Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through.
Speaker 1: The rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If
I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth,
not because.
Speaker 3: I put my hand on a book and made a wish.
Speaker 1: And working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Fusian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast, hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: I want to talk about an encounter that I had
at the ARC protest in Williamstown, Kentucky. I engaged an
apologist from the ARC and counter and we talked for
fifteen minutes and it made my head explode. And I
just want to vent about that, and I'll do it
in just a second, but forgive me. I was just
now browsing this article out of Newsweek that was talking
about Jennifer Welch. She is one of the co hosts
of the I've Had It podcast. She's fantastic and she
takes no prisoners. I mean, she just goes hard and
she was talking about homeschools, Christian homeschools. She said, homeschooling
is a quote crazy Christian problem, trickled down stupidity and
maga on steroids. Now you are listening to someone who
was homeschooled in a Christian homeschool for about six months
or so. I was private Christian schooled for most of
my upbringing, but there was a big blow up when
I was at Temple Christian School. My mother and one
of the monitors they weren't allowed to call them teachers, right.
The superintendent's wife was our monitor in the pace program
at Temple Christian School. But she had no college education.
She didn't have a college degree, which is kind of
part for the course here. You know, maybe she's still teaching.
Maybe she's like seventy five eighty years old, still teaching
with no college education, no background in education. That would
be on brand for what we're seeing out there. But
my mom and this person had a big blow up,
and Mom said, oh yeah, fine, I'm gonna yank my
kids out. We're going to finish the school year home schooled.
And I'm sure my mother, a theologian, felt more than qualified.
And so I don't even remember much about the lesson plans,
except we skated through them in about an hour and
a half and we just spent the rest of the
day doing whatever we wanted to. Maybe that was the
plan all along, but I mean, our curriculum was a
freaking joke. We'd done podcasts on religious homeschooling and private
at schooling and how they totally, very often will hamstring
students for the rest of their lives. They just throw
minnows out into the world totally unprepared for reality. And
so I think Jennifer Welch is absolutely right, and there
are a few examples of homeschooling that is effective. Don't
email me, don't get mad at me, all right, I'm
not talking about every instance. I'm not speaking in a
giant generality. I'm talking about when you hear homeschool, what's
first thing you think? You think, there's a little clucking
church hen who once her children to be separated from
all them evil secular studies, and so they bring them
home and train them to believe that there was a
talking reptile who spoke to garden nudists, and that a
five hundred year old guide captained a floating zoo for
a flood that left absolutely actually the flood left only
contradictory geological evidence, and that I don't know that people
lived to be a thousand years old, and that all
these crazy things in the Bible were true, and if
they weren't in the Bible, then it's not science. And
our distrust of science was remarkable. We really felt like
that scientists were all out there and they were sort
of chortling to themselves. There was a giant conspiracy because
God is I don't know, he was the enemy in
some way, and scientists were the enemy of God. And
the only science that was legitimate was sort of the
ken Hem kind of science, the kind of stuff that
he in Canthoven and other tragic figures have been vomiting
out to these little impressionable brains when they go out
to Sunday schools and regular schools or whatever. So I agree,
homeschooling it was terrible. I left my home school and
I went back to a Baptist school and it wasn't
much better. But Jennifer Welch was taking a call from
a list and the listener said, I've absolutely had it
watching some of the stupidest people I went to school
with decide they're qualified to homeschool their children, and Jennifer
Welch replied, this is MAHA make America healthy again, OURFK
Junior's initiative. This is tradwife, This is unvaxed and unjacked
and all that shit. This is the worst, worst, worst,
and this shit is America has a crazy Christian problem.
We have a fundamentalist, crazy Christian problem. I'm talking about
the freaks of the megachurch. I'm talking about the ones
that have schools that are these crazy indoctrination factories, hate academies,
and then when that hit isn't strong enough, they go
in homeschooling. I just think it's a huge problem. Wow.
The Department of Education was not happy with her. The
DOE posted on x and I quote the proven value
of homeschooling should never be dismissed as trickle down stupid.
The only thing that is stupid is your ignorance. By
the way, the Department of Education is being run by
a World Wrestling Federation magnet. Actually it's not WWF anymore.
It's WWE is that World Wrestling Enterprise. What's the E
stand for? She became she and her husband, right, Vince McMahon, who,
by the way, has been clouded in sexual misconduct allegations
using the Wrestling Federation to excuse abusive sexually abusive behaviors
by the wrestlers, and that Linda McMahon, our doe director,
was in on the cover up. This is also on
brand for this administration. She got I think, a French
degree in nineteen sixty six. Never one day, not ever, ever, ever,
did she teach in a classroom, and yet she is
determining what is taught in classrooms across the United States.
But back to homeschooling and the ARK. So when I
have toured the Ark Encounter, and I have been to
both the Creation Museum and the Ark in Counter, and
I produced two videos. Both run about ten minutes long,
and they're kind of a tongue in cheek. They're really
fun to watch, if I may say, but they're also
tragic because you see the shit that they're ramming down
the throats of impressionable believers. I'm going to link those
in the description box. Atheists at the Creation Museum and
atheists at the Ark Encounter. When I went to the ARC,
Matt Dillahunty joined me so it was a tag team event.
