DUP Education Minister Paul Givan has appointed his DUP colleague Mervyn Gibson Chairman of the Education Authority. Not surprisingly, questions are being asked about the part-time appointment, which pays a chunky £50k to £60k a year for three days work per week.
Me? I’m happy to let the rights, wrongs and technicalities of Merv getting the job play out among politicians and educationalists. My interest lies more in the implication of appointing a creationist to the most high-profile post in the world of education. For not only does Merv believe that the entire world and everything in it was created in the same amount of time it takes not to get a parcel from Britain, he believes that dinosaurs became extinct the year Cliff Richard was born. And not only does he believe these things, he believes they should be taught in schools as part of the science curriculum.
Let’s see if we can go a little way toward working out what teaching creationism would actually mean as a counter-explanation to the Big Bang. The following information is taken from i) the website of the Ark Encounter, a Kentucky theme park whose centrepiece is a full-size working Noah’s Ark complete with scientific explanations of how its occupants survived; and ii) Answers in Genesis, the foremost online young Earth creationism source. These technical details have been supplied by creationists with expertise in the various fields involved.
So, let’s begin our first creationist lesson of the day in a future world where science and the Old Testament sit side by side…
TODAY, children, I will be giving you the answers to some of the questions you may have about Noah’s Ark. And I will be batting away the juvenile criticism of creationism offered by those who would tell us that we emerged from a primeval atomic and cosmic inflation.
In comparing, for instance, a cruise ship with the Ark, they point out that there will typically be 4,000 people on a cruise ship and a crew-to-passenger ratio of 1-4, meaning the crew will number 1,000. They point out that to cope with 16,000 animals (a pair for each of 8,000 species), and taking into consideration the needs of the larger animals, the Ark would have needed a crew of 1,500 to sail the vessel and to take care of the animals.
In fact, science tells us that eight people – Noah, his wife, their sons and their wives – were quite easily able to cope for the year they were at sea. It’s estimated that 16,000 animals would produce a humungous 24 tons of manure a day, but the Ark had an ingenious system of slatted floors and by opening these slats once a day a massive torrent of dung would cascade down and out the side via specially-built exit holes. We’re not sure how Noah’s lot didn’t die from hydrogen sulphide poisoning, but we’re working on the theory that there was a basic, non-mechanical ventilation system.
Obviously eight people aren’t going to feed 16,000 animals once or twice a day, and so food and water were stored next to each individual animal and they ate and drank by way of regulated self-feeders – similar to those seen on bird cages. Clearly, an elephant’s going to need a pretty big bird cage and a pretty big bird feeder, but the theory is consistent. Water piped into troughs would probably have been used in some instances too.
Obviously, fresh meat for carnivores was not an option and salted or cured meat would have been brought aboard. But there is documented evidence of carnivores surviving quite happily in wildlife parks on a mixture of nuts, peanut butter, coconuts, beans, soy and other legumes (in time of war or crisis, for instance). So there’s no reason why big cats and the like could not have lived for a year on either salted meat or vegetarian options, although where eight people got the time to prepare it is something that we’re looking into.
But even a boat that size couldn’t have stored any where near enough salted meat and vegetarian options for a year. Thankfully, because the wild animals were caged, many if not all of them went into a state of hibernation or ‘torpor’, even the non-hibernators. This meant that for long periods they ate virtually nothing, waking only to feed sparingly and then returning to their light coma.
We come now to the question of how dinosaurs the size of a barn got on to the Ark. Most likely, Noah brought on juvenile dinosaurs from a representative selection of around 55 dinosaur types, and with the dinosaurs being in a state of light hibernation they would have grown even more slowly than usual.
An unimaginable amount of fresh water was needed daily for the crew of eight and the 16,000 animals. The Ark set off after the flood equipped with a number of massive cisterns filled with enough water to last for a quarter of their time at sea – three months. Later, rain collecting apparatus on the roof of the Ark funnelled rain water via pipes into the empty cisterns.
IT’S SCIENCE: Animal watering system on the Ark (Pic from Ark Encounter)
We turn now to the relatively small number of species which Noah brought on to the Ark. While today there’s estimated to be 8.7 million species of animals on Earth, just eight thousand species were aboard. But scripture refers to the Ark animals by their ‘min’, a Hebrew word meaning ‘kind’. And so just two dogs on the Ark, for instance, were responsible for all the dog-like species we see today: wolves, coyotes, hyenas, dingos and so on. Similarly, two big cats were the genesis of all lions, cheetahs, leopards and so on. Extrapolate this across the animal kingdom – birds, insects, cattle, rodents and so on – and we see how a relatively small number of animals gave us the teeming wildlife we see across the world today.
It's reasonable to point out that for just one man Noah knew an awful lot about seafaring, animal husbandry, nutrition, ventilation, hygiene and so on. But it’s important to remember, children, that when Noah took the helm of the Ark he was 500 years old and would have collected an extraordinary amount of information across five centuries about an extraordinary amount of subjects.
Which brings us to the final Ark question for today – when the animals were set free from the Ark after a year, wouldn’t the big predators have immediately eaten the small ones? And if they did, since there were only two of each animal, wouldn’t this have meant mass extinction?
Well, you have to remember that post-flood the Earth would have been littered with the corpses of drowned people and animals, and while these might have been a bit manky after 12 months, the ravenous carnivores would have got stuck in anyway since carrion is a staple of most predators’ diet. And by the time the big beasts had eaten all the rotten corpse meat they could handle, the other animals would have procreated to the extent that predation was no longer a problem.
• For the avoidance of doubt, and with apologies for repetition, the above is all part of what creationist educators teach children about the origin of life on Earth. It is not a joke.
Sadly.
