A giant ark is just the start. These creationists have a bigger plan for recruiting new believers.

Karen Heller
Washington Post
May 24, 2017

WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. — Ken Ham built an ark, a Noah-sized ark, in the verdant, landlocked hills of the American heartland.

At the sight of the wooden vessel, tourists — decidedly more than two-by-two, a caravan of buses surrounding the site — gasp in wonder. Christian school students storm the ramps, many completing science quizzes based on anti-evolutionary teachings. Admission is $40 for adults, $28 for students, but school groups often pay less.

The founder of Answers in Genesis, an online and publishing ministry with a strict creationist interpretation of the Bible, employed 700 workers to erect the $120 million Ark Encounter, which is five stories high and a football field and a half in length, and packs a powerful whoa punch. He had the massive boat designed by a veteran of amusement park attractions, commissioned an original soundtrack to enhance the experience, and stocked the interior with an animatronic (and freakishly real) talking Noah, along with lifelike models of Earth’s manifold creatures. Including dinosaurs.

And he saw that it was good.

The ark opened last summer and is on target, Ham says, to attract more than a million visitors in the first year.

But Ham did not rest.

The 65-year-old Australian and his partners, Mike Zovath and Mark Looy, have launched an ambitious 10-to-12-year plan to re-create a walled city from the time of Noah and a 1st-century village from the time of Jesus.

Also, a Tower of Babel, concept snack shacks, a 3,200-seat amphitheater and a 10-plagues-of-Egypt thrill ride. Frogs! Fiery hail! Locusts!

Instead of building a church, Answers in Genesis is sharing its teachings through a controversial biblical theme park designed to attract believers and nonbelievers alike.

“How do you reach the general public in a bigger way?” Ham muses rhetorically, sitting in his expansive corner office at the Creation Museum,his first, more sober foray into the family entertainment business, which celebrates its 10th anniversary on Memorial Day. “Why not attractions that people will come to the way they go to Disney or Universal or the Smithsonian?”
Why not, indeed?

Answers in Genesis is certainly adopting a different approach from the Museum of the Bible, which is scheduled to open in November in Washington and aims to attract all religions. AiG wants to attract all tourists and introduce them to its specific brand of faith.

Ham and his brethren are creationists and Christian apologists who believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. (Contrary to scientists who say that it’s more like 4.5 billion years — or older.) Apologetics is a branch of Christianity whose adherents actively defend their faith, and Ham is a robust debater.

The author or co-author of 50 or 60 books — he’s not sure, a rare instance of uncertainty — he argues that the Bible is a historical narrative and that “the whole gospel message is found in Genesis.” He believes that dinosaurs prowled the planet alongside humans and that the biblical flood created the Grand Canyon. One of his books is titled “The Lie: Evolution.” He maintains that Noah labored seven decades to construct his vessel and was 600 years old when the storm surged. (By comparison, the AiG team took only seven years to build the Kentucky ark.)

Ham — is it coincidence that his name is the same as one of Noah’s sons’? — began his career as, of all things, a science teacher in a tiny Australian town. But evolution didn’t sit right with him as the son of parents who subscribed to creationist beliefs.

“I took students to museums and saw that all the museums were totally from an evolutionary perspective,” he says. He began researching the creationist view of science, and ultimately began lecturing on the subject and was invited to speak at the Institute for Creation Research, then based outside San Diego.

And he realized that America was the best location for getting his message out to the world. “It’s the center of the business world, the center of the Christian world,” he says.

He acknowledges that his views aren’t commonly shared.

“Obviously, we’re in a minority,” he says in his pronounced Down Under accent. But “just because a majority believes in something doesn’t mean it’s right. People love darkness rather than light. If a majority believes something, I’m naturally suspicious because of the sin nature of man.”

Ham has twice debated evolution with television science star Bill Nye, at the Creation Museum in 2014 and two years later at the Ark Encounter, events that Answers in Genesis touts as akin to a modern-day Scopes trial — and that Ham believes he won. Otherwise, why sell the videos and book to believers in his museums’ large gift shops? (Nye declined to comment.)