He and I are going around these exhibits, and the
ARC is as pathetic. I mean, they're both pathetic, but
the ARC makes the mistake. It commits the crime of
being boring. I mean, say what you will about Noah's Arc.
It's not a boring story. It's crazy, but it's not boring.
But the Ark encounter you walk in and there is
some impressive architecture, but the whole thing is really sort
of a big chasm. There's a lot a dead space.
So as you walk in, you will see dinosaurs and
more dinosaurs. And look, there's dinosaurs and they're in cages,
you know, like you would keep a dog in a kennel,
and they had the velociraptors in the raptor kennel. And
we're supposed to take it seriously. And then I see
more of these little clucking church hens walking their charges,
young impressionable children, and they're like, oh my goodness, dinosaurs.
We're on the Ark with nouise yam Mingen Yingen, just like,
this is not science, this is not logical, this is crazy.
I just want to talk to each of those children
and say, your monitor is so full of shit that
if you were to give her an enema, she would disappear.
Ask some questions, Go find a secular science book, go
do something other than this. I just want to save
these kids. But you know, the Arc Encounter and the
Creation Museum in fact much more than children. Man this
obvious at the Arc protest July the twelfth, Williamstown, Kentucky. Now,
just to sum it up, the Arc Encounter Kenham's one
hundred and ten million dollar exhibits sold to the state
as a tourist attraction. So they said, Hey, we're going
to bring in hotels and restaurants and industry and tourism
and we're going to be amazing for the state of Kentucky.
And the State of Kentucky said, well, that'll be amazing.
Let us invest in this tourist mecca that will benefit
our state. So I was driving up to attend the
protest and it's bear I mean, I saw a gas station,
but a lot of just empty land. I think the
one hotel that I happened to see is owned by
the Ark Encounter. Where's the industry, what's going on here?
And so they sold it to the State of Kentucky.
But they also sold themselves as a church a ministry
because they wanted all the tax benefits. Oh what a
beautiful scenari We're a business when we want business benefits,
and we're a church when we want tax free status.
These people are slick. And we went out on the
tenure anniversary of the opening of the art and we
had a big protest that was going to happen near
the entrance where people were getting off the highway. And
there are a lot of people who were like, why bother,
why would you do this? What's the matter with your people?
Leave them alone? Doesn't do anything, doesn't change anything. And
I disagree. I think sometimes the ridiculous must be ridiculed.
The story of Noah's ark is actually part of a
much more sinister story, which is that we do not
have worth. There was no one worthy, no not one.
That's according to the Bible. We are infected with a
cancer of sin. We deserve to be horribly punished. This
is a stripping away or an invalidating of human identity
and worth and religion, fundamentalist religion Christianity uses them to
control people and to threaten them and to scare them
and to lock them away from the rest of the world.
They were afraid. They were afraid of Satan, they were
afraid of scientists, and they're also afraid of a bunch
of other stuff, whether it's vaccines, or immigrants, or Muslims,
or socialism or whatever. This idea that Noah's Ark is
just a happy tale about rainbows and birds with olive
branches and shit like that is monumentally naive. There's a
really sinister undercurrent going on beyond I think all the
grift and bullshit that can Hem has been guilty of.
So we went out to protest, and as we were
setting up, we saw a few cars arrive and people
in brown shirts got out with their video equipment and
lo and behold they were staffers from the Ark Encounter.
They had come to documents our protests. Now, what are
they going to do with the footage and a hover
around the edges? Are they going to try to interview people?
Are they going to take all that footage back and
use it for their own nefarious purposes. I don't trust
the Ark Encounter to fairly edit anything we say or do.
Of course, all of those things turned out to be
the case, or at least I think they're probably in
an editing bay somewhere, or maybe they've already released the
video interviews, and I ended up on camera being interviewed
by this apologist, a guy that looks a lot like
Douglas Wilson, that famous American pastor, who, as we speak,
is petitioning that women should be stripped of their right
to vote because it's a man's world. Man's the head
of the house. There should be apparently one vote a household,
and the woman has been made to serve man, so
she follows his lead. I'm reminded of that line. Why
did God make a woman's feet so short so she
can stand closer to the sink? That's how Pastor Douglas
Wilson thinks, and he's one of the most influential pastors
in the United States. I just can't believe it. So
this guy picture Douglas Wilson, and you'll see what this
guy look like. He is in kind of this blue
purple shirt, and he's got his camera crew and they're
going around engaging, and I figure, Okay, eventually I may
end up in a conversation. It happened, and I agreed.
Now I didn't get a whole lot of good footage
myself from the day. We had technical problems with their
sound system for the first half, I just wanted to
go back there and sort of take over. But you know,
they meant well, but there were some problems, and then
when they ironed those out, we had a torrent of rain,
so we were scrambling. I had to scramble with my
cameras and I ran out, and I only got two
speeches recorded on video MANDSA Thomas of Black non Believers.
I gave the footage and she posted it, I think,
on her chain, and then I got Noah Illusions and
he did a speech called why do you have to
be so mean? And I will play that nine minute
speech a little later on in the broadcast for you
and linked to the video that's already out on YouTube.
Noah refused to debate or engage the ark encounter people.
