Inside the ark are 125,000 square feet of exhibits, across three decks, that focus on the how and why of Noah’s endeavor. Just as Christians (and Western Civilization) use the birth of Christ as a fulcrum to track history before and after it, Young Earth creationists use the flood as a hinge to explain a post-Eden world spun out of control, righted by God’s rainy wrath, and now spinning, spinning again. When the waters recede about a year later, it’s left to Noah, his family, and the animals they saved to repopulate the Earth.įor Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG), Noah’s flood is foundational. “And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth,” the narrator writes, “and it grieved him to his heart.” He tasks the only moral man left in the world with preserving life in the coming catastrophe, telling Noah to build a ship and “bring two of every kind into the ark.” The rain falls, the waters rise, and everything that’s not on Noah’s boat dies.
After a series of events at the beginning of Genesis that distanced God from his creation-murder, lawlessness, sex between angels and human women-God has seen enough.
The group is perhaps best-known for the Creation Museum, an anti-evolutionary attraction it opened in 2007, just 45 minutes north of the ark, at a cost of $27 million.Īrk Encounter retells one of the most famous stories in the Hebrew Bible: a global flood that wiped out most of creation. The ark is the latest project of the creationist ministry Answers in Genesis and its evangelist-in-chief founder Ken Ham. The behemoth exhibition opened in July and cost $100 million. It’s opening day at Ark Encounter, a “life-size,” imagined replica of Noah’s Ark constructed, to the precise cubit as laid out in the Bible, in rural Kentucky. A garden of kale, chamomile, and fig trees grows a dozen feet away, planted in dirt that’s actually a mixture of colored sawdust and glue. Garlic cloves hang from a ceiling lattice, while loaves of bread sit on cooling racks. Above the butcher block countertops, gleaming knives and a pizza peel adorn the wall.