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Governor Beshear, Ark Encounter Announce Plans to Build a Full-Scale Noah’s Ark
“Ark Encounter” to employ 900, expected to draw 1.6 million visitors in first year

FRANKFORT, Ky. (Dec. 1, 2010)—Governor Steve Beshear today joined the Ark Encounter LLC to announce the planned construction of a full-scale Noah’s Ark tourist attraction in northern Kentucky. Partnering with the Ark Encounter is Answers in Genesis, which is most widely known for its high-tech and popular Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky.

“We are excited to join with the Ark Encounter group as it seeks to provide this unique, family friendly tourist attraction to the Commonwealth,” said Gov. Beshear. “Bringing new jobs to Kentucky is my top priority, and with the estimated 900 jobs this project will create, I am happy about the economic impact this project will have on the Northern Kentucky region.”

The Ark Encounter is scheduled to open in spring 2014 in northern Kentucky. Multiple sites are being considered, although property in Grant County off I-75 is at the top of the list. A feasibility study conducted by the renowned America’s Research Group has indicated that the Ark Encounter may attract 1.6 million visitors in the first year and is expected to employ up to 900 full- and part-time staff.

The for-profit Ark Encounter project will be privately funded at an estimated cost of $150 million. The final site selection for the Ark Encounter is subject to the ability to acquire all of the land needed for the project, and the approval of certain state and local incentives and other assistance for the project.

“We are very pleased to be a part of this new project,” said Ken Ham, president and founder of AiG and the Creation Museum. “AiG has been blessed to see the Creation Museum host over one million guests in three years. Based on our experience and success operating the large, state-of-the-art Creation Museum, our board believes the time is right to partner with the Ark Encounter in building a full-scale Noah’s Ark. We hope that this fun and educational complex called the Ark Encounter will become another popular tourist destination for the state.”

In addition to the full-size Ark, the complex will include a Walled City much like was found in ancient times, live animal shows, a children’s interactive play area, a replica of the Tower of Babel with exhibits, a 500-seat 5-D special effects theater, an aviary, and a first-century Middle Eastern village.

To showcase the “green” construction methods and materials that will be used, the complex will also include a Special Events Area for large gatherings, highlighting some of the Leader in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building techniques used to construct the Ark Encounter.

One of the factors in getting the Ark Encounter to launch the Ark project at this time was a November 2009 CBS News survey, which revealed that the remains of Noah’s Ark would be the greatest archaeological discovery of our day. CBS News stated: “CBS’ 60 Minutes news program, in conjunction with Vanity Fair magazine, recently conducted a web survey asking which archaeological discovery people would most want to see made next. The response: Noah’s Ark (43 percent); Atlantis (18 percent); Amelia Earhart’s plane (16 percent); Nixon’s lost tapes (13 percent); and Cleopatra’s barge (5 percent).”

The report continued: “Noah’s Ark continues to capture the imagination of the general public, and this interest spans all social, religious and economic segments. The Ark and the flood is one of the few historical events which are well known in the worldwide global circle.”

Following the release of the article, the Ark Encounter group became even more convinced about the viability of the project. It will be assembling virtually the same team that designed and built the Creation Museum, and have these same talented staff design a full-scale Noah’s Ark.

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Oddly enough, Kentucky’s atheist lawyer and long time Creation Museum opponent, Ed Kagin, was quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal paper as “defending” Answers in Genesis:

Edwin Kagin, a Northern Kentucky attorney who is also the national legal director for the group American Atheists, said it doesn’t appear to him to violate the law. If other projects with religious themes could qualify for the tax incentives, the law doesn’t discriminate.

“It might not be discrimination, but it might not be a good idea,” Kagin said.

We suspect that Answers in Genesis is very pleased with how our atheist friends are helping to spread the word about the Ark Encounter project!

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Frankly, his comments need to be translated to understand his real complaint:

“This is a very well done museum that shows how wrong Darwin and evolutionists have been for the past 150 years.”
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Paleontologists visit enemy turf in evolution debate with field trip to Creation Museum in U.S.

The Amherst Daily News, p. 9.
June 25, 2009

PETERSBURG, Kentucky. In one of the largest gatherings of critics since the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky opened two years ago, six dozen paleontologists in the area for a conference Wednesday took a field trip to get a glimpse of the marketing tactics used by the other side of the evolution debate.

Paleontologists spend their careers studying evolution, and here they were visiting a place where nearly every room is dedicated to disproving it through Creationism, a fundamentalist Christian belief based on a literal interpretation of the Bible that contends God created the universe just a few thousand years ago.

“The real purpose of the museum visit is to give some of my colleagues an opportunity to sense how they’re being portrayed,” said Arnold Miller, a professor of paleontology at the University of Cincinnati, which is hosting the conference. “They’re being demonized, I feel, in this museum as people who are responsible for all the ills of society.”

…read more…

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Origin of Species writer tormented by findings Christian thought is still trying to reconcile

LONDON— Wandering through this biggest-ever reappraisal of Charles Darwin, you do not get a sense that here lies the enemy of God.

