Charles Wolford, a reporter for Louisville Magazine, visited Ark Encounter on its opening day this past July, and his article about the experience is now available online. While most of it is about his day at the attraction and some background on Answers in Genesis — not news to anyone who’s been following this site — there’s one conversation Wolford had with AiG’s director of research Andrew Snelling that is just unbelievable, even for Creationists.
Wolford brings up how Creationists say dinosaurs were on the Ark with Noah. But they’re not around now, so what happened to them? Snelling says dinosaurs went extinct because they couldn’t adapt to a rapidly changing world. But there was a period of time when humans and dinosaurs were together on the planet.
That goes against everything we know about the timelines of both dinosaurs and humans — dinosaurs died off about 65 million years ago while modern humans didn’t exist until about 2.5 million years ago — but Creationists need to compress the timeline so they have to make the lie work for them.
Wolford wanted to know: Was there any proof that humans and dinosaurs overlapped in any way?
Check out Snelling’s response in the passage below:
[AiG’s Dr. Georgia] Purdom introduced me to geologist Andrew Snelling, who followed Ken Ham to the U.S. from Australia and for the last nine years has been the director of research for Answers in Genesis. I said,
“There were dinosaurs on the Ark, right?” Snelling nodded. “Right.”
“Then why aren’t there dinosaurs today?”
“Dinosaurs went extinct after they left the Ark. After the Flood, we had the Ice Age. We had a radically different world. Some creatures weren’t able to adapt. But most cultures in the world have some legend about dragons, and these dragons are actually a good description of dinosaurs. The Chinese, for example — their dragons are depicted on scrolls pulling the chariots of emperors. And there was a story called Beowulf in which the king slays a dragon, and this happened in Norway.”
“So you take Beowulf to be evidence of dinosaurs existing?”
“Yes,” Snelling said. “It was an eyewitness account.”
Seriously. Beowulf, a fictional story considered to be one of the oldest surviving works of literature (not biography), is supposed to be taken as literally as Creationists take the Book of Genesis.
That makes as much sense as saying Hogwarts is real because there are books about Harry Potter. But what else would you expect from someone who believes in a talking snake and a literal Adam and Eve?
One other passage from the article stood out as evidence of the nonsense pushed by Creationists. Wolford overheard an older man at the Ark saying this to a little boy:
“Gravity has never been proven, because gravity is a large object attracted to a smaller object, and it’s never been seen. If gravity existed, a BB and a bowling ball should bump into each other. So you see how guys like Newton get caught in their own lies.”
He doesn’t accept gravity because he thinks it would mean all of us would be bumping together until we’re one giant blob…
For what it’s worth, two people next to each other do exert a gravitational force on each other, but it’s negligible because our masses are so small (compared to, say, a planet). That’s why we’re not bumping into each other.
To put the man’s comments in a broader context, he doesn’t know something, he thinks he knows everything, and he passed that (mis)information along to a child as if it were true. It’s the Creationist way.
These people exist. These people raised $100 million for a Ark. These people work to dismantle scientific literacy in our country. And these people vote.
(Image via Shutterstock. Thanks to Dan for the link)