I don’t know, Zheng He’s treasure ships were about 400’ long (estimates vary), and they were seaworthy enough to make several ocean-going trips.
Of course, they were built by the expert ship-builders of a large empire a few thousand years old, not by an ignorant but inspired goat-herder and his family.
Edit: And then there was Ptolemy IV’s Tessarakonteres, a catamaran also about 400’ long.
Though, even with 4000 oarsmen, there were doubts about its seaworthiness.
My understanding is that Muslims also accept the Old Testament as the word of god, though they do believe that it’s been corrupted through translation over time. They also believe that Jesus was a legit prophet. So in theory you could be a Muslim and say you believe in Jesus without being a liar. That would likely make heads explode at Jesusland though.
IANAM but as I understand it muslims consider Jesus to be one of the most important prophets (not divine in the manner of christians, though) even to the extent that Jesus will be reading the names of the righteous from a book during the end of the world.
I think there are also stories about him within islamdom that christians don’t consider canon. Interesting stuff for people who like to study religion.
Like I said its complicated. They got a whole shit ton of incentives they shouldn’t have been eligible for, cheap land, and some incredibly expensive commitments for infrastructure among other things. But it isn’t as if the Kentucky cut them a check, and a lot of what they’ve been offered is contingent on hitting certain bench marks, and fulfilling the end goal of providing a long term money making and employment creating tourist attraction. They haven’t hit nearly any of the deadlines regarding construction, their end of infrastructure etc. The on going failure at the Creation Museum (who provided the baseline for what visitor levels to expect), and the baldly religious nature of the whole thing has put a lot of what’s been promised at risk. From what I understand they’ve already started loosing infrastructure commitments, making them responsible for building more roads, water lines, and power shit than they ever planned for (IIRC they never bothered to install their side of things, so the state is no longer required to provide anything additional). And Kentucky is starting to fight them on a lot of the tax crap. All of this shit was supposed to make the Ark Encounter look like a sound, sure investment so that private investors and donors would pony up the bulk of Ark/AIG’s side of things (they didn’t seem to have the money to start). But the investors never materialized, and as the state side of it starts to collapse they’re less likely to see that materialize. Hence the junk bonds and stunt debates.
Apart from that Ark Encounter is AIG. Same handful of people (mostly Ken Ham) with the same goals, connections etc. Spinning Ark off into a separate for profit entity is basically a legal fiction to make them eligible for all those state goodies, and make it easier to move money around. It basically a shell corp sort of only on paper thing. They can deny it all they want in court, but publicly they’ve really made little to no attempt to separate the two, or the Creation Museum. Outside of trying to brush aside Church/State based criticism. And that’s no small part of their current clash with Kentucky, though it seems unlikely Kentucky will continue the dispute. Basically they publicly present themselves as AIG, a fundamentally religious organization. But on paper they are Ark Encounter a for profit business. So the state says the business Ark Encounter can not discriminate on religious grounds, or operate as a religious venue using those state funding incentives its eligible for. So the Ark Encounter says no we’re AIG, a fundamentally religious organization entitled to all these exemptions churches get! So the state says well if thats the case you’re not elligible for any of this shit to begin with. So Ark Encounter says no! We’re a for profit business that’s totally not a fundementally religious organization! So the state says… AND SO FORTH. The whole thing has been on pretty shakey ground since minute one, and the last few years its seemed perpetually on the edge of collapse. AIG/Ark are basically trying to have it both ways, they’re trying to con their way into a money maker. Ken Ham and whichever organization he’s currently claiming is involved is basically poking around looking for a court to validate whichever argument he needs to keep it moving for the moment (and he seems to have found it).
Frankly I don’t see it going too much further than it already has. Maybe they open. See a burst of visitors from the same small demographic that made The Creation Museum look viable for a few years. But once those people have been a few times noone else shows up and they end up closing their doors. Maybe enough people show for long enough that Ham can run off with the money. More likely it never goes anywhere, or gets hit hard in the courts at some point. I’m willing to be they’ll end up with a sizable debt to the fine state of Kentucky. The whole edifice is from what anyone can tell, pretty near to broke. They’re desperate to get open in some fashion to get some money flowing.
And this is not unrelated to the other ways in which the USA is messed up.
Evidence-based reasoning is important.
so nobody shows up to save them?
Surely the elephants helped 
The thing is, the contract requires you to confirm that you have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior. That’s how they keep out the riffraff Jews and Muslims.
Co-pilot isn’t enough?
The Parting of the Red Sea and the Tenth Plague happened much later. God hadn’t leveled up enough yet to do those things in Noah’s time. He needed the XP He got from grinding all life on earth to unlock those achievements.