How did a former science teacher, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel (Zovath) and a former radio reporter (Looy), all based in Southern California and with zero tourism experience, come to build a museum and an enormous wooden boat to promote creationism in northern Kentucky?

The founders say they looked at multiple locations in several states and chose the region because of its proximity to the Cincinnati airport, once a Delta hub, and because it’s within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the nation’s population. But the sites are also situated firmly in the Bible Belt, where there’s less competition from other tourist attractions. Plus, AiG was able to negotiate attractive incentives to locate there.

Ham proudly points out that where many museums and attractions “are reliant on government subsidies or a few large donations,” the ark was funded by 42,000 small donors. “The average donation was $230,” he says, though there were several large gifts.

But the project’s single largest source of funding was actually $62 million in junk bonds floated by the town of Willamstown, population less than 4,000, home to the Ark Encounter and the county seat of Grant County, which faced bankruptcy this spring.

“In terms of revenue for the county, we don’t get too much from them,” says the county’s chief executive, Stephen Wood. The Ark Encounter negotiated a vastly discounted 30-year rate on property taxes in 2013 under a previous administration. “I hate it, but that’s the deal,” says Wood.

Unsurprisingly, the Ark Encounter and Answers in Genesis have attracted a loud chorus of critics who question this financial backing.

“Why would the state indirectly subsidize a nonsensible alternative to evolution?” asks Barry Lynn, an ordained minister who is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a frequent critic. “It’s not good science. It’s not good anything. It ought to be unacceptable for a state at any level to treat this like one more bond-funded enterprise. Most Christians do not accept this as a literal or natural interpretation of the Bible.”

Ham argues that his organization received a tourist tax break while creating jobs in a region battered by the economy.

Kentucky residents “should be thankful we’re here,” he says. “We’re creating all these extra jobs in the community, which wouldn’t be there if we weren’t here.”

Perhaps, but a year after the ark opened, downtown Williamstown, about two miles from the tourist attraction, still isn’t much more than a collection of resale and “antiques” shops and shuttered storefronts. At lunchtime on a spring weekday, Main Street was devoid of pedestrians, tour buses or open restaurants, except for a coffee shop with a tattoo parlor in the back.

Moreover, AiG limits who can fill its jobs, leading the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups to charge the organization with discriminatory hiring practices that should make it ineligible for state and local subsidies.

As a condition of employment, the museum and ark staff of 900, including 350 seasonal workers, must sign a statement of faith rejecting evolution and declaring that they regularly attend church and view homosexuality as a sin. So any non-Christians, believers in evolution, or members of the LGBT community — and their supporters — need not apply. (Although, due to less stringent hiring requirements for contractors, an actor who allegedly operated a gay porn site was hired to portray Adam in one of the Creation Museum’s original videos.)

Beyond the boat itself, the Ark Encounter attracts visitors — read kids — with reproduction dinosaurs, a petting zoo (those would be live animals), an insect exhibit (very dead), camel rides, zip lines, and fudge stands.

The goal is for the ark to become “something on people’s checklist when they’re traveling, like seeing the biggest ball of twine,” says Zovath, who supervised the encounter’s construction. “That gives us an opportunity for people who might never go to church to see something that is mind-blowing and get some information that could change their lives for the better and point them in the direction for a secure eternity.”

The partners are confident that they can achieve this soul-saving objective because, Zovath says, “God provided us with some in­cred­ibly talented people.”

Chief among these is Patrick Marsh, vice president of attractions design. A former Beverly Hills fashion designer, he helped create the opening ceremony at the 1984 Olympics, Universal Studios’ King Kong and Jaws attractions, and a Hello Kitty theme park outside Tokyo.

Marsh oversees a 65,000-square-foot warehouse that is part design studio — his team was busy finishing 10 biblical steles for the ark’s lake and the bus arrival area — and part Ikea warehouse stuffed to the rafters with building materials.

When the founders first suggested building a Noah-sized ark, Marsh told them, “If you want to attract people here, you need to do it at a Disney level. Kids are so used to high-quality things.”

