In Williamstown, Kentucky​ , no small distance from the ‘mountains of Ararat’, the biblical resting place of Noah’s Ark, a 510-foot-long wooden structure rises from a ridge. The Ark Encounter – less than an hour’s drive from Cincinnati International Airport and within a day’s drive of much of the Bible Belt – is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers Centre, where creationist-friendly science textbooks are on sale next to Noah’s Coffee. Outdoor speakers play music reminiscent of a fantasy video game. The Answers Centre looks out across a lake to the main attraction. The ark is massive (roughly the length of St Paul’s Cathedral), handsome and very strange.

Entertainments are on offer: a petting zoo; camel rides; zip lines; virtual reality ‘time travel’. There are flashes of humour: visitors can pose as a biblical patriarch in a cut-out panel; the refreshment stands promise ‘a flood of refills’. Yet the attraction serves a serious purpose. Built by an evangelical Christian group called Answers in Genesis (AiG) and completed in 2016, the Ark Encounter makes the case that the story of Noah occurred exactly as told in Genesis: that humanity was saved by the eight people who built the vessel and boarded it together with seven pairs ‘of every sort’ of animal, then stayed on it during a deluge that lasted forty days and for a further 150 days when the floodwaters prevailed, plus the better part of a year as the waters receded. In Williamstown, the argument unfolds across the ark’s three levels, which are filled not with live animals but with elaborate sets, dioramas, videos, illustrated panels and animatronics.

To build an ark, AiG had to resolve many practical questions that the Bible fails to address. God tells Noah in Genesis 6:15 that the ark is to be 300 cubits long. But what is a cubit? The unit denoted different measurements in antiquity and biblical exegetes have differed on the length meant in Genesis. The Ark Encounter settles on the longer royal cubit (20.4 inches) over the shorter common one. This yields a volume of 1.88 million cubic feet, or ‘enough to contain nearly 450 semi-truck trailers’. In Genesis 6:14, God says to Noah: ‘Make thee an ark of gopher wood.’ But nobody knows what gopher wood is. The Ark Encounter is made of North American timber – Engelmann spruce, Douglas fir – and radiata pine from New Zealand. More important, is a wooden vessel of this scale viable? The largest wooden ship ever built, the schooner Wyoming, was 450 feet long on completion in 1909. When its planks came under stress in heavy seas it took on water, and in 1924 it sank, drowning the entire crew. The designers of the Ark Encounter claim that, with multiple layers of ‘structural planking’, including two additional layers below the waterline, their design could withstand similar pressure.

When Ken Ham, an Australian evangelical entrepreneur and the founder of AiG, was asked whether the ark was seaworthy, he replied: ‘We didn’t build it to float, because there is never going to be another global flood.’ His confidence is grounded in the ‘rainbow covenant’, God’s promise at the end of Noah’s ordeal that ‘neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.’ God offers a sign in the form of a rainbow, a reminder of this new covenant with ‘every living creature of all flesh’. It was in reference to this that the German peasant leader Thomas Müntzer carried a rainbow banner into the battle of Frankenhausen in 1525.

As the visitor enters the hold of the ark, sound effects evoke frightened animals in captivity. Soon enough, viewers are presented with animatronic creatures in cages – on closer inspection, dinosaurs. Genesis gives no reason to believe that dinosaurs were not created on the sixth day along with the other wild animals and reptiles, and God did tell Noah to take ‘every sort’ of animal. If dinosaurs no longer roam the earth, the Flood can’t be held responsible.

For all its ambition, the Ark Encounter does employ some workarounds. The most obvious concerns the injunction to bring ‘two of every sort’ on the ark (according to Genesis 6:19-20), or ‘by sevens, the male and his female’ of ‘every clean beast’ and every sort of bird and two each ‘of beasts that are not clean’ (according to Genesis 7:1-3). Scientists today estimate that there may be as many as 8.7 million extant animal species. In AiG’s ‘worst-case scenario’, however, ‘Noah was responsible for fewer than 6744 individual animals.’ AiG argues that the Hebrew word min (‘sort’ or ‘kind’) does not correspond to the modern concept of species; it has developed its own classification system, which reduces all animals to a limited number of kinds (for example, felids encompass all cats great and small, canids all dogs and wolves). It estimates that there are ‘fewer than 1400 known living and extinct kinds’ among vertebrates on land. As for how dinosaurs could have fitted into the ark, the reasonable explanation is that they were juveniles – nowhere in Genesis does it say that Noah had to take adult animals on board.

