I must be a glutton for punishment. Last year we took the children to
Noah's Ark Farm Zoo at Wraxall near Bristol. At the time, we thought it was just a standard play farm, but it turned out to be much more than that. The place is run by creationists, so the walls are full of creationist posters and there is a big exhibition of the story of Noah's Ark (which of course is literally true). Anyway, a few months ago we won a prize in a raffle. It was two tickets to Noah's Ark. We decided to go along yesterday for a day out as the children enjoyed themselves last time and I would be more prepared this time around.
Before we got to the main play area where the posters were, we saw a number of other notices pinned up, like:
Rhinos appear, like other mammal families, suddenly in the fossil records. Rhino fossils appear in the Eocene era, in the same geological period as camels, dogs, cats, shrews, moles, horses and many other mammals that we would recognise today. A few changes have taken place in each, but they are largely as they were then.
and a long list titled
33 reasons why humans did NOT come from Apes
This was taken from the book
'The Origin of Man' by Professor Stuart Burgess of Bristol University. This person is actually a real life professor in a good department in a good university. Surprisingly, given the subject matter of his books, he is not a biologist, but a mechanical engineer. When I googled him, I found
this very unflattering description by the British Centre for Science Education.
In the Ark Exhibition room there was a curious diagram showing how all the animals would be arranged. It was interesting that the T-Rex was located between the Giraffe and the hay store (and underneath the fresh water tank). Doesn't look like good planning to me.
Of course, any logical consideration of the ark story obviously falls apart very quickly. What about all the insects, worms, birds, etc? How anyone can believe this is literally true is incomprehensible.
We managed to pick up a couple of good leaflets. One was entitled 'Can Life arise Spontaneously' and was produced by the Creation Science Movement and the other was 'Evolution - A Theory in Crisis' actually produced by the farm itself.
From reading around Noah's Ark and looking at the leaflets and websites they refer to (especially
http://www.earthhistory.org.uk) it seems like the theory they subscribe to is a weird variation on creationism called
Recolonisation Theory. Basically, it is a compromised half-baked idea that admits that standard creationism doesn't make sense, but, as they are committed to their religious view of history, they have to use the same tactics of twisting facts to fit their bizarre story.
The basic facts seem to be:
- After The Creation, all life on earth was destroyed by cataclysms from above in the form of asteroids and from below in the form of water rising up
- Did I say 'all life'? I forgot to say, a 600 year old man built a big boat and saved a pair of each living creature
- There is a fossil record showing a development of life over a number of years. However, they compress the timescale into thousands of years rather than millions (obviously you have to accept that all radio isotope dating and astronomy is wrong)
- To accept the above you need to accept that the speed of light used to be a lot faster than it is now (I liked this one!). Here's a couple of quotes
Rates of radioactive decay are proportional to c. Accordingly, these rates would also have been higher
and
It is currently unclear whether the value of c was highest at the time of the Creation or at the Cataclysm. It had declined to close to its present value by the second millennium BC.
- Certain creatures, such as mammals and birds appear suddenly in the fossil record with no predecessors
There's a section on the Earth History website called
In-Depth Discussions which doesn't discuss anything, just gives their own view of the deal.
Anyway,
Answers in Genesis don't like it, so it can't be all that bad!
