Читать книгу IN THE BEGINNING - Welby Thomas Cox Jr. - Страница 26

In Williamstown, Kentucky, near the Cincinnati Airport (to begin the confusion) a full-scale reproduction of Noah's ark is now open to the public. Claimed to be the largest all-wood structure in the world, it is 155 m (510 ft) long, 26 m (85 ft) wide, and 16 m (51 ft) high, closely corresponding to the biblical dimensions, given in Genesis 6:15, namely 300 x 50 x 30 cubits. The Ark Encounter, like the nearby Creation Museum, is operated by Answers in Genesis (AIG) organization, which promotes a literal young-earth creationist worldview: The Bible is an infallible repository of scientific as well as religious truth. But there are those who say the bible was written many years after the fact by monks who labored long and hard to present the best facts available to them at the time, and time has a way of clouding the issues.

For example, the Creation Museum features two children playing with tame Tyrannosaurus rex pets, despite the fact that all dinosaurs went extinct 66.04 million years ago, whereas Homo sapiens did not arise until the last one million years. Similarly, the Ark Encounter and AIG assert that Noah's ark was literally constructed and operated as described, that the flood was global in extent, that it destroyed all organisms worldwide except those on the ark, that fossils were deposited in the flood, and that the ark's survivors are ancestral to all life presently on Earth.