Getting all the animals onto the ark was only the first step. How were they housed, fed and provided with enough water, light and air to survive? And how did eight people look after all of them? AiG suggests that Noah and his family devised solutions worthy of Archimedes or Leonardo: refillable feeders; a bamboo piping system for conveying rainwater from cisterns to the animal enclosures; angled trays to dispose of waste; separate solid and liquid waste collection with valves to prevent backflow. Moths could have been grown in baskets to feed reptiles, amphibians kept damp in special pots with cloth lids. Best of all, an elephant-powered treadmill could have activated a bucket system to ‘scoop and dump’ waste.

There is something a little too on the nose about biblical literalists building an ark. Yet as Philip Almond recounts in his new book, the same questions that preoccupy the evangelicals who visit the Ark Encounter have troubled Jews, Christians and Muslims for millennia. Almond argues that we underestimate the importance of Noah’s story. To Christians, it offered a theological bridge between the Old and New Testaments: Noah was both a second Adam and, as the saviour of mankind, a proto-Christ. Yet many aspects of the story have seemed to require explanation. In addition to the practical questions, there are moral puzzles: God’s remorse over having created humanity is hard to square with his perfection; he punishes human wickedness by taking innocent animal lives; Noah’s righteousness is undermined by his inebriation after the Flood. In his wise and witty The Legend of Noah (1949), Don Cameron Allen interpreted the struggle with Noah’s story as one between reason and faith. Almond’s book is a learned complement to Allen’s, with a broader chronological span, from antiquity to the present.

The story is full of inconsistencies. Did Noah have to bring two of every sort or seven (or even seven pairs) of every clean sort and one pair of every unclean sort, for example? According to the ‘documentary hypothesis’ formulated by the German scholar Julius Wellhausen in the 19th century, the Pentateuch is a composite of four earlier sources, with resulting duplications and discrepancies. Genesis 6-9 combines the ‘Jahwist source’ and the ‘priestly source’ so paradigmatically that the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman uses it to explain the documentary hypothesis in his book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Other interpretative problems include dating the Flood and measuring its extent. Where did the waters come from, and where did they go? As the English theologian Thomas Burnet observed in the 17th century, ‘the excessive quantity of water is the great difficulty, and the removal of it afterwards.’

The version of Noah’s story that appears in the Hebrew Bible (which dates from around 500 BCE) is a reworking of Mesopotamian flood myths. In the earlier accounts, the motivation for the Flood is not mankind’s wickedness, but overpopulation and the bother that humans cause the gods. In the Atrahasis epic, from the 18th century BCE, the god Ellil says: ‘The noise of mankind has become too much./I am losing sleep over their racket.’ (One way of understanding the story is that the first urban society inspired an unneighbourly fantasy of mass murder.) The ancient epics offer vivid details absent in the Bible’s compressed account. In Gilgamesh, the deluge is so violent that ‘even the gods took fright … lying like dogs curled up in the open.’ The Judean compilers interpreted these stories through the lens of Israelite theology. Recorded after the Judean return from the Babylonian exile, Noah’s story seemed to mirror the predicament of a people beginning anew.

Many of the early responses to Noah expanded on the story, with a particular focus on the antediluvian Nephilim, the mysterious creatures mentioned in Genesis 6:4. Jewish apocalyptic writings such as the First Book of Enoch interpreted them as the offspring of angels and men, and blamed them for the corruption of the world before the Flood. The Book of Jubilees added such details as the name of Noah’s wife, Emzara. As the rabbinic tradition developed, commentators continued this imaginative project, often with the purpose of resolving the contradictions of the biblical account. Rabbi Azariah, writing in the first century CE, thought that God punished the animals because ‘all acted corruptly in the generation of the Flood: the dog with the wolf, the fowl with the peacock.’ Rabbis debated the layout of the ark, taking a particular interest in the way it was lit. Pearls or gems were preferred solutions for refracting light to the lower levels. Jewish writers disagreed, however, about where the waste was kept: on the lowest deck, at the greatest distance from the human passengers, or on the upper level so that Noah could easily shovel it out?