The ship includes 55 elaborate exhibits in 120 bays, including the recent “Why the Bible is True” done as an art installation in the style of a graphic novel, and two theaters with separate Noah movies. The first is set in Noah’s time, the other in the present, featuring professional actors, including one who portrays an incredulous female reporter who undergoes a conversion experience in both films.

Marsh is proudest of the ark’s intricate family living quarters, which resemble a wealthy Middle Eastern retreat. The exhibit panels note that Answers in Genesis took “creative license” in developing backstories for Noah and his family. Noah’s daughters-in-law, unnamed in the Bible, are each assigned a different race to explain the varying physiognomy of the world’s inhabitants.

By comparison, the Creation Museum, 45 miles away, seems modest and antiquated. It features a buff Adam, a comely Eve, dragons — Answers in Genesis views dragons as a variation on dinosaurs — and more dinosaurs. Ham acknowledges that its visitors are mostly creationists. Recently, the facility was packed with church and Christian school groups, retirement communities and a German group meeting with Looy to discuss building its own creation museum.

The Ark Encounter doesn’t get public school groups, either, “though there are some that come under the radar,” says Ham. “They get threatened by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the ACLU or Americans United.”

But Ham thinks that more than a third of the ark’s visitors do not share his beliefs. “It’s not unusual to meet someone who says, ‘I’m not a Christian,’ or ‘I’m an atheist,’ or whatever,’ but the comment that we get over and over again is, ‘You really present your message very tastefully.’ ”

The ark is not completed. Still to open is an 800-seat restaurant on the top deck, where guests will be entertained by Noah-era reenactors, a Bible-inspired dinner theater.

The biblical theme park, ultimately featuring 80 structures, will be built gradually. The founders hope to open a new attraction every year. Next up is a 2,500-seat auditorium for events at the Ark Encounter, scheduled to open next spring. The Noah-era walled city comes after that. “Picture Disney Main Street with lots of shops, food and fun things to see,” says Zovath.

Then the plans are to build a village set in the time of Jesus, who is currently a lesser player in the Answers in Genesis sites, rooted as they are in the Old Testament.

When he looks around at his progress, Ken Ham sees that it is good.

A full summer of tourists awaits. The ark, he thinks, will attract twice as many visitors in its second year of operation. That will help fund future projects.

“You’ve got to be risk-takers to do something like this,” Ham says. “But I see it as stepping out in faith. There are people you couldn’t blow into church with a stick of dynamite that will come and visit an ark.”

And, quite possibly, embrace the Word.

Karen Heller is national general features writer for Style. She was previously a metro columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she also reported on popular culture, politics and social issues.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-giant-ark-is-just-the-start-these-creationists-have-a-bigger-plan-for-recruiting-new-believers/2017/05/24/b497bd14-2920-11e7-be51-b3fc6ff7faee_story.html

How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail

Why worldview threats undermine evidence

Michael Shermer
Scientific American
January 1, 2017

Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data.

Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. Antivaxxers distrust big pharma and think that money corrupts medicine, which leads them to believe that vaccines cause autism despite the inconvenient truth that the one and only study claiming such a link was retracted and its lead author accused of fraud. The 9/11 truthers focus on minutiae like the melting point of steel in the World Trade Center buildings that caused their collapse because they think the government lies and conducts “false flag” operations to create a New World Order. Climate deniers study tree rings, ice cores and the ppm of greenhouse gases because they are passionate about freedom, especially that of markets and industries to operate unencumbered by restrictive government regulations. Obama birthers desperately dissected the president's long-form birth certificate in search of fraud because they believe that the nation's first African-American president is a socialist bent on destroying the country.

In these examples, proponents' deepest held worldviews were perceived to be threatened by skeptics, making facts the enemy to be slayed. This power of belief over evidence is the result of two factors: cognitive dissonance and the backfire effect. In the classic 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, psychologist Leon Festinger and his co-authors described what happened to a UFO cult when the mother ship failed to arrive at the appointed time. Instead of admitting error, “members of the group sought frantically to convince the world of their beliefs,” and they made “a series of desperate attempts to erase their rankling dissonance by making prediction after prediction in the hope that one would come true.” Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, or the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously.

