WHAT ABOUT THE DINOSAURS, MIKE?

 

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Noah’s Ark. Our newest Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is a big fan. The man second in line to the President believes Noah’s Ark was real. Like everything else in the Bible, it was an “actual historical event.”

MAGA Mike, and more than half of Americans, think this Biblical myth – the 40 days and 40 nights of rain that flooded the entire planet, the two-by-two of all the animals, the everyone drowned except Noah and his righteous little clan – all that is true.

I can’t get over how otherwise normal, seemingly intelligent Americans – people like Mike – believe such claptrap. I wish some reporter would ask him some simple questions about Noah’s Ark, like:

·       There are 10,000 species of birds in the world. 45,000 species of spiders. Etcetera. How do you figure that two-by-two thing worked?

·       What about fish? If the entire globe was flooded by the salty oceans, how did bluegills survive? Or Desert Hole Pupfish in Death Valley?

·       If the deluge was deep enough to cover the Himalayan Mountains, how did two snow leopards get from there to Noah’s launching pad in the Middle East? How big a head start did God give them to get there before the big rains started? What about Arctic polar bears? Antarctic penguins? Central American sloths?

·       What did all those animals eat during their year on the Ark, waiting for the water to recede? In all the images I’ve seen, the Ark’s animals are totally mellow. Like Jurassic Park on weed.

·       Moreover, what would they all have eaten after they got dropped off, after the Big Flood, atop Mt. Ararat?

·       What about post-Flood in-breeding – animals and humans? Or did God just pause that part of genetics for a few generations?

I can relate to the intellectual contortions anyone has to go through trying to reconcile religion with science. I must have been about eight years old, sitting on little kid chairs in Sunday School class in the basement of my preacher-dad’s church in rural Indiana. A nice woman was telling us the story of Noah’s Ark.

After her lesson, I raised my hand. “Yes, Wayne?

“What about the dinosaurs?”

She was flummoxed. My little brain went, “H-mmm.”

I wonder how Mike Johnson would answer that question? If he goes along with Biblical literalists, he believes the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old. None of this 13.8 billion-years-ago Big Bang fiction, or 4.5-billion-year-old planet nonsense.

Mike probably goes along with true believers who explain that Noah only took two of every “kind” of animals on the Ark, not two of every “species.” You wonder  how they all got to Noah’s construction site. Maybe God magically directed them, like geese migrating south? As for the how they got across the oceans, I’m told by Ark “experts” that in Noah’s time, all the continents were merged into one. Like a modern-time continent of Rodinia (one billion years ago) or Pangea (300 million years ago).

Dinosaurs, which Biblical scholars explain were created on the same day as Adam (Day 6), were contemporaries of Noah. So, well, duh! Obviously, Noah took only baby dinosaurs. All those 700 species of dino fossils in museums, they’re the remains of all the ones that drowned in the Flood. I wonder why none of the five million wicked humans that God drowned with them are fossilized.

So in just the few thousand years ago since the Big Flood, all the millions of species of critters on Earth have evolved (though I’m not sure “evolved” is the politically-correct verb here) from the 6,658 animals that Noah took on the Ark. Kind of like the way we got chihuahuas from wolves.

At least that’s the explanation you can get for a $60 ticket to Ark Encounter, a tourist trap set in the rolling horse country of Kentucky, just off I-75. When MAGA Mike, who used to be attorney for this pretend Ark, got a tour recently, it almost made him cry (The New Yorker, Dec. 4, 2023).

Two years ago, he said, “The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”

A whole lot of people are just plain dumb. For them, I can kind of understand their blind faith in the literal inerrancy of their Good Book. I suppose it’s easier to lack curiosity about mysteries of the Universe when you’re stupid. You can ignore thoughts that complicate your religious fantasies.

I sympathize. How does any human comprehend a 14-billion-year-old Universe? Given the miniscule timescale of our personal existence, how can anyone grasp 3.7-billion years of evolution of life on Earth. The greatest minds to ever have existed can’t explain human consciousness. Or why there is something rather than nothing. Or the spooky qualities of quantum physics. Or what came “before” the Big Bang. Or if we’re alone in the Universe. Or whether we’re merely an infinitesimal spec in a multiverse. Or why we yawn.

Because no science – not astrophysics, cosmology, biology, geology, anthropology – can yet answer such questions, why not just be happy in your faith that God simply did it all for His own reasons, so quit worrying about it? Why is the mystery of Noah’s Ark and all your “gotcha” questions any different than the mysteries of the G-spot or long Covid?

This saddest thing about literal belief in Biblical myths, such as Noah’s Ark and Creationism, is that it turns the wondrous, mysterious epic of creation into a comic book version of reality. Whether or not God exists and made this all, the actual story of life on Earth, and the cosmology of our Universe, is so much more glorious than the simple-minded tales that require believers to deny science and common sense.

The next year is going to be a challenging one for Speaker Mike Johnson, and for all of us: wars, the economy, global warming, abortion rights, political divisions, and overriding everything – the potential destruction of our democracy by Mike’s hero, the Orange Jesus (as one of Mike’s colleagues branded Trump). Still and all, the question I’d most like to ask him remains: What about the dinosaurs, Mike?

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More:

Wayne’s Blog: WHY I DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD (May 15, 2019)

Wayne’s Blog: WHEN WE ALL GET TO HEAVEN (Nov. 30, 2015)