He's like, I'm not doing I'm not going to waste
my freaking time, and we can have that discussion about
whether or not it is a waste of time. Should
we engage. I don't know the right answer. I have
no illusions that this apologist was going to engage me,
and immediately the light bulb would go off, and he said,
you know what, You're absolutely right. You have such good
points about the fallacies and the immoralities and the Christian
Book of Genesis. I will now reverse my position and
I will join you, and we will frolic off into
Reasonville together. I mean, we knew that wasn't going to happen.
But I will say, in the back of my mind,
when I was looking at the people, young twenty somethings
with the cameras and the microphones who were following this
guy around like he was a prophet. They were documenting.
They didn't say a word, but I thought, I wonder,
if they're listening as they're filming, as they're recording, are
they going to hear from a position of relative safety,
two arguments or two positions being articulated, And is there
a chance that they'll say, wait a minute, that atheist
guy actually had a few really good points. And that's
I think the reason that I did say yes when
they say do you want to talk to these guys?
I don't have good audio. The audio is horrible, and
it grieves me. And it's because I was wired up
with a lapel microphone. But I was not prepared for
the rain, which was just coming down in buckets all
around me. I did not have an umbrella. I stood
for if we both stood for about fifty ten minutes
in the rain, and it ruined my microphone. I heard
the audio and it's like, so I'm guessing that thing's
going to have to be replaced. That hurts my heart.
Give me a second here before I go off on
that ran. Let me take my short break here and
I will be back and I will bloviate further about
the ARC and counter bloviator at the protest one moment, okay,
because my microphone got ruined in the rain when I
was talking to this ARC and countiripologist. You're stuck with
me giving a summation of that fifteen minute encounter, and
it's pretty much what you might expect. So he starts
in good faith, and he introduces his team and hides
nice talking to you, and immediately he references this big
banner that the ARC protesters like to put up every year.
It says genocide and incest park. Okay, I mean I
call it genocide and certainly call it incest. I saw
one of their people doing a stand up with his
microphone and a camera right in front of the banner,
and I thought to myself, I wish I could hear him,
because how's he getting around this? How do you get
around drowning the entire planet except for a family of
eight and then everybody having sex with mom and sisters
to repopulate the planet. How does one get around that?
We know the Creation Museum has an incest exhibit. We
know that you can go through the Creation Museum, you'll
see it in the video. And ken Him's take is, well,
you know, back then God's plan, there were fewer of us,
and I think perhaps our genetic code was purer and
people weren't going to have all of the problems, and
it was okay. And of course you and I are
like and then we think, all right, incest, that's another
reason we don't want Christian homeschooling, is it not. The
apologist looks at me and he says, how can you
even call it genocide? If you are an atheist and
don't believe in the Christian God, how can you even
call it genocide? And I'm like, well, it has something
to do with the fact that God killed everybody by
the millions, perhaps billions, I don't know. How many people
lived four thousand years ago on this planet. But it
was a lot of people. It was pretty much everybody. Right, Well,
I'm going to go with genocide on that score. But
he says, how can you call it genocide if you
don't really have a standard for morality to know that
genocide would be wrong? And immediately I thought, here we go.
How do you know that rape and murder are wrong
if you don't believe in an objective moral standard and
my specific standard maker And I said, well, I'm not
totally convinced I believe in objective morality, but we understand
that killing is bad. And then he said, well, is
it always wrong to kill someone? And how would you
know that if you're an atheist? And so I began
to get into the fascinating idea of context. He says,
somebody breaks into my house and they're threatening my life
in the life of my family, and I use lethal
force to stop them. Well, I would have killed them,
but I would not have been guilty of murder. However,
if I just go out and kill someone because I
want to, that would meet the definition. But he's like,
how do you know that's wrong? What about the people
throughout history who have murdered and it has made their
lives better, or at least enrich them, or made them
more successful, or given them great power. He didn't say Hitler.
He didn't say Hitler, but I heard Hitler. We all
here Hitler because that's where he's going. Hitler was an atheist,
which means he hasn't done his research on Hitler. But
it's so insulting to be told that I wouldn't know
the concept of harm. I wouldn't know that killing is wrong.
Why in the world would you want to act ethically
if you don't believe in my God. I get into
the basics of pro social behaviors, cooperation, coalition, community, surviving
and thriving on the African Savannah. What about those people
who don't do those things? Well, society does have its anomalies,
and they do great harm, and they get away with
great harm, but historically they don't last all that long
against everybody else. I mean, we have to admit Hitler
was eventually defeated and overthrown. Right, there is a corrective
Erica Gotzig Gibbon talks about this in the primate world,
where there'll be some alpha for lack of a better
way of saying it. Who goes in and he he's
running his tree vibe of primates, you know, chimpanzees, gorillas, whatever,
and he's beating up everybody, and he's abusing everybody. He's
stealing all the resources, and he enjoys power for a while,
and then finally his group gets fed up and says,
screw a whole bunch of this. They turn on him,
and they don't just kill him. They torture him, they
kill him violently. They're just She had a video at
a speech that she gave recently, and she wouldn't even
show the video of a documentation of this group. What
do you call it? Group of chimps? Is it a pack,
a tribe, a flock of chimps? This flock of chimps
turns on the abuser and they fuck him up. I mean,
it's horrible. So there is a corrective that does happen.
