WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. —Ken Ham built an ark, a Noah-sized ark, in the verdant, landlocked hills of the American heartland.

At the sight of the wooden vessel, tourists – decidedly more than two-by-two, a caravan of buses surrounding the site – gasp in wonder. Christian school students storm the ramps, many completing science quizzes based on anti-evolutionary teachings.

The founder of Answers in Genesis, an online and publishing ministry with a strict creationist interpretation of the Bible, employed 700 workers to erect the $120 million Ark Encounter, which is five stories high and a football field and a half in length, and packs a powerful “whoa” punch. He had the massive boat designed by a veteran of amusement park attractions, commissioned an original soundtrack to enhance the experience, and stocked the interior with an animatronic (and freakishly real) talking Noah, along with lifelike models of Earth’s manifold creatures. Including dinosaurs.

And he saw that it was good.

The ark opened last summer and is on target, Ham says, to attract more than a million visitors in the first year.

But Ham did not rest.

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TOWER OF BABEL TO COME

The 65-year-old Australian and his partners, Mike Zovath and Mark Looy, have launched an ambitious 10-to-12-year plan to re-create a walled city from the time of Noah and a first-century village from the time of Jesus.

Also, a Tower of Babel, concept snack shacks, a 3,200-seat amphitheater and a 10-plagues-of-Egypt thrill ride. Frogs! Fiery hail! Locusts!

Instead of building a church, Answers in Genesis is sharing its teachings through a controversial biblical theme park designed to attract believers and nonbelievers alike.

“How do you reach the general public in a bigger way?” muses Ham rhetorically, sitting in his expansive corner office at the Creation Museum, his first, more sober foray into the family entertainment business, which celebrates its 10th anniversary on Memorial Day. “Why not attractions that people will come to the way they go to Disney or Universal or the Smithsonian?”

Why not, indeed?

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Answers in Genesis is certainly adopting a different approach from the Museum of the Bible, which is scheduled to open in November in Washington, D.C., and aims to attract all religions. AiG wants to attract all tourists and introduce them to its specific brand of faith.

Ham and his brethren are creationists and Christian apologists who believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. (Contrary to scientists who say that it’s more like 4.5 billion years – or older.) Apologetics is a branch of Christianity whose adherents actively defend their faith, and Ham is a robust debater.

The author or co-author of 50 or 60 books – he’s not sure, a rare instance of uncertainty – he argues that the Bible is a historical narrative and that “the whole gospel message is found in Genesis.” He believes that dinosaurs prowled the planet alongside humans and that the biblical flood created the Grand Canyon. One of his books is titled “The Lie: Evolution.” He maintains that Noah labored seven decades to construct his vessel and was 600 years old when the storm surged. (By comparison, the AiG team took only seven years to build the Kentucky ark.)

Ham – is it coincidence that his name is the same as one of Noah’s sons’? – began his career as, of all things, a science teacher in a tiny Australian town. But evolution didn’t sit right with him as the son of parents who subscribed to creationist beliefs.

SUSPICIOUS OF MAJORITY VIEW

“I took students to museums and saw that all the museums were totally from an evolutionary perspective,” he says. He began researching the creationist view of science, and ultimately began lecturing on the subject and was invited to speak at the Institute for Creation Research, then based outside San Diego.

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And he realized that America was the best location for getting his message out to the world. “It’s the center of the business world, the center of the Christian world,” he says.

He acknowledges that his views aren’t commonly shared.

“Obviously, we’re in a minority,” he says in his pronounced Down Under accent. But “just because a majority believes in something doesn’t mean it’s right. People love darkness rather than light. If a majority believes something, I’m naturally suspicious because of the sin nature of man.”

How did a former science teacher, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel (Zovath) and a former radio reporter (Looy), all based in Southern California and with zero tourism experience, come to build a museum and an enormous wooden boat to promote creationism in northern Kentucky?

The founders say they looked at multiple locations in several states and chose the region because of its proximity to the Cincinnati airport, once a Delta hub, and because it’s within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the nation’s population. But the sites are also situated firmly in the Bible Belt, where there’s less competition from other tourist attractions. Plus, AiG was able to negotiate attractive incentives to locate there.

Ham proudly points out that where many museums and attractions “are reliant on government subsidies or a few large donations,” the ark was funded by 42,000 small donors.

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TOWN FUNDING QUESTIONED

But the project’s largest source of funding was actually $62 million in junk bonds floated by the town of Williamstown, population less than 4,000, home to the Ark Encounter and the county seat of Grant County, which faced bankruptcy this spring.

Unsurprisingly, the Ark Encounter and Answers in Genesis have attracted a loud chorus of critics who question this financial backing.

“Why would the state indirectly subsidize a nonsensible alternative to evolution?” asks Barry Lynn, an ordained minister who is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a frequent critic. “It’s not good science. It’s not good anything. It ought to be unacceptable for a state at any level to treat this like one more bond-funded enterprise. Most Christians do not accept this as a literal or natural interpretation of the Bible.”

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