Why does Ken Ham's Ark-building have differing bow & stern shapes?

Ham’s Ark Encounter webpage includes diagrams of his Noah’s ark park reproduction, and so I immediately noticed that the “vessel” is shaped more like a ship than the floating warehouse one might expect from a reading of the Genesis account.

Yes, the two ends of the “ark building” are differently shaped. But why?

Ken Ham’s ark design doesn’t have any form of propulsion, and so it has no obvious direction of travel. Now I suppose it would make sense to have appropriate pointy-shaped ends of the barge-like vessel so that the ark could be (theoretically) aligned towards any oncoming waves from storms so that it wouldn’t be broad-sided and capsized.

Of course, without some propulsion system, maneuverable sails, or steering surfaces below the water-line, I’m not sure how that alignment could take place. There appears to possibly be a small “wind catch” structure at the one end of the ark that would tend to work like the “flecking end” of an arrow-shaped weather-vane. But one can’t assume that pointing a vessel towards a headwind is always the best alignment, because sometimes the most dangerous waves are coming from other directions during rough seas. Under rapidly changing wind and wave conditions, ship captains have to make difficult decisions quickly and be able to maneuver their vessels on a virtual moment-by-moment basis. I would think that there would be advantages to having identical bow-stern designs. (I’m not a nautical engineer but I would assume that the predominant design principles would be to simply float and to stay upright while protecting the contents. Period.)

So does anybody know why Ham didn’t make the two ends of the ark identical? Do any of the exhibits inside the tourist attraction explain many of the technical considerations? Are their docents to take questions from visitors?


P.S. I’ve already heard complaints from Ark Encounter visitors that there are no live actors lending realism to a rather boring experience that lacks even the generous animatronics one would expect for a $100 million exhibit. (One reviewer recalled just one, and it depicted Noah leading the family in prayer. That hardly seems like a particular exciting use of the technology. I’d prefer to see a dinosaur eating its bowl of dino-chow.) Motionless synthetic animals and continuous loop animal sounds beg the question, “Is this all there is?”)

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There are hundreds of reasons why Noah’s ark is impossible. The NCSE has the best article about the matter

The Ark Encounter ark is anchored to the bedrock below and attached to to another building. So much for being sea-worthy. As long as he’s making lots of money he couldn’t care less. But he does seem rather sensitive about the fact that he doesn’t have a lot of visitors

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For me, the Ark has always been a long chain of indescribable miracles … indescribable because we really can’t begin to count all of the sequential miracles it would take for the ark to have been built, to hold all those possible terrestrial and arboreal creatures … and to float upon an impossible global flood.

And yet … and yet … how many Christians who don’t believe a word about Evolution … because it isn’t literal … are perfectly content to gloss over a global flood … and conclude that it is a story about a regional flood… that the Bible just got a little wrong…

Sorry, I’m not following this. Which segment of Christians are you talking about? I know a great many of Young Earth Creationists and Old Earth Creationists of various varieties and none would fit your description. Could you give an example of a ministry or author who fits what you are describing?

I don’t understand what evolution has to do with something (what exactly??) being literal.

Considering that there is no mention in the Hebrew Bible of anything being “global”, that’s perplexing. They didn’t have our understanding of living on a spherical planet, so the word “global” doesn’t really make sense. but perhaps you are instead referring to the extent of the Noahic Flood? It would certainly be possible for someone to think that the flood engulfed absolutely everything, as in all lands. (I’m not saying that that is what the Hebrew text says, I’m just referring to the theoretical concept.) But that maximum extent of the flood wouldn’t have to include the idea of a spherical (global) planetary model. That would be terribly anachronistic.

Yet, the Hebrew text only states that the flood deluged the ERETZ, the Hebrew singular for land, country, nation, or region. It is the same ERETZ appearing in ERETZ YISRAEL, meaning “Land of Israel” or “National of Israel”, both in ancient Hebrew and modern Hebrew. (Indeed, as my favorite professor liked to say, “The phrase ERETZ YISRAEL has never been translated as Planet Israel.”)

Some would also object by saying that If the author(s) had wished to say that the Noahic Flood wiped out life on all the lands of the world, why didn’t they put ERETZ in the plural. I caution that reasoning because “the heavens and the earth” as in the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1 is idiomatic with a meaning akin to our word “universe”----as well as various other reservations. On the other hand, that idiom does not appear in the Noah account. Nevertheless, I don’t want to get too far gone with another exegetical tangent.