But I'm not able to really get into all that.
I'm just able to say, yes, we see them, but overall,
human flourishing is best explained with pro social and cooperative behaviors.
And I snock any question of my own. You're from
the Arc Encounter book of Genesis. Who wrote the Book
of Genesis, Well, it was Moses. He said, well, how
do you know that? How do you know there was
a Moses? Well, historians, an overwhelming documentation and blah blah
love And then he managed to throw Aristotle. You know,
at all these historical figures, philosophers, writers, their existence has
been corroborated by a host hundreds, perhaps thousands of sources
from the time period. And I just looked at him,
and what I regret not saying is this. And you
may have heard me say this before, but the Book
of Genesis starts before spacetime. There are no humans to chronicle,
before Adam and Eve, before the universe, before the cosmos
and the earth and light and dark in the water
and the animal and everything. It's not like Moses was
hanging around in a tiny little space pod with a
paper and pen documenting the creation of all things. He
did not exist. He didn't come down until later on
in the Book of Genesis. So how was he able
to report what was going on? And I just wish
I'd been thinking more on my feet to ask that
question for the minions that we're all shooting and recording,
not for the apologist and it goes on and on.
As the rain is pouring down. He gives me the
standard line about how we have faith in scientists and
why is their belief any less valid than our belief.
I think he may have challenged as to why we
would bother to protest something we don't believe in. But
here's the part that made my head explode. And even
now I'm still pissed off about it. It should have
been expected. Noah was just about to go on stage,
and so I politely said, we're done here. Forgive me.
You've been very kind to engage. I'm going to have
to get back to work. I've got a couple of
cameras under the tents. I'm going to try to get
footage of Noah, and then I'm up on the podium last.
But thank you for And I said, you know, I
think as far as human goodness, you know, I think
you and I may have more in common than we
have in disagreement. And he said this. He actually said
two things. He said, you have a secret. You have
done something in your life that if anyone knew about
it would ruin you. And we all have something about
us that we keep in the darkest part of our
hearts that no one else knows about. But it is
a cancer that lives within us. And if people knew it,
they would know what darkened hearts we have. It was
something along those lines. God, I wish I had a recording.
I wish it didn't sound like both so you could
hear what he said. And I'm like, well, we all
have made mistakes. Certainly, we all have little secrets, right,
but we've all screwed up. You know, we're flawed people.
But the perfect is the enemy of the good. If
I've made big mistakes in my life, and haven't we all,
I mean, my train has left the tracks, I've hit
the wall, I've screwed up, I've heard people, I've done
all it. We've all done it. We've all been human.
And I said, you know, I'm not defined by my
worst mistakes. And he was talking like we are like
spiritual criminals who are holding onto in our minds and
hearts our own criminal record. And if the world knew
just how tainted we really were, well we would be
exposed as harmful. We would be unworthy, requiring salvation of
pardon from the great prison warden in the sky. Well,
what do you do about that. How in the world
do you get redemption for the wrongs and your life,
the horrible deeds that you have done. And I said, well,
if I have wronged someone in my life, my goal
is to understand the wrong and then I find them
and I admit that I was wrong, and I say,
I'm so sorry for being wrong, and if there was
harm done, I say, forgive me for being hurtful. I
know you were hurt and that's my fault, and I
have real regret about that and real heartache and grief,
and I want you to know that I'm genuinely sorry.
And then in my own life I make a commitment
to do better next time. I was thinking of that
Maya Angelou quote where she said when we know better,
we do better. I thought that was a good answer,
but he was not satisfied. And as I wrapped it up,
I thought we were done. I'm stepping away with a
thank you, and he steps toward me and says this.
He said, I don't believe you ever had a covenant
relationship with Jesus Christ. Excuse me, I don't believe you
said you were a believer for decades, you were a Christian? Yeah,
I was a Christian. No, I don't believe. I don't
believe you ever had a covenant relationship with Jesus Christ.
I don't believe that. And I just stared at him like,
you have no idea who I am. You don't even
know me. You weren't there when I walked up and
dropped to my knees at the altar that Eastwood Baptist
Church and said the Salvation prayer followed the Roman Road.
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord,
and believe in your heart got raised him from the dead,
you will be saved. I confessed my sins and I said, Jesus,
come into my heart and save me. And I meant
it with all my heart. I actually said that prayer
more than once growing up. And that's a whole other
story you talk about, s Saraty. I was all in,
and I was all in for many, many years, and
this guy just wants to invalidate me. I don't believe
you ever had a covenant relationship. You're telling me that
I wasn't a true Christian. That's not what I said.
I never said that you wored a true Christian. I
said you never had a covenant relationship with Jesus. Well,
what's the difference. You're saying I didn't do Christianity correctly? Then, No, no, no,
I didn't say that. I didn't say you didn't do
Christianity correctly. I said you never had a covenant relationship
with Jesus. And I actually looked at the guy with
a microphone who was holding it up to my face.
This kid from the arcan counter. I'm like, like, so
I didn't have a proper covenant relationship, which I should
have had to do Christianity correctly, which means I wasn't
doing Christianity correctly. That's what he's saying. I've never said
that you never had a covenant relationship. And I beg you,
I implore you to go to Jesus and drop to
your knees and confess your sins and receive the saving
power of my God. So now now it's evangelism. And
I think it was performative because the camera was rolling
and I say, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not broken. I
do not need to be fixed. I'm not your pet project.
