Behind the Scenes at the Creation ‘Museum’
Ken Ham started the event a little before noon. In spite of his stern manner, he is a good speaker with a clear, folksy, yet authoritative voice and an Australian accent. His purpose for this event was to explain the current state of the project and introduce some of the people involved in the Ark Encounter’s design. More importantly, he was also trying to find funding to get the project afloat.
According to Ham the Creation “Museum” was built as a reminder to people that the Bible is true and is a walk through the Bible. “How do we reach millions more?” said Ham. “Noah and his family had to go through a doorway in order to be saved and we need to go through a doorway to be saved. The Lord Jesus Christ said ‘I am the door’ … Imagine if we were to rebuild Noah’s Ark. … We want people to come and have an encounter with Noah’s Ark, but at the same time to have an encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Ham continued by stating that in 2009 CBS/60 Minutes and Vanity Fair Magazine did a web-based poll asking which archaeological discovery people would like to see made next. Apparently Noah’s Ark was the leading choice. According to Ham, since Satan got Eve to doubt, doubt leads to unbelief. Ham said, “The teaching of evolution, Big Bang, millions of years, telling people there never was global Flood, there never was an Ark, Noah couldn’t fit all the animals on the Ark anyway, so you can’t trust the account in the Bible, it has a dramatic effect on generations of people.”
Ham then played a short clip from the 2009 movie about Darwin, “Creation,” in which the Thomas H. Huxley character says to Darwin “You’ve killed God, sir! You have killed God!” Then Ham played a YouTube clip by physicist Lawrence Krause where he states (discussing nucleosynthesis of elements in stars), “Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be here.” Then Ham played yet another YouTube video of a teenager who became an atheist after learning about evolution in high school biology. This was followed by still another video clip, of President Obama before his election saying that the United States is “no longer a Christian nation, at least not ‘just,’ we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” Ham certainly knows how to push his audience’s buttons. He continued by mentioning various court cases that took prayer, bible reading, and nativity scenes out of schools.
The evils in the world
With the audience sufficiently warmed up and frightened by various boogey men, Ham began selling them the Ark Encounter. He repeated the claims of the Beemer study done by American Research Group that 1.2 to 2.1 million people would visit the Ark Park the first year. They settled on 1.6 million people per year as the likely attendance figure. Ham stated, “Friends, if you owned a business, and you had that sort of response to your business, you’d build one on every corner, like McDonalds or something.” He went on to state, “The Lord has led us to a very special property. Interstate 75 one of the busiest north-south corridors in America from Canada all the way down to Florida. At an interchange at Williamstown, I think it is Exit 154, …you will see there that we have 800 acres.” He continued that this is within a one-day drive of 2/3 of the US population. He didn’t want to build in Florida where he would be competing with Disney World or Universal Studios.