I’m just saying that even though the most traditional English Bible versions of the Noah text can easily be taken to mean “worldwide”, I don’t get that impression at all from the Hebrew text. Certainly the land Noah knew was the entire “world” as far as he was concerned. And it is certainly possible to imagine that all Adamic descendants who carried the Image of God in them could have lived in that same ERETZ and thereby been wiped out in the flood of Noah’s ERETZ. So I can certainly understand why Old Earth Creationist Hugh Ross likes to say that the flood was worldwide but not global: wiping out the entire world of Adam’s descendants and the only world that Noah new.

A regional flood is certainly what I find when I read the Hebrew text and take it at face value. “Everything under heaven” can just as easily be translated “everything under the sky”, and that fits very well into a regional view of things. (That is just one example of the “regionality” found in the Hebrew text. More importantly, I just can’t find any clues pointing to “maximum extent flood” or “every land flood”.)

I don’t know any Christians who think the Bible got it “a little wrong”. Whether they view the text as describing an historical event or a teaching story or both (such as an actual event where a regional flood became the basis of a teaching story), that wouldn’t make the Bible “a little wrong” any more than understanding Jesus’ parables as teaching stories wouldn’t make the Bible “a little wrong” just because they didn’t actually happen to someone.

I assume your paragraph was only meant to be tongue-in-cheek and I’m reading too much into it.

Obviously, I’m not a Young Earth Creationist and I find the Ark Encounter a sad sad milestone in the history of evangelical Christianity in America. (And I’ve written essays picking apart all sorts of technical/practical problems with Ham’s silly ark project.) But I consider the Noah account in Genesis to be an important telling of truth about judgment, grace, and God’s plan for his people. It can have great value without having to be understood as Ken Ham sees it.

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Same here. This is also how it was read by Josephus and Philo, both Jewish commentators of the first century. This is also how it was read by some of the early rabbinical expositors and some of the early Christian expositors. It’s a natural reading, and was not motivated by scientific concerns.

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@Socratic.Fanatic Thanks, this is going to bug me the rest of the day now. :slight_smile: A simple square sail should allow them to run before the wind. No particular need to reach. Given the array of complex tools in the Ark’s carpenter shop I seriously doubt the knowledge was beyond Noah. I’m also curious how the Ark design dealt with the problem of turtling. Perhaps it is simply a matter of getting the width-to-length ratio correct, but for an especially long ship that should have posed a serious problem.

@Jonathan_Burke and @Socratic.Fanatic,

How can it be a regional flood when it is as high as Mt. Ararat? If it was regional, why did hundreds of animals have to be housed and fed for a year?

If it was a regional flood, how is it that the bulk of humanity traces itself through the Table of Nations to just Noah’s children?

It wasn’t.

They didn’t.

It doesn’t.

Wow those were easy!

Of course, you could also ask why that big barn has such funny shaped ends. ;{)
Sort of off topic, but it was interesting in church this morning when one off the more vocal YEC guys suggested taking a Sunday school class trip to the Ark and no one expressed any interest. Zero. I suspect that visitor numbers may actually fall far below even the lower independent projections.

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There is not such a thing as “Mt. Ararat” in the Bible! The Bible says that the ark rested in “the mountains of Ararat”. (My professor preferred “the hill country of Ararat.”) You’ve confused the scriptures with popular tradition.

Furthermore, nobody knows where the region was located. Nothing in the Bible implies modern day Turkey. The ancients had at least a half dozen
traditions for the ancient Ararat region.

Yet, even if there was a Mt. Ararat and even if the ark came to rest at the very peak of it (a bizarre notion in any case), how would that pose a problem??? Some lakes and seas are extremely deep. I’ve never understood why anyone would think that scenario would rule out a regional flood! Can someone explain that reasoning to me?

Consider the Dead Sea. The shores of the Dead Sea are around 1400 feet below sea level. That’s dry land more than a quarter of a mile below sea level! And the lowest point at the bottom of the Dead Sea is around 1000 feet below that! So just for the fun of it, let’s assume for the moment that Noah’s ERETZ was in that area of Israel and his village was where the shores of the Dead Sea can be found today. So if God wanted to flood Noah’s ERETZ (“land”) high enough to cover even a nearly half-mile high mountain, all he’d have to do is remove a few minor obstacles—and then let gravity do the rest. Not only would that flood and totally destroy everything in Noah’s ERETZ, that regional flood would remain to this day. No miraculous “flood containment walls” necessary!

