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Ark Encounter is a creationist theme park that features a wooden building modeled on a full-size replica of the classic Noah's Ark, built according to the dimensions given in the KJV, of the Bible. Taking the KJV, term "cubit" as 20.4 inches (1.7 feet), the main attraction is 510 feet (300 cubits) long, 85 feet (50 cubits) wide and 51 feet (30 cubits) high. Erected next to a reflecting lake, it is truly an impressive sight! Much like Cinderella's Castle at Walt Disney World, also the main artifact of a classic story, it is the dominant feature of the park. It is situated near Williamstown, Kentucky, halfway between Cincinnati and Lexington, off I-75. Like the Disney parks, It features other tourist attractions, such as a zip line tour, a petting zoo, and a theme-inspired restaurant. It is associated with the 
Answers in Genesis (AiG) creation museum 45 miles away in Petersburg, Kentucky. The parks' exhibits demonstrate the sponsors' beliefs in the Flood, Noah, and the animals in the biblical account of Noah's Ark in Genesis 6-8. The Ark is basically a wooden building that looks like a ship, but doesn't move or float or conform to ancient building standards even for fixed structures. It also doesn't have any animals except human tourists, an occasional service animal, and maybe some termites and other small fauna.
Flood myths involving a deluge sent by God or gods to punish mankind, of which there are a few "righteous" survivors, are common in early history. The Gilgamesh flood myth so closely resembles the story of Noah's Ark that it is likely that the latter is based on the former.
The tale of Noah's Ark is basically a morality story about a common man who avoids punishment due his wicked neighbors by adherence to what he believed was rightly his duty - with animals. This is the same formula employed so successfully by Walt Disney. It is no coincidence that the Ark Encounter and the attractions of Disneyland and Walt Disney World are so much alike! Like the Disney stories, there is a good bit of logical and moral ambiguity in the story of Noah, some of which AiG attempts to resolve and some of which, such as why Noah didn't do anything to warn his neighbors, is left as an exercise for the readers.
A story about Noah is also found in the Koran. Sura 71 (Nuh) is all about the prophet Noah. It is not, however, the story in the Bible about Noah's Ark in Genesis 6:1-8:22. In the Bible, God speaks only to Noah, Noah doesn't talk to anyone, and his neighbors aren't mentioned at all until Jesus talks about them in Matthew 24:38 and Luke 17:27. In the Koran, the ark is mentioned in passing in six places (Ayats 7:64, 11:37-38, 44, 23:27-28, 26:119, and 29:15), but neither it nor the Flood are mentioned in Nuh. Noah is portrayed as a prophet, sent by God to convince his neighbors to repent to save them from an impending unspecified "severe punishment."
Like Mohammed, Noah is rejected and ridiculed by his people. Unlike Mohammed, Noah complains to God that nobody listened to him. He asks God not to leave a single disbeliever on earth because if you let them, they will only mislead your servants and give birth to nothing but wicked disbelievers. The Islamic Ark builder asked God to "forgive me and my parents, and anyone who enters my home as a believer, and all the believing men and women. But do not give the disbelievers anything but annihilation."
The version in the KJV, Bible begins in Book 6 of Genesis. It is actually one of two stories, in which Noah is instructed by God to build a 2,210,850 cubic foot box with the theoretical maximum cargo capacity of 5 WWII Liberty Ships. Although the actual space inside the model is inefficiently utilized, the Ark was supposedly large enough for two of every sort, "male and female" of "living things of all flesh," "fowls" and "cattle after their kind," and "every creeping thing of the earth," "to keep them alive." The popular interpretation of the story has the animals going into the Ark "two by two."
In Book 7, Noah is instructed to take seven "of every clean beast" and "of fowls also of the air," allowing only "of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female." It is not obvious what "clean" means in this context, since the concept wasn't defined until after the Flood. The concept of "clean" and "unclean" animals is not introduced until Leviticus 11:3. So it is not obvious, from which animals Noah selected two, and from which he selected seven. How did he decide?
Actually, God told Noah later, in Genesis 9:3, that "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you." The definition of "unclean" animals that may not be eaten is introduced first in Leviticus 11:3, although the term is used for the first time in Leviticus 5:2.
The Ark Encounter museum explains elements of the story in a universe similar to that imagined by ancient man, a hollow space bounded by a "firmament" above and a "firmament" below. Identification of the animals Genesis 6:17, is very specific. Those of "all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die," so nothing that breathed
that wasn't in the Ark would have survived, presumably including sea mammals such as whales, dolphins, and dugongs, which otherwise would have survived anyway. No matter how one interprets it, the story requires that the ancestors of all breathing animals, regardless of habitat, had to be in the Ark during the Flood. How many were there?
The resolution to this question is addressed on the Ark Encounter website by asserting that subsequent animal genera and species evolved afterward. The website states that, "Noah didn't take two of every species on the Ark - only two of each 'kind' of animal. The biblical 'kind' is actually more like the 'family' level of classification. That's a lot fewer animals!" This makes an excellent case for the Theory of Evolution, albeit thousands of times faster than claimed by the science of biology!
