere 6,000 years outdated and that people had been created by God on the sixth day, exactly as described within the biblical textual content.

All this defies the overwhelming consensus of recent scientists — that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that people and different dwelling issues advanced over hundreds of thousands of years from earlier species.

But Ham needs to succeed the place he believes William Jennings Bryan failed.

Bryan, a populist politician and fundamentalist champion, helped the prosecution within the well-known Scopes Monkey Trial, which passed off 100 years in the past this July in Dayton, Tennessee.

Bryan’s aspect gained in courtroom — gaining the conviction of public schoolteacher John Scopes for violating state regulation in opposition to instructing human evolution. But Bryan was extensively seen as struggling a humiliating defeat in public opinion, along with his sputtering makes an attempt to clarify the Bible’s spectacular miracles and enigmas.

The knowledgeable witness’ notorious missteps

For Ham, Bryan’s downside was not that he defended the Bible. It’s that he didn’t defend it properly sufficient, decoding elements of it metaphorically somewhat than actually.

“It showed people around the world that Christians don’t really believe the Bible — they can’t answer questions to defend the Christian faith,” Ham says.

“We want you to know that we’ve got answers,” Ham provides, talking within the accent of his native Australia.

Ham is the founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis, which opened the Ark Encounter in 2016. The Christian theme park features a zoo, zip traces and different sights surrounding the ark.

Nearly a decade earlier, Answers in Genesis opened a Creation Museum in close by Petersburg, Kentucky, the place displays equally argue for a literal interpretation of the biblical creation narrative. Visitors are greeted with a diorama depicting kids and dinosaurs interacting peacefully within the Garden of Eden.

The group additionally produces books, podcasts, movies and homeschooling curricula.

“The main message of both attractions is basically this: The history in the Bible is true,” Ham says. “That’s why the message of the Gospel based on that history is true.”

Creationist perception nonetheless frequent

If Ham is the most prominent torchbearer for creationism today, he’s hardly alone.

Polls generally show that somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 Americans hold beliefs consistent with young-Earth creationism, depending on how the question is asked. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 37 per cent of US adults agreed “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

That percentage is down a little, but not dramatically, from its mid-40s level between the 1980s and 2012. Rates are higher among religious and politically conservative respondents.

“Scopes lost, but the public sense was that the fundamentalists lost” and were dwindling away, says William Vance Trollinger Jr., a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

But the reach of Answers in Genesis demonstrates that “a significant subset of Americans hold to young-Earth creationism,” says Trollinger, co-author with his wife, English professor Susan Trollinger, of the 2016 book “Righting America at the Creation Museum.”

Leading science organisations say it’s crucial to teach evolution and old-Earth geology. Evolution is “one of the most securely established of scientific facts,” says the National Academy of Sciences.

The Geological Society of America similarly states: “Evolution and the directly related concept of deep time are essential parts of science curricula.”

The issue has been repeatedly legislated and litigated since the Scopes trial. Tennessee repealed its anti-evolution law in 1967. The US Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that a similar Arkansas law was an unconstitutional promotion of religion, and in 1987 it overturned a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught alongside evolution.

A 2005 federal court similarly forbade a Pennsylvania school district from presenting “intelligent design,” a different approach to creationism that argues life is too complex to have evolved by chance.

Science educators alarmed

Some lawmakers have recently revived the issue. North Dakota’s Senate this year defeated a bill that would have allowed public school teaching on intelligent design. A new West Virginia law vaguely allows teachers to answer student questions about “scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist.”

The Scopes trial set a template for today’s culture-war battles, with efforts to expand vouchers for attendees of private schools, including Christian ones teaching creationism, and to introduce Bible-infused lessons and Ten Commandments displays in public schools.

Such efforts alarm science educators like Bill Nye, the television “Science Guy,” whose 2014 debate with Ham was billed as “Scopes II” and has generated millions of video views online.

“What you get out of religion, as I understand it, is this wonderful sense of community,” Nye says. “Community is very much part of the human experience. But the Earth is not 4,000 years old.

“To teach that idea to children with any backing — be it religious or these remarkable ideas that humans are not related to, for example, chimpanzees or bonobos — is breathtaking. It’s silly. And so we fight this fight.”

Nye says evidence is overwhelming, ranging from fossil layers to the distribution of species. “There are trees older than Mr. Ham thinks the world is,” he adds.

Religious views on origins vary

One weekday in March, visitors milled about the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, which draw an estimated 1.5 million visits per year (including duplicate visits).

“We are churchgoing, Bible-believing Christians,” says Louise van Niekerk of Ontario, Canada, who traveled with her family to the Creation Museum. She’s concerned that her four children are faced with a public-school curriculum permeated with evolution.

The Creation Museum, van Niekerk says, “is encouraging a robust alternate worldview from what they’re being taught,” she says.

Many religious groups accommodate evolution, though.

Gallup’s survey found that of Americans who believe in evolution, more say it happened with God’s guidance (34 per cent) than without it (24 per cent). Catholic popes have shown openness to evolution while insisting the human soul is a divine creation. Many liberal Protestants and even some evangelicals have accepted at least parts of evolutionary theory.

But among many evangelicals, creationist belief is strong.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical body, has promoted creationist beliefs in its publications. The Assemblies of God asserts that Adam and Eve were historical people. Some evangelical schools, such as Bryan’s namesake college in Tennessee, affirm creationist beliefs in their doctrinal statements.

There’s a larger issue here, critics say

Just as Ham says the creation story is vital to defend a bigger reality concerning the Christian Gospel, critics say extra is at stake than simply the human origin story.

The Trollingers wrote that the Answers in Genesis enterprise is an “arsenal in the culture war.” They say it aligns with Christian nationalism, selling conservative views in theology, household and gender roles, and casting doubt on different areas of scientific consensus, akin to human-made local weather change.

Nye, too, says the message matches right into a extra normal and ominous anti-science motion. “Nobody is talking about climate change right now,” he laments.

Exhibits promote a “vengeful and violent” God, says Susan Trollinger, noting the cross on the ark’s massive door, which analogises that simply because the depraved perished within the flood, these with out Christ face everlasting hellfire.

And there are extra parallels to 1925.

Bryan had declaimed, “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys?” The Creation Museum, which depicts violence, medication and different social ills as ensuing from perception in evolution, is “Bryan’s social message on steroids,” wrote Edward Larson in a 2020 afterword to “Summer for the Gods,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Scopes trial.

More sights are deliberate

The protests that originally greeted the museum and ark tasks, from secularist teams who thought of them embarrassments to Kentucky, have ebbed.

When the state initially denied a tourism tax rebate for the Ark Encounter due to its non secular nature, a federal courtroom overturned that ruling. Representing Ham’s group was a Louisiana lawyer named Mike Johnson — now speaker of the US House of Representatives.

Despite these blips, Ham’s huge ministry costs ahead. Expansion is subsequent, with AIG sights deliberate for Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri — each vacationer hubs providing extra alternatives to advertise creationism to the lots.

Todd Bigelow, visiting the Ark Encounter from Mesa, Arizona, says the exhibit vividly evoked the security that Noah and his household will need to have felt. It helped him recognize “the opportunities God gives us to live the life we have, and hopefully make good choices and repent when we need to,” he says.

“I think,” Bigelow provides, “God and science can go hand in hand.”