Poisoned by Secular Dinosaurs!

Last night the Ark Van ministry visited a local church, so we got together a small group of atheists and went along for a bit of a laugh.

When we arrived, the van was outside the church so we went and had a look at the model of the ark, which was complete with little dinosaurs and all!

We milled around and tried to contain ourselves before they began the night's activities inside the church. I now know why I don't go to church. It was sooooooo boring!

The evening was opened with a hymn, before moving on to the longest, hardest and most boring bible quiz EVER! That's not to say we did too bad. The top four scores were 89, 92, 98 and 135. We scored a mighty 2 points! Perhaps we should have done our homework!

After about an hour and a half of faffing around with the quiz, interspersed with hymns and skits from the children of the church, Rod Walsh got up to talk about the Ark.

He began by explaining how hard it was to build the ark. It took him 200 days work, some of it with teeny weeny tweezers. He then invoked Hoyle's fallacy by saying that the big bang argument is silly, the model ark was not created by an explosion in his garage but by hard work and intelligent design.

This wasn't the most ridiculous of his arguments, either. Throughout the night, some of his points included:

• Evolution is not true. If it was, there'd be people in zoos with all the other animals.

• Outback shacks are not pyramids, therefore people were better builders in ancient times.
• That humans are de-evolving rapidly. We used to live for 900 years, now we're lucky to get to 100
  
• If you plant carrots, you won't get lettuce leaves
• 'Deep litter' could have absorbed over a year's worth of manure
• Biracial people are called 'mid-brown'
• That Shem makes a nice cup of tea

And my favourite argument of the evening.

• Looking at fossils we can see evidence of a global flood by the surprised look on the fish's faces! This indicates that a sudden traumatic event occurred and is backed up by fossils of fish mid-mouthful and halfway through giving birth.

Now I'm no archaeologist, but a fossilised fish can look surprised because the bones around it's eyes would not have been compressed as easily as the flesh surrounding them, giving a bulging appearance (and some fish just have bulging eyes anyway). A fossil of a fish 'mid-mouthful' could be because the fish choked to death and was fossilised as such, or the two fossils are just overlaid. Finally, a fossil of an animal mid-birth could occur if the animal were to die during childbirth, which is a common problem amongst god's perfect creations...

The main arguments used throughout the night were the argument from design, the argument from personal incredulity and the argument from biblical truth. Over the night, the talk went from details of the ark, evidence of the flood and the problems of science.

Details of the Ark

The design of the ark was spoken about in detail. "The bible tells us some dimensions, the rest of the model's layout was the result of prayerful thought and careful contemplation." In other words, "we made up most of it, but i think it looks cool".

We were told:

• the ark was 300x 30x 50 cubits (150m long, 25m wide and 15m high)
  
• Noah took 100 years to build it (he lived till around 900 years)
  
• It was 400x more stable than moderns ships
• Modern oil tankers are now built in the shape of Noah's Ark
• Each 'kind' taken on board was a species (so 2 dogs, not 2 of each breed)
• Big animals were taken on board as infants
• it was 4-5 stories high, it had three levels 5m each
• It's capacity was 52 rail cars, or 125000 sheep
• there was no need to muck out the animals, because they used a deep litter method
  

Evidence of the Flood

• The grand canyon strata layers are so close that they can't be 1000's of years apart because there would have been erosion between them.
• The geological time frame given by science is wrong. Just look at the erosion of the 12 apostles and other events.
• Mt St Helen's deposited 8 meters of strata in 3 hours, showing that traumatic events can mess with geological knowledge.
• All of the water drained into the pacific ocean afterwards because god rearranged things after the flood, which is how we get buckled strata layers.
• Polystrate trees (Fundy explanation here and sensible explanation here)

The Problems With Science

• When Rod Walsh (the speaker) was born, there were only 2 billion people, now there's over 6 billion, so the old-earth cannot be right or there would be many more people at that rate.
• 'Mid brown people' (don't get me started on that one!) have the genes to 'go one way or the other in one generation'
• Dinosaur bones have been found in Montana with flesh, bone and red blood cells
• Dinosaurs were in the bible as leviathan and behemoth. Also dragon stories are dinosaurs
• We killed the dinosaurs, just like we did to the Tasmanian Tiger, Whales and the Moa.
• There is a difference between experimental science (Bunsen burners etc) and historical science (anything that disagrees with the bible)
• Nebraska man was a blunder and Piltdown man was a hoax by evolutionists
• Don't believe the fallible words of man over the infallible words of god

The last part of the night was a shameless plug for creation magazine. If you bought a subscription, you'd get a free back issue, a picture of some old boat (an ark of some sort), a paper model of an ark that you can use to evangelise to your brother at a dinner party and a DVD (presumably something to do with the ark). Then he said that there'd be two free subscriptions for the first two people under 18 to go to the stage, to which there was a mad rush for the stage. Sadly, the kids seemed to have bought it hook, line and sinker.

Finally they had a prayer 'for those who were deluded and deceived by the lie of evolution'.

I must totally admit that I am still poisoned by secular dinosaurs and deluded by the lie of evolution. Sorry Jesus...