Bill Nye: “Mr. Ham and his followers have
this remarkable view of a worldwide flood
that somehow influenced everything we observed
in nature.
A 500 foot wooden boat, eight zookeepers for
14,000 individual animals.
Every land plant in the world underwater for
a full year.
I ask us all is that really reasonable?
You’ll hear a lot about the Grand Canyon
I imagine also, which is a remarkable place.
And it has fossils.
And the fossils in the Grand Canyon are found
in layers.
There’s not a single place in the Grand
Canyon where the fossils of one type of animal
cross over into the fossils of another.
In other words, when there was a big flood
on the earth, you would expect drowning animals
to swim up to a higher level.
Not any one of them did, not a single one.
If you could find evidence of that, my friends,
you could change the world.
One of the extraordinary claims associated
with Mr. Ham’s worldview is that this giant
boat - very large wooden ship - went aground
safely on a mountain in what we now call the
Middle East.
And so places like Australia are populated
then by animals who somehow managed to get
from the Middle East all the way to Australia
in the last 4,000 years.
Now that to me is an extraordinary claim.
We would expect then somewhere between the
Middle East and Australia, we would expect
to find evidence of kangaroos, we would expect
to find some fossils, some bones in the last
4,000 years.
Somebody would have been hopping along there
and died along the way and we’d find them.
And furthermore there is a claim that there
was a land bridge that allowed these animals
to get from Asia all the way to the content
of Australia.
And that land bridge has disappeared - has
disappeared in the last 4,000 years.
No navigator, no diver, no US Navy submarine—no
one’s ever detected any evidence of this,
let alone any fossils of kangaroos.
And so your expectation is not met, it doesn’t
seem to hold up.
Another remarkable thing I’d like everybody
to consider.
Along, inherent in this worldview is that
somehow Noah and his family were able to build
a wooden ship that would house 14,000 individual
- there were 7,000 kinds and there’s a boy
and girl for each one of those - so is about
14,008 people.
And these people were unskilled.
As far as anybody knows they had never built
a wooden ship before.
Furthermore they had to get all these animals
on there, and they had to feed them.
And I understand that Mr. Ham has some explanations
for that which I frankly find extraordinary,
but this is the premise for the bit.
And we can then run a test, a scientific test.
People in the early 1900’s built an extraordinary,
large wooden ship: the Wyoming.
It was a six masted schooner, the largest
ever built.
It had a motor on it for winching cables and
stuff, but this boat had a great difficulty.
It was not as big as the Titanic, but it was
a very long ship.
It would twist in the sea.
It would twist this way, this way, and this
way.
And in all that twisting it leaked like crazy.
The crew could not keep the ship dry.
And indeed it eventually foundered and sank—a
loss of all 14 hands.
So there were 14 crewman aboard a ship built
by very very skilled shipwrights in New England.
These guys were the best in the world at wooden
ship building, and they couldn’t build a
boat as big as the Ark is claimed to have
been.
Is that reasonable?
Is that possible that the best shipbuilders
in the world couldn’t do what eight unskilled
people, men and their wives, were able to
do?
Shipwrights - my ancestors, the Nye family
in New England, spent their whole lives learning
to make ships.
I mean, it’s very reasonable, perhaps to
you, that Noah had superpowers and was able
to build this extraordinary craft with seven
family members, but to me it’s just not
reasonable.
