Toilet Train Your Tyrannosaur

Millions drowned, but they deserved it. Be like Noah, and be saved.

It is easy to laugh at the idea of Noah’s Flood as a historical account, with all the animals (including, according to the main creationists organizations, extinct animals such as dinosaurs) on board the Ark. That would be a big mistake. In contemporary Young Earth creationist thought, the story has come to rival in importance belief in the creation account itself, while the Flood is seen as a foreshadowing of the approaching Final Days. As shown below, much ingenuity has been expended on making the story plausible. How were eight people able to manage so many animals?

Well, we know that Middle Eastern people were experts at animal husbandry, so perhaps Noah’s family had kept a pre-Flood menagerie to train them. Clearing out waste seems like an insuperable problem, but this could have been overcome by ingenious engineering, combined with training the animals to use chamber pots for their urine, and to defecate in designated areas (this according to a book praised in the Arc Encounter pocket guide). As to why the story is so important, it shows God dividing humanity into the Saved, and those who deserved to be drowned, and the entire Ark Encounter experience is an invitation for visitors to see themselves as among the Saved, then and in time to come.

According to the anthropologist James Bielo, such places as the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter provide sacred infotainment, in which visitors imagine that their own lived experience is Bible-based. This requires an illusion of authenticity, with no concern for biblical accuracy. Thus, when Bielo sat in on the planning stages of the Ark Encounter video trailer, he found much concern over the appearance of the pegs being used to hold the Ark’s planks together, which looked like something you could buy at a modern DIY store. That mattered because it didn’t fit the illusion. But no one really cared that Noah was incorrectly described as “righteous,” rather than the highly ambiguous “righteous in his generation,” which is what the Bible actually tells us. Ken Ham had okayed the script, so it must be fine theologically. Ken Ham, founder and at the time CEO of Answers in Genesis, owner of the Ark Encounter, is zealous in his support of one particular version of biblical literalism, but such zeal does not leave room for even the possibility of ambiguity.