He's like, no, no, I implore you to meet the
risen Jesus where you are and accept his saving grace.
Blah blah blah. He was still talking when I walked away,
and I could feel my blood boiling. And this is
yet another reason why I was there to protest the
arc encounter. I'm supposedly the product of my worst mistakes.
There was some evil core deep down within me, and
it's always there, and apparently it defines me. It has
robbed me of my worth to such a degree that
only a third the third party, can come down and
fix me. I have to die to myself and essentially
be replaced with the identity of someone else. His whole
narrative is that the drowning of the world isn't genocide,
it is an act of love and justice. And even
all these thousands of years later, a guy like me
is still defined by evil and needs to be saved.
In the speech that I gave, which was ruined by
a bad microphone, I was talking about the comedy of
the Old Testament. I mean, for a divine master plan,
we have to admit it's kind of jacked up whenever
it fails. In the third chapter of the book in
the first book of sixty six, the third chapter of
the first book right at the beginning of the story,
shit goes bad. When people ask about me being an
atheist activist with a biblical name, I always say, oh, well,
I was the son of Adam and Eve that was
not involved in a homicide. There was a homicide in
the third chapter of Genesis, right, this is was it
after Adam and Eve were kicked out of the guard?
I can't remember if it was before or after, So
that way wrong immediately, it is a joke. And then
the whole planet I mean, by Genesis chapter six, everybody
on Earth, everybody is so evil they have to be
horribly drowned alongside all the animals, and every other resource
is destroyed. It's that bad. Well, that's not humankind's fault.
That's an indictment of the intelligent designer. That's an indictment
of God. He didn't have any idea how to put
together and implement a plan that actually worked. And the
entire Bible is all that God says, do this by command,
and as children say, screw that, We're going to go
do something else, God gets pissed. There is smiting a plenty.
There's all this kind of smiting. We've got swords and wars,
and we've got plagues and blood and sulfur from the sky,
and we've got all these starvation and infanticide. It's all shit.
Shit's always going wrong. And then God's children are like,
we're really sorry, please if you would stop smiting us,
and then always says, okay, all right, well, if you
promised to be good next time, I'll stop the smiting.
It's a joke and the message is so freaking sinister.
I think the Book of Genesis through revelation has to
be protested, it has to be condemned, and I think
inappropriate occasions must be ridiculed as ridiculous. I left there
soaking wet thinking about that apologist, that interview in some form,
possibly unfairly edited. It is probably going to end up
where did they have a YouTube page? Will it be
on their social media? I will say ever since that encounter,
I have had a total influx of ARC encounter apologists
and promoters and defenders on my social media pages. Apparently
I'm a pet project now. I posted the image of
the banner genocide and Incest Park with me standing next
to it, and they're coming, you know what, let me
read a couple of these hang on let me read
a couple of the arc encounter defenders, and I promise
I will play the speech from Noah uh seth Facebook,
Hang on, hold on just a second, just like two
hundred and thirty comments on here. Oh wow, there's someone
who's breaking down the arc logistically. That looks interesting. I
may have to come back and read that. Rachel jumped
in with a huge diatribe and a weird reference to
the Guild Christ. I don't know what a guil Christ is.
Gil have you heard of this? This may be a
gap in my knowledge if it's part of Christian tradition
or scriptures. She said, I have seen him, the scars
on his hands and the crown on his head, and
before he returns the Elijah Isaac Gilchrist will come. She
goes on and on and finishes with I tell you
ahead of time, so you might believe well good things.
She showed up to tell me on Facebook. Jeff said,
the Bible said all this would happen. It told us
that in the final days people would raise up against
the people of God. It said good would be considered evil,
and evil would be called goods. The mocking of God
in the twenty first century somehow proves God. Ben chimed
in and said, it has been said that an atheist
does not find God for the same reason that a
burg blerd does not find a policeman. Oh he wins.
I am now convinced. Okay, I'm going to come back
and read this breakdown from a skeptic named Devin his
It's actually a relatively long comment. It reminds me of
an article that was published forty some years ago. It
is posted still at the National Center for Science Education
the NCSSE. It is called The Impossibility of Noah's Ark.
He was written by Robert day Moore, and it is,
if you will, almost a comprehensive dismantling of Noah's Ark.
So I was looking at Devon's comment and it kind
of reminds me of that. But I'm going to go
ahead and narrate it for you, and then we'll go
back and we'll vet his details.
Speaker 4: Overall.
Speaker 2: I think, if you'll pardon the expression it really holds water,
we'll come back and do that next. Nois arc on
every level. The whole idea of it just sinks. And
I'm going to read for you a comment that was
left on my Facebook page by a skeptic. His name
was Devon, and he broke everything down for us. There
are an estimated eight point seven million species on Earth,
give or take, because taxonomy is messy, about two point
two million ar marine, which means, unless we are suggesting
fish needed rescuing from water, roughly six point five million
species are land dwelling and air breathing. Now let's be generous,
ignore insects entirely, even though that quietly collapses ecosystems, and
round way down to just one million terrestrial species at
two of each. That's two million animals already unreasonable, But sure,
let's keep going, be charitable with mass and call it
twenty five pounds per animal. That's fifty million pounds or
about twenty five thousand tons of animals. For contexts, the
USS Enterprise displaces not the not the spaceship, the USS Enterprise.