That was the least of his problems. According to the Midrash Tanhuma, a biblical exegesis that dates from the early Middle Ages, during his twelve months on the ark Noah – who was then six hundred – ‘had no opportunity to sleep, neither in the daytime nor at night, as he was busy feeding the souls that were with him’. The Sanhedrin, a book of the Talmud, imagines a witness report by Noah’s son Shem: ‘We had much trouble in the ark. The animals which are usually fed by day we fed by day; and those normally fed by night we fed by night. But my father did not know what was the food of the chameleon.’ (The answer turned out to be worms.) The animals howled and cried in fear, and Noah compared the ark to a prison. Not only did he and his wife refrain from intercourse, the medieval rabbi Rashi writes, but sex between animals was proscribed too: ‘Cattle and fowls also were separated, male and female, in the ark.’ In a Dantean rhyming of punishment with sin, the Talmud holds that the flood waters were boiling. As Rabbi Hisda put it, ‘with hot semen they sinned, and with hot water they were punished.’ Though they were not included on the ark, some fish must have found a way to survive. Muslim scholars had equally colourful responses to the story. The historian al-Kisa’i imagined the ark as having a bird-shaped prow and jewelled wings. The anthologist al-Tha’alabi had Noah honour the parrot, who was allowed ‘on the upper level out of solicitude, lest anything evil kill it’. Also on the upper deck, according to al-Tha’alabi, was the (presumably mummified) corpse of Adam, dividing the women and men.

Others interpreted the ark as allegory. For the Hellenistic Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria, the Flood represented the passions, the ark the human body. The analogy is pursued to breaking point: the ark’s decks represent the stages of digestion, its window the anus. Allegorical readings flourished among the Church Fathers. According to Origen, he who receives the word of God is ‘building an ark of salvation within his own heart’. Augustine, who associated the wood of the ark with the wood of Christ’s cross, compared the window to the wound in the side of Christ from which flowed the sacraments of the Church. The variety of animals on board indicated that the Church contained all nations. Christian writers also treated the Hebrew Bible as a prefiguration of the Gospels or the Church – what’s known as the typological reading. The Flood prefigured immersion baptism: both washed away sin. The dove represents the Holy Spirit, and the ark the Church itself. Tertullian sums it up: ‘To our flesh, as it emerges from the [baptismal] font, after its old sins, flies the dove of the Holy Spirit, bringing us the peace of God, sent out from the heavens, where is the Church, the typified ark.’

In the 12th century, the theologian Hugh of Saint-Victor grappled with the literal aspects of the story, devoting individual chapters to the size and shape of the ark. Genesis is rather elliptical about the ark’s form: the word used to describe it (tevah in Hebrew) appears only once more in the Hebrew Bible, to describe Moses’s rush basket (translated in the King James Version as the ‘ark of bulrushes’). Origen had imagined a square pyramid floating on a raft, but Hugh understood that such a structure would capsize immediately. He gave the ark a hull, then placed a sloped roof on the top and a door and window at the side. As Almond writes, Hugh’s ark soon became ‘the standard depiction’.

The Christian effort to make Noah’s story intelligible grew more vigorous in the centuries between the late Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. In his Opera Geometrica (1554), the French mathematician Johannes Buteo treated the ark as a geometry problem. Rejecting both the pyramid and house designs, Buteo settled on a prism structure with three decks. While Origen had cheated by interpreting the cubit as the ‘geometrical cubit’ (nine feet), which made the ark 2700 feet long, Buteo’s cubit was eighteen inches and his ark 450 feet long. He counted all the different animals, then reduced ‘all these species of animals … by comparing them to three well-known species: the cow, the sheep and the wolf’. The elephant, for example, was equivalent to four cows. The literary scholar Laurie Shannon has written that Buteo’s methods ‘elide animal properties and peculiarities … to create a biomass of flesh measurable – and divisible’. As a result, he was able to calculate the available space on the ark and found there was even room for a fish tank.

This approach was handy when estimating the food supply. Buteo wasn’t convinced by Augustine’s notion that the inhabitants of the ark kept a vegetarian diet; he saw no scriptural reason why additional animals couldn’t have been brought along as dinner. In his estimation, the herbivores amounted to the equivalent of four hundred cows, each eating one cubic cubit of hay a day, so 146,000 bales would have been required to cover the year. The carnivores, equivalent to forty pairs of wolves, needed ten sheep a day, meaning 3650 additional sheep. Buteo’s approach became the standard interpretation in an era that increasingly sought to reconcile biblical history with the laws of nature. As Allen puts it, science ‘had finally entered the story of Noah’.

