Mal-ark-ey

This was totally like this when we got here, honest! (via the guys-with-no-vested-interest's site)

People sometimes want things to be true so badly that they’ll latch onto the first fraud that comes around offering them a shred of purported evidence, and will stay latched even when the evidence is later proven fraudulent. Sometimes this happens to detriment of only the person being snookered; sometimes this happens to the greater detriment of humankind as a whole, and its ability to get past the fallacious beliefs, keeping it from ever throwing their lot in with reality proper. With religious iconography, usually (and most unfortunately) the latter is almost always the case.

Fox News recently reported on a news conference held by Turkish Christian Evangelicals from a group called Noah’s Ark Ministries International (so you know they have no dog in THIS race!), wherein they claim that their scientists have discovered with “99.9% certainty” the final resting place of the mythical Ark that Noah used to survive the mythical global flood. Sorry, I should clarify: the mythical Noah. And yes, that means THIS ark must not be real. Nobody respects Wyatt. Le sigh.

Spot the Ark!  The Ararat Anomaly
Spot the Ark! (via Wikipedia)

To Fox’s credit, they went on to post an update stating experts doubted the claims, but of course, being Fox, spun it such that the creationists get both the headline (“Noah’s Ark Hoax Claim Doesn’t Deter Believers”) and the last word in the matter, even going into a tangent on Nephilim to explain the 1200-foot “Ararat Anomaly” when predictions of the Ark’s size state 600 feet. Never mind that there is no global flood stratum, that the Earth’s geology was formed by plate tectonics and a global flood couldn’t do what they claim it could have done, or that, basically, Young-Earth Creationists have pretty much every aspect of reality wrong and have to create one ad-hoc justification after another to stick with their hypothesis. Their hypothesis being, “God did it and the bible is absolutely true, and any place reality differs, our interpretation of the evidence is wrong.”

Of course, the only alternatives they CAN offer are either that God made it that way to test our faith, or the Devil made it that way to turn us away from God. Or that we’re not seeing what we think we’re seeing, and also LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.

Nonetheless, we humor their hypotheses because they are not disprovable — how does one disprove the existence of Noah’s Ark outright when their answer is always, “oh sure, you disproved THIS one, but we just haven’t found it yet”? Well, you can winnow out the bullshit claims about a proposed ark the same way as you do the invisible pink unicorn that we haven’t found yet — by asserting that it does not exist until and unless evidence turns up proving it does. Setting the null hypothesis (non-existence of proposed entity) is scientifically valid and, of course, the best place to start when looking for the real, empirical truth about reality.

The main problem with this methodology is that this encourages gullible evangelicals to strike out in search of evidence, and people will take advantage of their gullibility, and in so doing, will perpetuate the meme that should rightly die out if there was any justice in the universe. This happened in the 2008 expedition that this press conference belatedly references, where the Noah’s Ark Ministry had bilked Randall Price, a theologist from World of the Bible Ministries who’s been searching for the Ark for much of his life, out of $100,000 in order to allow him to be a part of the joint Chinese-Turkish expedition. His letter in whole:

I was the archaeologist with the Chinese expedition in the summer of 2008 and was given photos of what they now are reporting to be the inside of the Ark. I and my partners invested $100,000 in this expedition (described below) which they have retained, despite their promise and our requests to return it, since it was not used for the expedition. The information given below is my opinion based on what I have seen and heard (from others who claim to have been eyewitnesses or know the exact details).

To make a long story short: this is all reported to be a fake. The photos were reputed to have been taken off site near the Black Sea, but the film footage the Chinese now have was shot on location on Mt. Ararat. In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut, the guide used by the Chinese, are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area (where the photos were originally taken) at the Mt. Ararat site. In the winter of 2008 a Chinese climber taken by Parasut’s men to the site saw the wood, but couldn’t get inside because of the severe weather conditions. During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the site. The Chinese team went in the late summer of 2009 (I was there at the time and knew about the hoax) and was shown the cave with the wood and made their film. As I said, I have the photos of the inside of the so-called Ark (that show cobwebs in the corners of rafters – something just not possible in these conditions) and our Kurdish partner in Dogubabyazit (the village at the foot of Mt. Ararat) has all of the facts about the location, the men who planted the wood, and even the truck that transported it.

The Toronto Star is pretty much the only news organization I’ve seen that took a skeptical slant from the outset on this news.

The bible suggests that the ark came to rest after 150 days of flooding in the “mountains of Ararat.” The mountain, located in Turkey near the border with Armenia, is an inhospitable place for both geographic and political reasons. And even the translation is suspect.

The bible specifies that the landing spot is “Urartu.” Over time Urartu became Ararat, a name that was given to the mountain long after the bible was written. So it’s not exactly clear where the bible’s authors meant. Thus, it’s slightly suspect that the ark should show up exactly where we want it to be.

Nonetheless, Ararat has drawn a steady stream of explorers for decades. Many of them have “discovered” the ark.

“I don’t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn’t find it,” said archeologist Paul Zimansky recently told National Geographic.

I don’t doubt that there was a historical Noah’s Ark — far from it. There could very well be such a thing, though probably not in recognizeable boat form, and very likely nowhere near a mountain, so nobody would ever recognize it as the one of the bible. This ark would not have saved all the creatures of the world from a global flood, but rather from a very localized flood that affected the Middle East, e.g. the Black Sea flooding, back when people thought the Middle East was the whole of the world. Go reread Genesis for some good descriptions of the world and all its rivers. Funny that they all happen to be in the Middle East.

Manu, the First Man, is taught how to survive the coming Great Flood by a fish deity in Indian mythology
Manu, the First Man, is taught how to survive the coming Great Flood by a fish deity in Indian mythology (via Myth Encyclopedia)

You see, flood myths are huge in mythology — just about every culture has one or two. Don’t mistake the reason for this, either — if you read those mythos, you’ll understand they don’t tell about the same biblical flood like some people might think. The real reason for this commonality is twofold: local floods are common, and most mythology developed before written record. People settle near water, and natural disasters happen all the time. Floods become part of your history, and in a time before written word was commonplace rather than the practice of the elite, your oral tradition flood myth retelling will become so distorted across successive generations that over time what was once a flood from which a local land-owner saved his cattle by building a boat for temporary refuge, becomes a world-ending cataclysm God-did-it purple monkey dishwasher. Much of the Bible is a result of this oral tradition, having only been written after such writing was invented and having only been cobbled together some three hundred years after their deity supposedly died and was resurrected. When you see the similarities between the events that supposedly happen two thousand years ago, and events that supposedly happened much earlier with different names and in a different region, you can’t help but realize they’re all fairy tales.

And in the meantime, mountains will be renamed, people will truck wood up a mountain, and expeditions will be launched, one after another, until either a “canonical” site is chosen (as Noah’s Ark Ministries is trying to do in having their site declared a UNESCO World Heritage site), or until the world finally stops believing in such myths. Nobody would launch an expedition to find the Golden Fleece today, but if Greek mythology had won out over Christian mythology, fundies would be out there searching for it, and people would be forging evidence of cyclopses to bilk them out of their money.

Call it a gullibility tax, I guess. It’s just a shame unethical people are the ones making this money. The ethical ones are the ones that either believe in the story so wholeheartedly, or merely feel bad for those that do.

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Mal-ark-ey
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One thought on “Mal-ark-ey

  1. 1

    “I don’t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn’t find it,” said archeologist Paul Zimansky recently told National Geographic.

    I’ve heard the same thing about Atlantis. It always seems to be located in the sea closest to where the searching person is from.

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