The sea vessel the USS Enterprise displaces about ninety three
thousand tons, So we're already loading a wooden vessel with
over a quarter of an aircraft carrier's displacement before adding
anything else. Now add food, because animals insist on continuing
to be alive at two point five percent body weight,
per day. That's about one million, two hundred and fifty
thousand pounds daily, or another fifty million pounds over forty days,
another twenty five thousand tons, So we're sitting at fifty
thousand tons without water waste or the ship itself now water,
which is where it really falls. Apart the evenet of
very conservative zero point five gallons per animal per day,
that's a million gallons daily or forty million gallons over
forty days. At eight point three pounds per gallon, that's
roughly three hundred and thirty three million pounds or about
one hundred and sixty six thousand tons volume wise, about
one hundred and fifty one thousand cubic meters. The arcs
total volume, based on biblical dimensions is about forty three
thousand cubic meters, so the water alone requires more than
three times the ARC's entire volume before you add a
single animal or piece of food. At this point we
are at roughly two hundred and sixteen thousand, eight hundred
tons of animal's food and water alone, over twice the
displacement of the USS enterprise on a wooden vessel, and
that wooden vessel is supposedly made of gopher wood, which
has confirmed botanical identity, We don't know what it is,
what its properties are, or whether it corresponds to any
real species of tree on top of that Wooden ships
at this scale run into hogging and sagging, where the
hull flexes under its own weight and fails. This is
a known engineering limitation. So even if everything else worked,
the ship itself is already pushing past what the material
can handle. Then there's the flood itself. The cover the
earth up to the height of Mount Everest about eight
point eight five kilometers, you need roughly four point five
billion cubic kilometers of water. The oceans today contain about
one point three billion cubic kilometers, so you need over
three times all existing ocean water to appear, sit there,
and then disappear. There is no known mechanism for that.
If that water came from rain over forty days, you're
talking about roughly one hundred twelve million cubic kilometers per day,
about one hundred thousand times current global rainfall. The atmosphere
only holds about thirteen thousand cubic kilometers of water vapor.
You can't scale that anywhere near what's required to even try,
atmospheric pressure would have to rise into hundreds of atmospheres,
pushing toward hundreds to near one thousand psi. At that point,
the air is unbreathable and temperatures become lethal. Everything dies
before the flood even matters. Even if you ignore all that,
biology still doesn't cooperate. Two individuals per species creates several
genetic bottlenecks, and there's no fossil or ecological evidence of
a global redistribution of species from a single point afterward,
behavior carnivores do not stop being carnivores. You're placing predators
in prey together in confined stressful conditions for over a month. Actually,
I thought they were on the arc for almost a year,
weren't they. I mean it range for forty days and
forty nine. But anyway, stress increases aggression, not decreases it.
So either you massively increase food requirements to continuously feed
every predator, or you assume supernatural behavioral changes. Otherwise, predation, panic, injury,
and disease start collapsing the population almost immediately. And that's
before you get into territorial behavior or the logistics of
separating millions of animals in a confined space. Then you
hit the edge. Cases. Koalas require eucalyptus, which does not
exist anywhere near Mount err Rat or along any plausible
migration route. Sloths are not crossing continents in any reasonable
time frame. There is no fossil trail showing either species
spreading outward from the Middle East after such an event.
Even the text itself can't quite keep its own instruction straight.
Genesis chapter six, verses nineteen and twenty says two of each,
while Genesis seven two and three shifts to seven pairs
for certain animals. At that point, that's less a contradiction
and more just another loose threat. Now I've heard the
apologetic on this. The extra animals were sacrifice animals for
when they I don't know why you had to save
animals to kill them, but that's one of the excuses.
Then there's history. Civilizations were not conveniently wiped out and rebooted.
Ancient Egypt shows continuous records through the supposed time frame.
Early Chinese civilization shows continuity. Mesopotamian cultures develop without inter
In other words, the people who were writing things down
at the time do not appear to have noticed the
total destruction of all life on Earth, which is notable.
And then there's the human side of this. Eight people
as the source of all modern human diversity requires extreme
genetic compression followed by implausibly rapid divergence. Historically, later interpretations
tried to map different populations onto the descendants of Noah's sons,
especially through ideas like the Curse of Ham, which were
then used to justify racial hierarchies and slavery. By the way, Ham,
you know this, but Ham is one of the sons
of Noah. It wasn't Ham, Like, there wasn't cursed Ham.
Ham was a person. Okay, that's not required by the
text the Curse of Ham, but it's a very real
outcome of treating this story as literal human ancestry. So
what are we actually being asked to accept here? A
wooden ship of unknown material exceeding known structural limits, carrying
over two hundred thousand tons with more than three times
its volume require just for water, while billions of cubic
kilometers of water appear and disappear under atmospheric conditions that
would make the planet uninhabitable, all while ecosystems collapse and
somehow reassemble, predators behave unnaturally humanity, bottlenecks to eight individuals,
animals disperse globally without leaving evidence, and multiple civilizations somehow
fail to notice any of it. At some point, this
stops being a flood narrative and becomes a scenario where
every physical, biological, behavioral, historical, and social system fails at once.