By the way, because the Hebrew text simply says that the ark came to rest in a hilly or mountainous region, there is no support for the idea that the ark rested “on top of” some mountain.

Huh? Consider:

(1) Where does the Bible say that “hundreds of animals” was the quantity of animals on the ark? I’m curious how you came up that number. [As to the day-to-day logistics of animal maintenance, if one accepts the idea of a God who is powerful enough to control precipitation and “the fountains of the deep”, animal-tending would appear to be a minor matter. Young Earth Creationists have assumed since the days of Morris & Whitcomb’s 1962 The Genesis Flood everything from all animals going into a peaceful hibernation—thus, no food required, no waste disposal problem, and you can pack 'em into the ark like sardines! (Of course, even if food was necessary, recall the story of the never-emptying food supply of the widow and son who Elijah blessed with a miracle.)

In fact,it has always surprised me that Ken Ham doesn’t play his God-performed-a-miracle card more often than he does.

(2) Why couldn’t Noah’s ERETZ/region have hundreds of “kinds” of animals? I can’t imagine how one could make an anti-regional flood argument from that.

In fact, if these are the major points you are arguing, they sure would seem to me to operate to your disadvantage: totally destroying a “global flood” idea.

Simple:

(1) Noah was just a few generations after Adam. Thus, the population of “Image of God humans” who descended from Adam would be a modest number at that time. Seeing their genes passed down to all humans today poses no special problems that I can see. (Something like half of the males in Central Asia today carry the Y-DNA markers of Genghis Khan, who was being very fertile around A.D.1200.) So I’d be fascinated to hear more details about the problems you foresee that I’m missing.

(2) A theme in Genesis is that the descendants of Adam like to stay together in one place and not disburse as God wanted them to do. Of course, this is how people often tend to behave: they stay in their “home turf” and don’t spread out until resources dwindle. So why wouldn’t a few thousand (or even tens of thousands) of Adamic humans not all be found within one region? What’s the problem?

(3) Many would argue that other people groups which did NOT possess the Image of God (i.e., non-Adamic peoples) lived outside of the flood zone and that the same inter-mixing problem developed post-flood as before the flood: God’s people of the Adamic line intermarried with non-Adamic tribes.

Some read “Noah was pure in all of his generations” as meaning that he alone did not have “genetic contamination” of his ancestors intermarrying with non-Image-of-God peoples. Thus, the purpose of the flood (for which this text segment and what precedes it, which describes “the sons of God” mixing with “the daughters of men”, serves as the preface to the flood account) was to purify that Adamic line to its original state. Thus, there is no reason under that viewpoint to wipe out every hominid on the planet—just the impure members of the Adamic line.

Examples of such non-Adamic hominids would be the Nephilim, the Sons of God. Perhaps they were of larger stature. “Sons of God” is a very common descriptor in a great many cultures of tribes. People notice that the people of some neighboring tribe are larger and stronger, such that people fear them. They assume that those “giants” are the offspring of the gods. Think of the Titans of Greek mythology. Over time—like fish stories----the descriptions of large people get even bigger. Perhaps it started when a people averaging 5’ in height encounters a tribe where 5’10" is the average. After a few generations of storytelling, the tall and strong people become outright giants. So it is easy to conclude that they are the offspring of gods.

Anyway, keep in mind that there is no logical or genetic reason why all humans today could not be descended from a small group of people of a few thousand years ago----as long as one doesn’t claim that that small group of people was the ONLY set of ancestors. (Some claim that the “Image of God” in all people today is a “dominant trait” so that when there was intermarriage with non-Adamic people, the offspring carried the Image of God within them. So eventually, the human population of the earth became entirely Adamic because everybody inherited the Image of God from having at least one Adamic ancestor.)

Of course, I’m not saying that I necessarily personally endorse those interpretations of the Noah story. I’m just saying that your interpretations don’t fly because they confuse traditions with scripture and are unaware of the many varied ways Bible readers have understood those issues.

It is also worth pointing out that a key statement in the Hebrew text about the height of the flood waters is quite tricky to translate and an ambiguity of “punctuation” [I’ll not try to get into cantillation complexities] makes two readings possible. By the way, I mention height of the flood waters rather than depth because at that time it is doubted that the non-nautical culture had a Hebrew word for water-depth per se.

Let’s look at Genesis 7:20 in several translations:

New International Version
The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.