An example of a "family" of animals are the cloven-hoofed, ruminant mammals know as Bovidae. This includes bison, African buffalos, water buffalos, antelopes, wildebeests, impalas, gazelles, sheep, goats, muskoxen, and domestic cattle. If one assumes that this family represents a single "kind," There were only two bovids (or seven, depending on which story you prefer) of the ancestors of all these animals in the Ark. They are all "clean" animals, according to Leviticus. There are at least 143 living species and 300 known extinct species. Biologists estimate that the family evolved 20 million years ago, but if only one "kind" of ancestors of this family were on the Ark not more than 6000 years ago, a new species had to evolve every forty two years since then, 3333 times faster than the biologists claim. It's a wonder nobody noticed! It certainly isn't mentioned in the Bible!
Smaller animals had to evolve even faster, at least once every 100 days (over the entire age of the universe!) for ants, the family Formicidae. One has to wonder how Noah managed to make sure he had one male and one female ("unclean") Formica ancestor (and kept track of them in the Ark). He might have had less trouble with the two representatives of the family Pediculidae, the ancestors of the human body louse.
Noah had to work fast to build an Ark this size. The park replica took over 1000 craftsmen, using modern tools and building standards and "traditional" methods, not more than 4 years, 4000 man-years. Noah was at least 500 years old (Genesis 5:32) at the beginning of the story, and 600 years old when the Flood began (Genesis 7:6). Even with his three sons and the women of his family to help him, he had only 800 man years of work available, 1/5 of the Ark Encounter builders, assuming time for eating, sleeping and potty breaks, not to mention finding all those animals and obtaining materials, tools and supplies. One has to wonder how he made his living during that time, too. Maybe some of his neighbors helped, hoping to get a berth when whatever was going to happen started happening.
Surprise!
Catholics, like me, believe that the stories of Noah in the Bible are just that - stories. Jesus was fond of telling stories, called parables, to illustrate a point or explain a difficult concept. It does not surprise us at all that God would have done that prior to the time of Jesus. We do not see that the "truth" of the Bible is at all impaired by not insisting that God is unable to tell us a story. We think that, being God, He can do pretty much as He pleases. If we insist that what the Bible says is literally true and everything that it does not say is not true, we are presented with any number of conundrums, such as where Cain's wife came from. Scripture sayeth not!
The foregoing problems of incompatibilities in the Bible arise from trying to justify the assumptions implicit in it to make it say something that it simply does not. For example, the Ark Encounter devotes a lot of attention to dinosaurs, but not a single dinosaur is mentioned in the Bible anywhere - not one! Good Christians can refuse to believe in them at all, which makes the problem presented by the science of palentology go away (with respect to dinosaurs, anyway). This is a common difficulty, given the plethora of Bibles found in modern "Christian" bookstores, not to mention those not sold in these stores, such as the on-line New American Bible Revised Edition used by American Catholics. There are quotations from the New King James Version, published by Thomas Nelson Bibles, on the Ark Encounter website, but the classic KJV, originally published by 47 scholars commissioned by King James I of England, is probably better known, and will continue to be quoted and referenced here.
One of the most obvious difficulties is that of the word "ark." This word appears 230 times in the Bible. In only 14% of those cases (32 instances, noted by asterisks below), the word has to do with floating. In all other cases, "ark" refers to the
Actually, the specifications in the Bible are pretty simple: the Ark was to be:
That's it!
If the Bible writers had wanted to describe a boat, or a ship they could have said that. The KJV, uses the word "boat" six times to describe a small fishing vessel. They didn't say that Noah built a "ship," which is mentioned 71 times, either. To be sure, the replica looks like a huge, unpowered ancient warship. with flat bottom that would have made it resistant to rolling, and a pointed bow and stern that would have made no sense for an unpowered vessel. Unlike a real ship, it doesn't have a rudder, which would have been useful in maneuvering in wind and swells. Actually, a box (ark) would have been even less likely to roll and would have used interior space more efficiently. In either case, it still would have rolled dangerously without considerable ballast.
Another obvious problem is the depth of the flood. Genesis 7:20 "Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered." Fifteen cubits in AiG reckoning is 306 inches, which makes for pretty small mountains. Genesis 8:4 says that "the ark rested ... upon the mountains of Ararat." The two largest such mountains are Mount Ararat (9914 cubits) and Little Ararat (2292 cubits). If they were even partially exposed, Noah could have used them as bearing markers. There is no indication anywhere in the Bible that these mountains grew significantly after the time of Noah.