You can lower the numbers, you can be generous at
every step, and it still doesn't work. Not structurally, not biologically,
not atmospherically, not behaviorally, not genetically, not historically, and not mathematically,
and certainly not all at once. If the only way
the story works is by overriding every constraint at every step,
then it isn't a description of reality. It's a story
that only functions if reality is optional. Devin ellen Wood,
that is impressive. Now, obviously we've got to go back
and check the numbers, and there are a lot of them.
But if you'll pardon the expression, I think the spirit
of the piece it's spot on. I'll link to I
guess I'm gonna have to link to my original Facebook
photo of me in front of the genocide a incest poster,
where Devin was commenting and you can just scroll down
if you want to copy and paste and go check everything.
Devin has no idea that he's that his work has
become featured in this week's broadcast. I'll try to go
back and let him know. I don't know if he'll
be happy. Hopefully he'll be appreciative of that. Now, Noah
Illusions the second to last speech at the ARC encounter.
I mentioned that he went hard at ken Hammond Company,
and I'm going to play you the audio of his speech.
It runs just under ten minutes. Again, the video of that,
it's surrounded by rain, he's under attend and he's having
to almost shout even with the sound system to be heard.
But you know, the video is good, and I think
the audio is good. Let me play it for you
here and you can decide what you think. Here we go.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: So let me tell you the dilemma that I find
myself in here today. A couple of weeks ago, I
was on with the Kentucky Atheists doing a fundraiser for
this event, right, thank you, And during while we were
in between records, Joe told me a rumor that one
Ray Comfort was going to be here. For this protest. Yeah,
just another lie from Ray Comfort. He's nowhere to be found.
But here's the thing. When I heard that, I went
ahead and wrote myself a ten minute roast of Ray
Comfort to deliver as my speech.
Speaker 4: Anyway, it doesn't work.
Speaker 3: If he's not here, unfortunately, so I have to give.
Speaker 4: Don't worry.
Speaker 3: I did write a different speech. I don't have to
add lib here or anything. I'm not gonna say I
was more excited about the Ray's speech, but I will
say that if Ray Comfort was here, I wouldn't have
to work off of my notes. So instead of Ray Comfort,
I want to talk to you about something that's almost
as bad.
Speaker 4: I want to talk to you about the comment section.
Speaker 3: Right. So, when this event was first announced, everybody talked
about it on Facebook and they tagged me on it.
Speaker 4: I talked about it on Facebook, so I had plenty of.
Speaker 3: Opportunities to see what the online commentary was about the event,
and I will say most of it was very supportive.
Most of the people that heard about it were actually
really glad that somebody that was out here taking it
to the art park, telling people about the violations of
church state separation that made it possible telling people about
the homophobia that undergirds their hiring practices, tell everybody about
the prejudice that undergirds their entire park. That was most people.
There was a minority, however, that took issue with what
we're doing. Some of them were Young Earth creationists. Some
of them were the people that were just there to
tell us how much they were going to enjoy.
Speaker 4: Watching us burn in hell.
Speaker 3: Apparently there's a window in heaven or a porthole or
somewhere you can drop in a quarter and watch the
skin melt off of all the people who beat you
in arguments on Facebook.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, that's their vision of paradise. People be afraid.
Speaker 3: But there were also a couple other types of commentaris,
people who weren't directly supporting the art park, but we're
more of tertiary supporters. There were two types of them,
and I want to address both of them from the
podium today. The first were the what's the harm people?
People would hear that we're coming out here, and they go, oh,
what's the harm of the art part? Those people out
there having fun with their family and they're just doing
their thing, They're just you know, practicing their religion. What's
the harm in it? You know, that's a dumb, damn question. Yeah,
I'm sorry, but if you weren't paying any attention to
the news at all, I can understand formulating that question
in nineteen ninety three. But today today you're gonna ask
me what's the harm of lying about how the world works?
You can ask me, what's the harm of lying about
the very foundations of biology in a world where we
have an anti vaxxer in charge of public health?
Speaker 4: What's the harm? Really?
Speaker 3: You can ask me what's the harm about lying about
how global weather patterns work in a world that's dying
of climate change, where we can't do a damn thing
about it because of the deniers.
Speaker 4: What's the harm?
Speaker 3: They asked me, what's the What's the harm of lying
about how geology works? In a world where we can't
convince grown ass adults that the Earth is round?
Speaker 4: What's the harm?
Speaker 3: But of all the ologies they get wrong at the
art part, the most dangerous one, of course, is epistemology.
The beauty of science, as many of the speakers have
already pointed out, is not that it teaches us a
series of facts, although that's very nice of it to
do The beauty of science is that it teaches us
how to interrogate the world, how to tell what is
true and what is false. And if you need to
know what's the harm of country losing the ability to
tell what's true and what's false, you need to look
no further than the White House, thank you, or maybe
they're reflecting pool. It seems crazy to me that anybody
has to come out here and defend the concept of truth,
but that's where we are. We have so many people
out there asking how do we get here? How do
we wind up in this post truth world of alternative facts. Meanwhile,
the atheists are saying, hey, we've been answering it is
streaming the answer to that question from the rooftop for decades.