New Living Translation
rising more than twenty-two feet above the highest peaks.

New American Standard Bible
The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered.

King James Bible
Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

So you can see that there are two ways to understand Genesis 7:20.

I’ll not delve into a detailed exegesis of the Hebrew text and deal with the presence or absence of a major-stop. But there are two ways to read it:

(1) The waters rose to a height of 15 cubits. As a result, the hills/mountains were covered.

[The Hebrew word appearing in the text doesn’t distinguish between hills and mountains. English Bibles have tended to render the word with “mountains” but if Noah’s ERETZ was what we today would call the Fertile Crescent, those mountains were just modest hills. And remember: the author(s) would describe the situation according to the “world” known to him. He knows nothing of Mt. Everest and may have never seen any elevations taller than the modest “hill country” of his own experience in that ERETZ.]

(2) The waters rose to a height that surpassed the highest hills by 15 cubits.

Now which is more likely for a person with a basic sounding device (i.e., probably a weight tied to a rope and dangled off the side?) Will he measure the total depth of the water or will he figure out a way to find the tallest elevation in the area and take a sounding at that exact point so as to determine how much the depth of the water exceeds the height of the tallest point in the area? Obviously, #1 is far easier to determine and also makes a lot more sense in terms of the quantities of waters brought by 40 days and nights of rain.

When I’ve posted such regional flood observations on forums where Young Earth Creationist are present, they often make some of the most amusing objections, such as: “How do you explain the flood waters being restricted to one region to where such heights were achieved? Are you saying God performed a miracle by keeping the water from spilling out beyond the region? Did God make walls to contain the water? How did the waters pile up?” I ask them if they’ve never heard of lakes and seas, where waters accumulate to significant depths without anyone having to build walls to keep them contained! Of course, that’s why people who look for evidence of Noah’s Flood (such as Mr. Ballard, who discovered the Titanic wreckage) believe that the remnants of Noah’s Flood still survive as the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, or perhaps even the Mediterranean Sea. When it comes to “containing” the flood waters in one region, gravity and the well-known properties of fluids explains thing with no need for invoking miracles----although considering how liberally Young Earth Creationist are usually willing to apply miracles, I’m flabbergasted that they suddenly have difficulty in accepting the non-miracle of a localized flood! Go figure!—as my professor always liked to jest whenever he reflected on the self-contradictions of the YEC world.

Nevertheless, my main reaction (when I read protests like yours against the idea of a regional flood) is to wonder if you actually think Biblical scholars would be so casually unaware of the traditional arguments for a global flood. Yes, we have indeed read the Genesis text. And we do so in the original language, not just in the traditional English Bible translations. Furthermore, because we don’t automatically assume (as most YECs do) that the account is necessarily about an actual historical event, we have no vested interest in a global or local deluge. We are simply reading what is there in the text and trying to ignore what gets there purely as a matter of popular traditions. So if the Hebrew text described a global flood, I’d have no reason not to say so. And if it describes something else—which it most obviously does----I’m fine with that. It’s not my job to make the Biblical text more or less palatable to anyone.

{The following observation is speaking generically of Young Earth Creationist debaters in general—and is not meant as a potshot at George Brooks, whose participation here I greatly appreciate because he helps promote a lot of interesting discussions.}

Thus, it doesn’t really matter to me if someone accepts or rejects my reading of a regional flood. But it does amaze me whenever someone thinks that my conclusions from years of careful study of the Genesis text would be so easily toppled by a few shot-from-the-hip, cliched observations which previously had somehow escaped my notice.

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You mean the barn with no animals but plenty of cash registers?

On my visit I also noted the lack of interpreters. There were plenty of employees but they appeared to just be caretakers of the ark, cleaning up spills etc… I only saw one Ark Employee engaging directly with a couple of visitors and I wasn’t sure if they weren’t personally assigned to that family. I wanted to be able to ask questions and with such simple answers provided they needed someone to provide a real voice rather than just reading text. But, I expect it could be hard for AIG to hire people with enough knowledge of creation science to be able to answer any deeper than the signs do. There are so few people who understand the whole flood geology and rapid post-flood speciation apart from those that have come up with the ideas themselves that it might not be possible for them to have knowledgeable tour guides.

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Yes. The non-seaworthy, non-ark barn with no animals—with four decks instead of the three-deck ark of Genesis—basically SHOUTS its lessons.