Following in Buteo’s footsteps, Athanasius Kircher offered the ‘most elaborate’ 17th-century account of the ark. Kircher had inventive solutions to the holes in the original story: the humans on board refrained from intercourse because they were too sad; animal overpopulation was avoided by feeding excess offspring to the carnivores; contractors built the ark but refused Noah’s message of salvation (this at once explained how the ark was built and absolved Noah of exploitation). Kircher also considered the various fantastical animals that appear on the ark in certain accounts, denying passage to most of them on grounds of non-existence. He thought that the unicorn, for example, was a misidentified rhinoceros. Buteo and Kircher’s estimates for the total number of animals are strikingly low. Buteo reduced the animal kingdom to four hundred cow equivalents and eighty wolf equivalents; Kircher counted 130 kinds of land-based animal, 150 kinds of bird and thirty kinds of snake. Reports of new species may have been arriving from the Americas, Africa and Asia, but the European world was still very small.

Noah’s story had to be reconciled not only with the world’s fauna but also with the diversity of peoples. Noah’s three sons (Shem, Ham and Japheth) had long been associated with Asia, Africa and Europe, but this has no textual grounding. Similarly, the ‘curse of Ham’ – the notion that the descendants of Ham’s son Canaan were punished for Ham’s seeing his father naked – is a creative reading of a puzzling episode. Nevertheless, the idea that the curse explained why some people had dark skin proved popular. (The curse of Ham isn’t mentioned at the Ark Encounter, though Ham’s wife is depicted as Black.)

In the 17th century, marine fossils began to be recognised for what they were – traces of prehistoric life – and to inform discussions of the early history of the world, including the Flood. They weren’t received as proof of the universal deluge, in part because they were too widely dispersed to record a single climatic event. Moreover, the fossilised shells of ammonites bore witness to organisms that no longer lived, an apparent contradiction of the instruction to bring ‘two of every kind’ aboard the ark. (Premodern thought encompassed the notion of degeneration but not extinction.) Some naturalists, such as John Ray, simply admitted they didn’t have all the answers. John Woodward of Gresham College reconciled the Flood with the emergence of fossils by imagining a slurry of water and soil that deposited different objects according to their weight. Over time, he argued, the ground shifted, elevating some strata and burying others.

The new knowledge of nature didn’t necessarily alienate its students from the Bible. Between 1731 and 1735, the Swiss doctor Johann Jakob Scheuchzer produced Physica Sacra, known colloquially as the Kupfer-Bibel or copperplate Bible. Its lavish illustrations included depictions of ammonites, fossils and geological formations, as well as mastodon bones, all of which Scheuchzer thought supported the Genesis account. He also described a fossil, recently found near Lake Constance, which he took to be a remainder of ‘man, witness of the Flood’. (Eighty years later, Georges Cuvier demonstrated that it was in fact an extinct giant salamander.)

By the late 18th century, it was possible to write a history of the earth without mentioning Noah at all. Les Époques de la nature (1778) by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, offered a planetary history from the beginning of time. It discussed early deluges but made no mention of a universal flood, much less an ark. Was Noah becoming obsolete? Not quite: Buffon still sought to reconcile the geological age of the planet with biblical time. In private, he estimated that the earth was between three and ten million years old, but in print he put it at around 75,000 years: still shocking to pious Christians but not, he must have thought, beyond their imaginative capacity. He elegantly reconciled this with biblical chronology by suggesting that the days of creation were not 24-hour periods but eras of variable length.

Not everyone was so delicate. Thomas Jefferson, who cut up the Bible with a razor and kept only the parts he found credible (not many), examined theories of the deluge in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Jefferson saw little evidence for a universal flood. What troubled him was that no adequate explanation had been found for the presence of fossils (which he called ‘petrified shells’) in mountainous areas. After reviewing several hypotheses, he concluded that ‘ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.’

Buteo and Kircher​ would have admired the ingenuity of the Ark Encounter’s solutions, but its underlying worldview is distinctly modern. AiG promotes a school of thought known as ‘Young Earth creationism’, which was popularised by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in The Genesis Flood (1961). Unlike ‘Old Earth creationists’ or ‘intelligent design’ theorists, who diverge from the biblical account of Creation in six days but nevertheless interpret the natural world as evidence of divine creation, Young Earth creationists insist that the Bible be read literally. In their view, to reject biblical chronology or suggest that Noah didn’t actually bring two of every kind on the ark is to doubt the whole Bible, and thereby to undermine the doctrine of Adam’s fall and man’s salvation. Old Earth creationism is for them ‘the worst of both worlds’. As one of the wall texts at the Ark Encounter puts it, ‘if we cannot believe God concerning how He made the universe, then why should we believe Him about the salvation offered through Jesus Christ?’

