Arks to Quarks

       I Saw an article today regarding the discovery by a California college student of a Triceratops skull. That made me wonder, as I periodically do, about what, if any, thought process takes place in the relative vacuum in Ken Ham’s ears. Ham, in case you missed it, is the Australian born guru behind the Noah’s Ark experience in Kentucky. His Wikipedia page says: “Kenneth Alfred Ham is an Australian Christian fundamentalist, young Earth creationist and apologist, living in the United States. He is the president of Answers in Genesis, a creationist apologetics organization that operates the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.”

Now that we know who and what we’re dealing with, let’s analyze what Mr. Ham believes and how he displays it.

First, there is a small diorama in the “Creation Museum” which shows some sort of reptilian raptor chasing a human. How’s that for a start?  Then there are the (prehistoric??) steel pipe railings in the animal areas of the Ark. All this, hokey and implausible as it is, pales beside the truly obvious questions (and real-world answers) which make Ham’s charade simply a scam preying on the ignorant and ingenuous. 

I am pretty sure Ham has at least heard of Alfred Wegener or his theory, now proven as fact, of Continental Drift, also known as Plate Tectonics, Wegener was pooh-poohed when he proposed that the continents are, and have for millions of years been, in motion. Part of this was the assertion that initially the continents were one large land mass which later spilt into the continents. Less than 100 years later, however, such is not the case. Explaining earthquakes and borne out by new land formation in such places as the Atlantic off Iceland and Hawaii, along with continued increasing heights in the Himalayas,  no credible academic today disputes this reality. Sadly, for Ken Ham, (especially with respect to his ludicrous “young Earth” and Human/dinosaur interaction) allegation) this also means that one of two scenarios must have existed to validate his claims. 

Either: 1) The world and all there is on or in it was “created” as it is, with the continents located as they are, or,
           2) continental drift occurred after “Noah’s Flood” (around 4000 years per Mr. Ham. Let’s consider each case and the problems associated with fitting Ham’s assertions to ether.

1) Earth created as it is today: That would imply that evolution, which Ham denies, instead must be valid, since Ham maintains that the flood exterminated all life except that on the Ark. If the world was created as it is today, numerous species would have been exterminated which neither Noah nor Superman could have managed to get to the Ark. Jaguars love to swim but crossing 2500 miles of Atlantic Ocean to get to the Mid-East might have been a bit too much. The same is true, of course for Black Bears, Grizzlies, Pumas, Capybaras, Tapirs and all those other uniquely New World animals, which, per Ham, would have been eradicated if not on the Ark, which time and distance would have made impossible. The fact that these other animals exist in the Americas and not in any other place would mean that either they “evolved” here, which of course Ken Ham denies, or alternately, that Ham and the Genesis Flood/Ark story, are full of shit.     

2) Continental drift occurred after “The Flood.”   If that were true, then those same animals unique to the western hemisphere would have to have evolved (there’s that word again) from the Ark’s passengers. This, of course fails to explain almost everything we categorically know to be true, beginning with the most persuasive argument for evolution and Continental drift, which is that we find fossil remains of various species in some places but not anywhere else. While some of these are obviously similar, they have “grown apart” by separation. T-Rex is uniquely found in the Americas (as is the Triceratops, which inspired this rant), as the most direct example. 
Additionally, no human remains are found in any strata of the earth remotely close to the same age as Dinosaurs. More significantly, if any event sufficient to kill all the large reptiles befell the Earth, what are the chances humans would have survived it? And finally, if as Ham maintains, humans coexisted with dinosaurs, what happened to them (dinosaurs) after the flood subsided?

We have here an individual and, sadly, numerous others so desperate to cling to a fiction which allows for the possibility of miraculous events in place of relying on their own evolution given intellect for guidance. If all who suffered (just monetarily in this case) as a result were fools like those who go the see the Ark Experience (less than half of Ham’s pre-opening estimates, by the way) that would be unfortunate, but self-inflicted. However, when those naïfs with their messianic zeal tell those of us with functioning brains that we must not only “respect” their beliefs but legislate them unto the entire body politic, that is another matter. These people, sadly, cannot differentiate between respecting their right to believe, and the drivel to which they apply it and attempt to inflict upon others.