I recall an early rough draft of the pseudo-ark’s layout. At that time there was one room of the pseudo-ark that was labelled “petting zoo.” I wonder at what stage of development even that tiny nod to the ark’s purpose was rendered infeasible and they had to move that small collection of livestock to a separate area well removed from the pseudo-ark. Even Ken Ham found it couldn’t ignore reality for long. Wood, excrement, food,and water soon created enormous logistical obstacles.

It might be interesting to start a thread where visitors could pass along what they are hearing from Young Earth Creationist friends who have visited the Ark Encounter. I’ve been shocked at how underwhelming are the reactions. The size of the pseudo-ark is impressive and so the initial reaction is a strong one. But things seem to be downhill from there. Some are wondering if Ham’s insistence on opening as scheduled regardless of the state of the exhibits may have been his undoing. I’m hearing complaints about a lack of signs, so that people don’t know where to go next and there’s lots of overly dark, ambiguously unlabelled, caged animal mannequin dioramas with random continuous loops of animal sounds. And one area apparently looks like those outdoor shelf areas at Home Depot where they have lots of huge planters and oversized flower pots—apparently meant to the arks food stores. Yet, the same animal sounds seem to eminate from those oversized flower pots!

And if Ken Ham’s ancient engineers were capable of building modern-looking cranes, supplementing gopher wood with metal alloys and modern polymers, why weren’t the ancients capable of making gravity-fed storage bins or at least storage containers which were square instead of circular and therefore better able to use the limited space efficiently. I heard one comparison to those comical Flintstones ancient technologies where they always had a way to substitute small dinosaurs for modern machines! The visitor wondered how Ham decided when to go with “ancient looking” versus “Noah had the benefit of long lifespans to where pre-flood civilizations were actually quite intellectually and technologically advanced!” She wondered if Ham made more concessions to ancient-looking solutions instated of the paleo-techno stuff Ham actually believes in because Ham didn’t want to risk overly confusing his visitors who are still stuck in the Sunday School version of Noah’s Ark that he often complains about. She wondered if those people were already in excessive shock after seeing “two by two animals” which didn’t look like modern animals at all and weren’t in ‘literal twos’, because Ham thinks each baramin/kind consisted of pairs like a lion and panther feline pair, a buffalo and musk ox ruminant pair, etc. etc. Ham takes risks but not too many risks.

What I’m hearing from visitors is lots of animal mannequins in cages with annoying recorded sounds that get on your nerves after a while, and countless exhibit captions explaining Ham’s strange brand of “creation science”—which mostly consists of denials of real science.

The biggest surprise besides the lack of sophisticated animatronics was apparently the low quality of the animal mannequins. One visitor described them as “really bad taxidermy without the advantage of starting with an actual animal.”

Some visitors even expressed surprise at the appearance of mold and wood deterioration on the outer “hull” of the ark. “If it looks that bad at the grand opening, what’s it going to look like after a few years?”

One lady told me that the Creation Museum has more impressive animatronics along with a better telling of the ark story than does the Ark Encounter. So considering the significant expense for a family of home-schoolers to visit the Ark Encounter, I wonder if a lot of the target audience will consider the Creation Museum their one and only stop.

A big building of dioramas with captions already found on AIG’s website just doesn’t seem like much of an attraction. And I wonder if Ham intentionally avoided the use of anciently-dressed docents directing tour groups and explaining the exhibits because it would inevitably create opportunities for Q&A----and lots of questions Ham knows he can’t answer. Surely the first questions would be how Ham determined the names of Noah’s daughter-in-laws and how the entire backstory of the family was developed. For someone who claims strict adherence to the literal teachings of the scriptures, Ham has no difficulty fabricating a Noahic Ice Age out of thin air and teaching a bizarre version of hyperevolution to where all modern day species of animals evolved in just 200 years from the original ark passenger pairs.

I do think the Ark Encounter will eventually rival Jim Bakker’s abandoned Heritage USA ruins. Selecting such a remote location hardly bodes well for post-collapse Plan B’s.

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And yet, amazingly @Jonathan_Burke, because of your notoriously lazy approach to discussions… your entire audience comes away not knowing anything more than what your opinion is.

You don’t explain any of your 2 word responses…

Why do you even bother participating when you have so little to offer of yourself?

Compare your pitiful response to @Socratic.Fanatic

…who writes robustly to explain his position.

I’ve been through all that stuff in previous discussions of the flood here. I didn’t see the need to repeat myself for you, especially since I know you’ll just reject out of hand anything I write on the subject. But if you want to re-tread the same ground, SF has given you an extremely detailed answer which covers all the same points I have raised previously (and more).

