More Nonsense From Ken Ham

A new diorama is being created for the Ark Encounter, in Petersburg, Kentucky that is said to depict gladatorial combat between men and dinosaurs.  Raw Story has this:

“Exquisite design by @ArkEncounter artists for new Diorama depicting wicked population in the pre-Flood world to be installed @ArkEncounter,” Ham wrote.

Ham is the director of Answers in Genesis, a fundamentalist Christian sect who believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old and that humans, dinosaurs and apparently giants coexisted rather than being separated by millions of years.

“Scientists estimate that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, or a good 64.8 million years before the first homo sapiens, who evolved roughly 200,000 years ago,” said Mazza.

Here is Ham's original twitter post and here is an image of the diorama:

This is the relevant biblical text for this time period:

6 When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with[a] humans forever, for they are mortal[b]; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

Even assuming that this passage is to be taken literally (and make no mistake, there is no evidence whatsoever for the world-wide flood that follows later in this book), the passage makes no mention of gladiator-style combat, bread and circuses, or large, prehistoric beasts.  Like so many other things in creationist literature, these are all add-ons to the text.  These were added by Mr. Ham to emphasize the “wickedness” of this generation and the presence of “giants.” 

Ken Ham has a peculiar relationship with dinosaurs, once denying that they were ridden off the ark, only to be confronted with a picture out of a book that he, himself, had written showing just that. 

Dinosaurs are a particular problem for young earth creationism because, if, indeed, they were ridden off the ark, then their almost immediate demise has to be accounted for.  What would have caused them to die off...all of them...at once...without leaving any kind of historical record?  There are no tales of dinosaurs eating people and being hunted to extinction in any literature.  Given that this was only 2400 B.C., wouldn't some of them have survived?  Why aren't they mentioned by either the Chinese or Egyptians, who both had thriving civilizations at this time.  Surely some of the smaller ones would still be walking among us. 

No, in fact, there is not a single dinosaur still living.  We have their descendents, in the form of birds and a wealth of evidence for the transition from the maniraptoran line to modern Aves, but no dinosaurs still exist.   Creationists have yet to satisfactorily address this question.