In their 2007 book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), two social psychologists, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (a former student of Festinger), document thousands of experiments demonstrating how people spin-doctor facts to fit preconceived beliefs to reduce dissonance. Their metaphor of the “pyramid of choice” places two individuals side by side at the apex of the pyramid and shows how quickly they diverge and end up at the bottom opposite corners of the base as they each stake out a position to defend.

In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.” For example, subjects were given fake newspaper articles that confirmed widespread misconceptions, such as that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When subjects were then given a corrective article that WMD were never found, liberals who opposed the war accepted the new article and rejected the old, whereas conservatives who supported the war did the opposite ... and more: they reported being even more convinced there were WMD after the correction, arguing that this only proved that Saddam Hussein hid or destroyed them. In fact, Nyhan and Reifler note, among many conservatives “the belief that Iraq possessed WMD immediately before the U.S. invasion persisted long after the Bush administration itself concluded otherwise.”

If corrective facts only make matters worse, what can we do to convince people of the error of their beliefs? From my experience, 1 keep emotions out of the exchange, 2 discuss, don't attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum), 3 listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, 4 show respect, 5 acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and 6 try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews. These strategies may not always work to change people's minds, but now that the nation has just been put through a political fact-check wringer, they may help reduce unnecessary divisiveness.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-facts-fail/

The Obsession With Biblical Literalism

A Christian theme park in Kentucky brings the ancient to life through a life-sized reconstruction of Noah’s Ark—but not without dipping into fiction.

THE ATLANTIC
CARMINE GRIMALDI
AUG 21, 2016

Of all the biblical episodes, Voltaire thought none required more faith than the story of Noah’s Ark: “The history of the deluge being that of the most miraculous event of which the world ever heard, it must be the height of folly and madness to attempt an explanation of it.” If only he had visited Ark Encounter—a Christian theme park that opened this summer in Kentucky and boasts a “life-sized” reconstruction of Noah’s Ark. Seemingly impossible details have been fanatically researched and naturalistically explained by Answers in Genesis (AiG), a literalist Christian organization that’s also responsible for the nearby Creation Museum. With roughly 40 percent of Americans believing in creationism, the park shouldn’t be dismissed as mere Christian kitsch. Rather, it represents a recent and powerful trend in evangelical thought, a kind of fundamentalist realism. To visit the park is to see how conservative Christianity of the 21st century finds strength not simply in miracles, scripture and sermon, but in timber, mannequins, blueprints, and feasibility studies.

In over 100 exhibits on the ship, visitors learn how each difficulty might have been surmounted: How could eight people feed so many animals? Through an elaborate system of drains and chutes, as illustrated by an interactive video. And what about the stench? Solved easily enough—Noah just needed a ventilation system powered by the tides. And the daily tons of animal waste? Noah could dispose of that with a treadmill-cum-conveyor belt powered by elephants. But how did he fit elephants on the ship? And all those dinosaurs? They were babies at the time. And if visitors doubted that a wooden ship carrying all this cargo could withstand an apocalyptic flood, a placard explains that the ship’s dimensions, as specified in Genesis, has been proven by naval engineers to be the perfect compromise between comfort, stability, and strength. In one video, entitled “Sink or Swim,” visitors can watch animated simulations of ships from other diluvial myths being tossed in rough water. They all sink, often to the sound of terrified screams.

During the grand opening in July, visitors marveled at these technological novelties. But many I spoke with also confessed that they had never really worried about these details before; instead, they had just ascribed it to God’s power. Tim Lovett, the ship’s engineer, has heard this too often during his decades researching the ark’s design—and he has no patience for it. When we sat in Ezmara’s Kitchen, the park’s cafeteria named in honor of Noah’s wife, he dismissed those who attribute the ark solely to miracles. “It’s a bit of a disease,” he told me. “I’m only going to assume miracles if it’s there, and if it’s not there, it’s unhealthy for me to assume it’s a miracle… [God] doesn’t do miracles willy-nilly.”