@Eddie

is smack on correct on how I meant the term "global’…

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And if you actually read what I wrote, that is exactly what I explained! (Do I actually have to repost those sentences??)

I also made clear—repeatedly on these threads—that when I address the immediate context of a post I also often address other relevant views, including those of Young Earth Creationist in general. (If I had taken the time for even more detail, I could have pointed out that many Young Earth Creationist ministry leaders insist that the Old Testament does teach a “global planetary view” and that the “the circle of the earth” is a declaration of the earth’s spherical nature.) Considering that the topic of this thread is Ken Ham’s pseudo-ark, consideration of YEC ministry leaders’ interpretations of Genesis are certainly topical and relevant!

So next time, read for comprehension, not just another complaint.

I realize that it may have been embarrassing for Jon and I to point out the blatant errors in adopting traditions like “Mt. Ararat” as if they were actually in the Bible. But as with your own chronic errors of fact—as Dr. Swamidass has so ably demonstrated on multiple occasions— there is a limit to how much remedial tutoring can be tactfully applied without your feelings getting hurt and your digging yourself in deeper while trying to dig yourself out. As he stated so well, if you would first take the time to learn at least a little bit of the basics of a science topic, you wouldn’t keep embarrassing yourself when you rant here about how nobody knows what they are talking about when they simply provide citations and share the consensus of the scientific academy. It’s tiresome. It’s just not interesting. (And it explains why many of us ignore your Nth science-denialism in the same old tunes.)

Eddie, you have a pattern of ignoring what is posted and even denying what has been posted that already addressed your challenges. (Need I mention yet again your refusal to accept the existence of scientific journal articles describing the use of evolutionary algorithms in design of everything from space probe antennas to aircraft wings to new medications and protein folding? You could have read the citations given and you could have learned from them—but instead you complained that we all owe you a spoon-feeding of the material which we all know that you are going to reject in any case. Those of us who get paid to do that just aren’t interested in remedial tutoring in our spare time.)

No. I’m not reading your post any further. It’s a waste of time. Whether I’ll address your future posts, I don’t know. I was hoping to see a change of tactics, if not a change of heart, after Dr. Swamidass so thoroughly rebuked you and exhorted you to a change of behavior. You can always return to the Camel’s Hump and complain there about how unjustly you are treated at the Biologos Forum. That’s a very good idea because most of us are far more interested in the science of these topics than of the daily dose of Eddie drama. So if you complain there, it will save on the repetition here.

As for me, I’m leaving on a major trip in the morning and don’t know if I will have much Internet access. So you can take advantage of my absence to review my injustices against you. I would have wished you could have engaged the evolutionary algorithms in the NASA space probe antenna design project Jon posted----because that would have been far more interesting than your dishonest rant claiming that no such EA design paper (or is it no such project) ever existed. (OK, I will admit that your challenge that EAs be shown to redesign toaster and hyperdermic needles was quite funny—though unintentionally so—but from what I could determine from your rant, you thought that challenge was remarkably insightful! Seriously?)

My exasperation with you may not be as tactful as Dr. Swamidass’ careful exhortation—but I assure you that it is just as sincerely exasperated----yet as with Dr. Swamidass I must start focusing on more important projects for publication. I so want to believe that you are not merely wasting our time here with an endless game meant to frustrate the scientists here but I’ve lost all optimism in that regard. So you can have all the last-words on the matter you wish.

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@jlock, Ham doesn’t use the term “turtling” but I think that is what he is talking about in his articles where he claims that the ark’s dimensions are the most ideal for preventing capsizing from being broadsided by waves----yet I think of it as you do: it would need more width to give a better stability ratio. But Ham says his nautical engineer friends that the ark’ ratio is perfect for that. (If that is true about the ratio, then why doesn’t the escape pods and “lifeboats” use on oceanic oil rigs and very large ships more circular or at least “boxy” rather than “long rectangular” in terms of the ratio of sides?)

I do agree that Noah’s ark’s ratio was “perfect”----but in the mathematical sense as to how the ancients felt about the prime numbers, of which the ark’s dimensions are derived in beautiful ways. (I’ve written a rough article on that topic but not yet published it. I discovered that it is such common knowledge among many rabbinical scholars that I felt a little silly treating it as worthy of publication, even if the concepts are foreign to many evangelical audiences and scholars.)

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