A doubter? Unquestionably. A man born to the clergy, yet one who lived in quiet agony as the evidence of science and the articles of faith did battle for decades between his ears? That too.

And finally, a man so wary of societal outrage that he held his silence a full 22 years before reluctantly publishing the revolutionary theory that upended our understanding of the world.

This is the man unveiled in “Darwin,” the newly installed celebration of the famous scientist’s life changing journey at the Natural History Museum in London.

read more…

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Of course, political correctness gone wild is not limited to pop science writers. The same issue of The Observer has another article by Robin McKie in which she notes evolutionist Steve Jones is upset with the Bank of England for allowing a hummingbird to be on a 10 pound note commemorating Darwin’s Galapagos Island studies. Hummingbirds do not exist in the Galapagos Islands and apparently Darwin never even discussed these birds in any of his writings!

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Looking the truth right in the eye
by Robin McKie
The Observer (UK), The Critics, p .11
November 16, 2008

Confronting visitors as they enter the Natural History Museum’s bicentennial tribute to Charles Darwin is a plinth with a plush purple cushion on top. Two pale-coloured mockingbirds rest there in elegant repose, their labelled claws pointing upwards. Caught by Darwin in the Galapagos in 1835, the birds – previously stored in the museum’s vaults – are being displayed in public for the first time.

These are no mere historical curios, however. Although at first glance they look similar, a closer examination reveals key differences. One bird – from the island of Floreana – is darker and has wing bands and a relatively large beak, features that surprised Darwin at the time. Until then, the young naturalist had thought all mockingbirds would be light-coloured like the second specimen (from San Cristóbal island) on the plinth. Such differences – in creatures supposedly from the same species – intrigued Darwin and set him thinking about how animals might change and then evolve into new creatures. ‘Such facts undermine the stability of species,’ he wrote of his mockingbirds in a notebook, also displayed here.

read more…

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The mockingbirds are perhaps the most important specimens Darwin collected from the Galapagos during his five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle in the 1830s, and today they go on show as part of a major exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. It reveals Darwin as a tenacious scientist, a pragmatic lover, and a man pained by losing his religion.

read more…

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Colleges celebrate Darwin in yearlong slate of events
by Kevin Mayhood
The Columbus Dispatch, October 15, 2008
p. B3

Throughout Ohio, people can sup on primordial soup and listen to the strings of evolution as part of a celebration of Charles Darwin, a former divinity student who shook the world when he published his theory of evolution.

Darwin’s 200th birthday would be Feb. 12, and his On the Origin of Species will turn 150 on Nov. 24, 2009.

…

Cincinnati will host the North American Paleontological Convention in June, partly so that paleontologists can tour the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky.

read more…

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Of course, the release of Bill Maher’s docudrama, Religulous, and subsequent media PR blitz, have added to the Creation Museum’s media exposure for October.

A year later, Creation Museum still claims big crowds
by Dylan T. Lovan
The Detroit News, p. C1 and C3.
13 Oct 2008

The museum exhibits are taken from the Old Testament, but the special effects are pureHollywood: a stateof-the-art planetarium, animatronics and a massive model of Noah’s Ark, all intended to explain the origins of the universe from a biblical viewpoint.

The Creation Museum, which teaches life’s beginnings through a literal interpretation of the Bible, is claiming attendance figures that would make it an unexpectedly strong draw less than a year and a half after it debuted. More than a half-million people have toured the Petersburg, Ky., attraction since its May 2007 opening, museum officials say.

read more…

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Stung like a bee by the Louisville Lip
by Chris Coplans
The Mail on Sunday (UK), September 7, 2008
p. 32-33

On my way back to the airport in Kentucky I made one last stop at God’s answer to Disneyworld, the Creation Museum.

Worried about being stereotyped as Stone Age, Bible-bashing hillbillies, Kentuckians have been reluctant to embrace their newest attraction. Not so the thousands of biblical literalists who make a pilgrimage from all over America to visit God’s own theme park.

ThE state-of-the-art 70,000 sq ft museum is just one exit away from the airport and presents itself as a ‘walk through history’, although it struck me as a walk through fantasy land. For just under £13, you can learn how God made the universe in six days, where the dinosaurs lived on Noah’s Ark and, most bizarrely, how Darwin was responsible for the Holocaust.

I was greeted outside the main building by a large, apparently harmless dinosaur. It turns out the likes of Steven Spielberg and 99 per cent of scientists have been giving dinosaurs an undeservedly bad Press.

One exhibit shows a young child happily frolicking with a couple of peace-loving, vegan dinosaurs, even though they had been extinct for 60 million years before humans came along. The Creation Museum, like Hollywood, doesn’t let science get in the way of a good story.

The museum is packed with hordes of jumbo-sized evangelical Christians, waddling around with their offspring, apparently defying the deadly sin of gluttony. Had Noah let them aboard, their excess weight would have sunk the Ark.

read more…

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