The main, overwhelming problem, of course, is that imposed by the assertion to which the AiG is totally dedicated, and is found nowhere in Scripture, that all creation is less than 7000 years old. The latter claim is attributed to Primate of All Ireland, Archbishop James Ussher, who allegedly added up all the durations specified in the KJV, and came to the conclusion that the universe began around 6 PM on 22 October, 4004 BC. Of course, Archbishop Ussher ignored the intervals that were not specified, so what he actually determined (assuming that his arithmetic was correct and that the Biblical "day" meant what he thought it did), was that the history of the universe goes back at least that far, which it does ... but the Bible doesn't say that it does - or doesn't. I debunk this in more detail elsewhere, if anyone is interested.
AiG, and the Ark Encounter staff, are obviously motivated by their religious belief. Employees are required to sign a Protestant fundamentalist statement of faith (which says nothing about the Ark, evolution, or a 6000 year old universe) as a condition of participating in the "ministry" of the attraction. Their motives may be, and no doubt are, completely sincere, but their science literacy is
woefully inaccurate, not to mention their knowledge of the Bible, its history, and ancient technology.
Nevertheless, the Ark Encounter is what it is, a huge modern structure that dominates the skyline, meant to impress patrons, and vaguely resembling the builders' concept of an artifact in an ancient story - just like Cinderella's Castle.
But it is much more.
Like other great religious monuments, such as the Great Buddha at Ling Shan, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Chartres Cathedral, St. Peter's Basilica, the Temple of Zeus and the Great Pyramid of Giza, it is a physical testament to the sincerely held beliefs of a people who, in this case, see an unreconcilable dichotomy between science and faith, and adhere to the latter as a means of honoring their God and achieving their eternal salvation.
Would that we were all so dedicated to our respective beliefs!
The word "ship" appears 71 times, in Proverbs 30:19, Isaiah 33:21, Ezekiel 27:5, Jonah 1:3, 4, 5 (twice), Matthew 4:21, 22; 8:23, 24; 9:1; 13:2; 14:13, 22, 24, 29, 32, 33; 15:39, Mark 1:19, 20; 3:9; 4:1, 36, 37, 38; 5:2, 18, 21; 6:32, 45, 47, 51, 54; 8:10, 13, 14, Luke 5:3, 7; 8:22, 37, John 6:17, 19, 21 (twice); 21:3, 6, 8; Acts 20:13, 38; 21:2, 3, 6; 27:2, 6, 10, 11, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, and 28:11.
"Ark" occurs in Genesis 6:14* (twice); 15*, 16* (twice), 18*, 19*; 7:1*, 7*, 9*, 13*, 15*, 17*, 18*, 23*; 8:1*, 4*, 6*, 9* (twice), 10*, 13*, 16*, 19*; 9:10*, 18*, Exodus 2:3*, 5*; 25:10, 14 (twice), 15, 16, 21 (twice), 22; 26:33, 34; 30:6, 26; 31:7; 35:12; 37:1, 5 (twice); 39:35; 40:3 (twice), 5, 20 (three times), 21 (twice), Leviticus 16:2, Numbers 3:31; 4:5; 7:89; 10:33, 35; 14:44, Deuteronomy 10:1, 2, 3, 5, 8; 31:9, 25, 26, Joshua 3:3, 6 (twice), 8, 11, 13, 14, 15 (twice), 17; 4:5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 18; 6:4, 6 (twice), 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13 (twice); 7:6; 8:33 (twice), Judges 20:27, I Samuel 3:3; 4:3, 4 (twice), 5, 6, 11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22; 5:1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 (three times), 10 (three times), 11; 6:1, 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21; 7:1 (twice), 2; 14:18 (twice), II Samuel 6:2, 3, 4 (twice), 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12 (twice), 13, 15, 16, 17; 7:2; 11:11; 15:24 (twice), 25, 29, I Kings 2:26; 3:15; 6:19; 8:1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (twice), 9, 21, I Chronicles 6:31; 13:3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14; 15:1, 2 (twice), 3, 12, 14, 15, 23, 24 (twice), 25, 26, 27, 28, 29; 16:1, 4, 6, 37 (twice); 17:1; 22:19; 28:2, 18, IIChronicles 1:4; 5:2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (twice), 9 (twice), 10; 6:11, 41; 8:11; 35:3, Psalms 132:8, Jeremiah 3:16, Matthew 24:38*, Luke 17:27*, Hebrews 9:4; 11:7*, I Peter 3:20*, and Revelation 11:19.
for Moses' stone tablets, portrayed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, now reportedly residing in secret in a chapel in Ethiopia, among other locations. In Noah's case, the Ark was a container of animals that was coated with pitch to be able to float. The theme park replica looks like a ship, but that doesn't mean that the Bible says, or even hints, that's what the real Ark was. As described in Scripture, Noah's Ark is just a very big black wooden box!
Genesis 6:14 - Made of gopher wood (whatever that was), containing an unspecified number of rooms, and pitched on the inside and outside
Genesis 6:15 - 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by 30 cubits high
Genesis 6:16 - with a cubit-sized window and a door in the side and three stories.
The word "boat" occurs six times in the KJV, in II Samuel 19:18, John 6:22 (twice), Acts 27:16, 30 and 32.