In a final sequence, narrated across large comic-book panels, we meet a college student called Gabriela, a lapsed Christian who is told in a lecture that the Bible has ‘gone through countless revisions and translations. There’s no way to know what was originally written.’ Moved by the deathbed injunction of her father, and unsettled by a (somewhat) debauched college party and her own close call with death, she is eventually born again. The Ark Encounter has revealed its enemy: the modern university, which imparts not just science but secular ideology. These cultural politics are made even more explicit at another AiG initiative, the Creation Museum, which opened in 2007 in Petersburg, Kentucky. By moving creationism from the church to the museum, AiG has pursued a form of ‘plausibility politics’, as the sociologist Kathleen Oberlin puts it. Its approach is summarised by the slogan ‘one world, two views’: believers don’t need to choose between religion and science; creationism merely offers a different interpretation of the same physical reality. Yet where the Ark Encounter is imaginative, almost playful, the Creation Museum is a cruder venture. A diorama of Adam and Eve committing original sin leads to a room filled with black and white images of the Holocaust, atomic warfare and heroin addicts.

We are used to thinking of the battle line between natural science and creationism as the one drawn at the Scopes Trial of 1925, which concerned the teaching of evolution in Tennessee public schools. But starting in the 1930s, creationists such as Dudley Joseph Whitney began to adopt elements of the theory of natural selection. ‘If we insist upon the fixity of species,’ Whitney wrote, ‘we make the Ark more crowded than a sardine can.’ Asserting that all present-day species had derived from a smaller number on the ark helped ‘simplify the Ark problem greatly’. Some of his peers thought that he had ‘given up half the battle’ to Darwinism; yet his approach is the same one taken by AiG. Young Earth creationists accept many aspects of evolution, while maintaining that speciation only happens within ‘kinds’ and on a dramatically compressed timescale. (They also exclude humans from any evolutionary processes.)

Both the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter argue that modern geoscience – the true enemy of Young Earth creationism – is less certain than it seems and doesn’t account for everything. Geological formations emerged quickly, the theory goes, and most organisms which became fossils were buried swiftly as the flood waters rose. Had the Grand Canyon been formed over millions of years, AiG’s director of research, Andrew Snelling, claims, it would show more evidence of erosion between layers.

Only a thirty-minute drive from the Ark Encounter is Big Bone Lick Park, an important site in the development of palaeontology. On a visit in 1807, the explorer William Clark dug up bones belonging to prehistoric mastodons. Some of the bones were sent to Paris, where they helped Cuvier to formulate the modern theory of extinction. The cast of a mastodon skeleton is mounted in the atrium of the Creation Museum. When I visited, a guard asked: ‘Want me to take your picture with the dinosaur?’

Dinosaurs are everywhere at the Creation Museum. The prize artefact is the skeleton of a thirty-foot allosaurus nicknamed Ebenezer, from the Morrison Formation in Colorado – one of the most complete allosaurus skeletons ever found. We are told that Ebenezer is one of the unlucky dinosaurs that died in the Flood. Perhaps the curators didn’t wish to make children choose between loving dinosaurs and respecting God’s word, but Young Earth creationists also need to fit these creatures into their compressed history of the planet. They argue that dinosaurs survived the Flood, thanks to Noah, then later became extinct. Dragons, the Creation Museum suggests, derive from a cultural memory of human-dinosaur co-existence.

The intellectual effort required to develop multiple pseudosciences would be a quirky postmodern coda to the intellectual endeavours of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, if only it were politically innocent. In his book Climate Change for Kids (2024), Ken Ham denies the reality of anthropogenic climate change, if not climate change as such. A passage from Noah’s story remains the guiding star: ‘While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’ If the deluge was an anthropogenic climate event (in the sense that humans had it coming), God promised it would be the last.

AiG doesn’t have a monopoly on contemporary interpretations of the ark. A Dutch carpenter and creationist called Johan Huibers built his ‘half-size’ ark – 230 feet long – after a dream in which he saw his country ‘disappearing under an enormous mass of water’ (fifty years earlier, in 1953, the North Sea Flood killed almost two thousand people in the Netherlands). In 2010, he sold it to the impresario Aad Peters, who turned it into a travelling gallery of Bible stories. When Peters brought the ark to the UK in 2019, Extinction Rebellion activists boarded the vessel. On one side they hung a giant banner bearing the words: ‘We need a better plan than this.’