Oh Sweet Baby Jesus this is becoming more and more hilarious (so long as the state never does end up committing to any infrastructure or tax breaks that leave them significantly holding the bag, financially speaking). What a lovely clusterfck. Someone was talking about the TIF as an upfront loan that the state/county had already agreed to give them, but it sounds like that isn’t the case, luckily.
It depends totally on how the questions are asked, and about what. As mentioned, in the US at least, questions about human beings tend to elicit more creation-y answers. Actual young Earth creationists probably are substantially less than that in the US, as questions asking if things have been around for millions or billions of years see a lot more people agreeing with them (up to 80-something percent). But it’s hard to nail down because almost identical questions that vary only slightly in phrasing within the same questionnaire will see a significant percentage of respondents contradict themselves by answering each one differently. So about the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that nearly half of all Americans are definitely idiots.
Is[quote=“Skeptic, post:65, topic:77045”]
Nearly half of all Americans believe in in Young Earth Creationism, that humans were created in their current form by God (around 42-47% depending on the year of the survey). Less than 20% of Americans believe in non-theistically guided natural evolution (9-19%).
[/quote]
Not surprising. There are people who think that vaccinations cause more harm than good, and think that Hawaii and New Mexico are foreign countries.
77% of Americans believe in angels… (2011 poll, “Do you believe in angels, or not?”)
Notice that 50% of the people in that poll were retired, compared to about 11% who were students. And 37% of the polling was done in the south compared to just 18% in the north-east.
Polls are often done not for research, but to back an agenda. If you want politicians to back your Christian-based “protect the sanctity of traditional bigotry” agenda, you need to convince them that most Americans back your agenda too.
Working for a computer store a couple decades ago I did a lot of service calls to a polling firm. Customers - political parties, corporations and unions - would tell them the result they wanted, and the polling firm would run an impeccably valid poll to produce those results.
Results could be tailored based on where they called. Rural farm areas vs rural non-farming areas vs inner city vs middle class suburban vs wealthy suburban areas would produce predictably different results. And of course how the questions were phrased made a huge difference.
And I guess that dependency is vastly different between countries, which is what I suspect has happened in those poll numbers that I am doubting.
As theists often believe in theistically guided lost objects, theistically guided human life spans, theistically guided lottery numbers, and, perhaps most importantly, theistically guided belief in God, I really can’t fault them for applying the same world view to evolution. So I’m really fine with lumping that together with “godless” evolution.
Still don’t get where all those creationists are hiding in Austria, where the idea that God literally created humans in something remotely like their present shape will get you laughed at by bishops and nuns.
I’d have guessed the number of creationists to be roughly equal to the number of recently immigrated muslim creationists + the number of people who believe that the earth is flat.
True. But pretty much every poll shows a disheartening amount of supernatural belief - be it in angels, a literal Satan, etc. Gallup polls have shown similar levels of belief in angels, so I don’t think you can write off the high numbers of belief in angles so easily.
I’m really not, because the two are fundamentally different. One is a natural, unguided process, the other has humans as a predestented goal, thus natural selection is not the agent of evolution, but rather artificial, divine selection at the very least. Not the same thing at all. One is science, the other is not.
Polls also show belief in evolution making significant gains over the last 15 years, while religious beliefs have been dropping.
One statistic I find interesting is “Absolute certainty that there is a God.” (Down from 66% to 54%, from 2003 to 2013.) There’s a rapidly growing number of people who consider themselves religious, but without faith in that religion. It’s more of a self-identity issue - this is what my people believe; what I was taught to believe. As the article quotes:
Because many persons have come to believe that creationist notions are consistent with other social, political, and religious views they hold, they will respond with creationist opinions when asked by a pollster.
the only way i can rationalize this level of crazy is to think that there is a difference between “belief” and BELIEF…in other words 77% of people aren’t really critical logical thinkers and when asked if they believe in a poll, well sure they believe enough to answer yes at no cost to themselves, but if you asked them if they would jump off a cliff assuring them that angels will catch them before they hit the ground…well no they don’t actually believe THAT much. Heck even if you told them you just spoke to an angel i bet 50% of them would give you the stink eye because, no they don’t actually believe for reals, they just like the idea of believing.
Yeah, the poll didn’t get specific on what belief in angels specifically entails, so I’m sure you are right to a degree. But, I think many rational people underestimate how deeply and sincerely many people are in beliefs rational people may not relate to.
Philosopher Maarten Boudry:
Their published paper is more about religion rather than angels in specific, but it serves as a warning that one must not underestimate people’s ability to truly believe in things that may seem patently silly to you or me, including angels.
