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.