Lovett’s fastidious focus on the ark’s “plausibility” is as much about politics as it is intellectual rigor. “The Israelites in the desert were not of particularly good character,” he explained. They simply “waited for miracles” and “sat in a tent complaining”; they were, in other words, “a bit like people sitting on welfare.” While certainly not universal, this sentiment has deep roots in conservative evangelicalism. As historian Timothy Gloege has argued, Christian fundamentalism has been intertwined with consumer culture and a faith in modern capitalism from its beginnings in the 19th century. This connection continues to flourish at Ark Encounter, where the text is interpreted, and then reconstructed, as a celebration of radical self-sufficiency.

During its first decades, Gloege explains, fundamentalism borrowed from the popular media of its day: converts were taught to read the Bible as if it were a realist novel or newspaper. A century later, the literalist style of reading has changed along with popular entertainment. At Ark Encounter, visitors learn to read the Bible as a producer would read a screenplay—the location, characters, and dialogue may be given, but the reader must fill it out with a set, lighting, sounds, and actors. It becomes fully realized only through performance.

While touring the ark, visitors are invited to consume fictional reenactments of Noah and his family as if it were a popular summer movie. When first entering the ship, visitors confront an overwhelming cacophony of life as imagined during the deluge: there’s the deep, bassy pound of waves, the hiss of wind, and the chatter of rodents hidden in the wooden cages that surround the path. The ceiling is lowest here; the lights are dimmest. The corridor winds around animal crates until visitors turn a corner and see the family huddled together; at the center is an animatronic Noah, who bends up and down in prayer like a bobblehead.

It’s a visceral experience, but more than that—it’s a lesson on how to read and visualize the Bible. This is no cartoon ark, no hermetically sealed miracle. If this isn’t immediately obvious to visitors, it will be when they stroll through the “Fairy Tale Ark” exhibit, which inveighs against light-hearted illustrations of the ship. Jonathan Crawford, an organic farmer from Pennsylvania and donor to Ark Encounter, complained to me about picture books that depict “a little bathtub with animals sticking out. The pictures are showing a falsehood.”

Christian fundamentalists have long proselytized with cartoons, but Ark Encounter seeks to change this by adopting the recent trend in Hollywood that conflates grittiness with verisimilitude, “reinventing” famously cartoonish franchises into something moody and gruff. If cartoons are the vehicle of myth and miracle, the ship’s immersive experience offers a different story, one about regular people, steeled by hard work, courage and faith. Ark Encounter seems to have found a realism that balances sanctimoniousness with entertainment.

For self-proclaimed literalists, the ark includes a striking amount of fabrications and fictionalizations. Consider, for example, one of the most popular exhibits, where visitors can walk through the family’s living quarters. At the entrance are two placards, one entitled “Artistic License,” and the other “Why Are the Living Quarters So Nice?” In each of the following rooms, visitors can see mannequin renderings of the family and read short bios. Take Ham’s wife Kezia, who likes “dressing up and looking her best, although the Ark’s busy schedule provides few opportunities for this.” But none of these details appear in the Bible. Genesis never takes a charming detour through the family’s hobbies. It never even reveals the names of the women on the ship. And yet these details are integral to the experience of Ark Encounter. It enlivens and stabilizes the text with the incontrovertible hardness of sets, props, and mannequins.

On AiG’s blog, Simon Turpin equates literalism with “plain reading” and “natural interpretation,” suggesting that anyone with common sense will read the Bible as they do. But as Ark Encounter reveals, this apparent simplicity demands endless fabrication. The park plans to build a pre-flood walled city, a first century village, a “journey in history from Abraham to the parting of the Red Sea,” and even the Tower of Babel (the latter, if literally life-size, seems to be courting disaster). Each of these grand dollhouses will likely be realized with the same style of evangelical realism that has made the Ark so enthralling to visitors.

The literary critic Terry Eagleton has written: “The ideal situation for the fundamentalist would…be to have meanings but not written language—for writing is perishable, corporeal and easily contaminated. It is a lowly vehicle for such hallowed truths.” Answers in Genesis seems to agree. These reconstructions create a deluge of meaning. So much meaning, in fact, that one begins to forget there was ever only a text.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/ark-encounter-kentucky/495707/