Nobody has a more vested interest in lying about reality
than religion. Nobody has more motivation, nobody has more experienced,
nobody has better funded. That's what happened to truth. What
happened to truth is ken Ham got a hold of it.
And you might think that epistemology is the worst thing
we could possibly lie to their children about, but it's not.
Because they also lie about ethics. They lie about how
morality works. There's a homophobia minimum. If you want to
work at the art part, right, there's a bigotry minimum
to work there. And the only way that you can
get there, the only way that anybody would be willing
to accept that, is that they've been lied to about
how ethics work.
Speaker 4: As atheists, we're constantly asked, where do we get our morals? Right? Well,
the truth is, of course we get our morals the.
Speaker 3: Same damn place everybody else gets them.
Speaker 4: But they don't seem to realize that.
Speaker 3: They say we get our morals from the Bible, yet
they somehow know which parts of.
Speaker 4: The Bible are immoral.
Speaker 3: Right, But of course they've been convinced that suffering comes
from a lady eating the wrong apple.
Speaker 4: And wolves come from old books.
Speaker 3: So it's easy to lie to them. So that's my
answer to what's the harm? Truth matters, and it's crazy
that anybody even has to say it. But there was
one other question that I wanted to address, and those
are the people who are always asking, and they asked.
Speaker 4: Me this about a lot of things. Why you gotta
be so mean?
Speaker 3: Why you got to be so mean to those people
while they're out on vacation with their kids, they're just
having them trying to have fun.
Speaker 4: Now, of course that question sort of assumes that we
don't have a good answer for the first question, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you're lying to people in a dangerous way,
and you're charging them sixty dollars a ticket to do
it plus parking, and I'm out here trying to tell
them the truth.
Speaker 4: For free in the rain, who's being mean?
Speaker 3: Who?
Speaker 4: You remember? You?
Speaker 3: You know we talked about how this purg was built
on lies. We're not just talking about the lies that promotes.
We're not just talking about Young Earth creationism. It was
literally built upon lies. You remember the vision of prosperity
that ken Ham sold this area when they mortgaged their
future to get the park into this place. Remember the
numbers of you, all that talking had about all these
new hotels and these restaurants and these businesses that we're
gonna open up to serve all the customers that were gonna.
Speaker 4: Come flooding into his art park. An An you guys
see them?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: Did I scare them off?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 4: I didn't even have to say fuck? Wow?
Speaker 3: All right, So no, I don't want to have any
kind of civil conversation with you. You lie to children for
a living, and that's disgusting, thank you. Speaking of lying,
they also he says, I'm scared. Hey, how want you
shut the fuck up and let us do our things?
Speaker 4: So okay? So anyway, so.
Speaker 3: Speaking of the lies they told, I was looking on
my way and did anybody see any of these new
hotels and businesses because I came in the backway. Apparently
didn't notice any of those. There's also you know, he
also lied about the projection numbers. They actually put a
number on that. They said, ten years on they would
have they would be servicing two point eight million guests
per year.
Speaker 4: Yo.
Speaker 3: They didn't even get the point eight Okay, I mean
they don't open until one o'clock today. That's not what
a successful theme park does, right, So okay, so that's
a lie. Here's another one. You remember all the new
jobs that they promise. Again, they put a number on it.
They said, ten years on, the art park's existence would
have created the equivalent of three thousand new full time
jobs in this area. They never got a third of that.
And when they promised that there would be new jobs,
they never mentioned the homophobia minimum. They never mentioned that
those jobs will be restricted to biggots, or people who
at least pretended to be biggots for the purposes of
their employment. That is a lie. Everything they told this
town is a lot. He didn't bring them prosperity. He
brought him increased taxes. He brought him increased strain under
municipal services, and says they mortgaged their.
Speaker 4: Future to get him here.
Speaker 3: He's not even contributing to the taxes of the community
the way any.
Speaker 4: Other for profit business would so.
Speaker 3: And of course, as Joe pointed out, when they tried
to recoup even a small fraction of the money that
this park was costing them, they fought them tooth and
nail and tried all kind of crooked shit to get
out of pay in their fair share, because that is
who they are. They are liars all the way to
their core. So let me just say in conclusion that
the Ark and Counter theme park is dangerous, it's disingenuous,
it's dishonest, it's homophobic, is transphobic, and it is woefully
under taxed, which, by the way, was the same clothes
that I had for the Ray Comfort roast.
Speaker 2: Thank you, big shout out to the Tri State freethinkers
and Kentucky Atheists. They put the entire ARC protests together
and it was a lot of fun. I think it's
a worthy protest. I'm so glad that you made it
through my rant today, and it was kind of fun
to go back to Noah. You know, it's always fun
to go back to the Bible from time to time
and just take it apart bit by bit. I will
see you back here next week and we will podcast
all over again.
Speaker 1: Follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter for a
complete archive of podcasts and videos, products like mugs and
t shirts featuring the Thinking Atheist logo, links to atheist
pages and resources, and details on upcoming free thought events
and conventions. Log onto our website, The Thinkingatheist dot com.