From presenting gladiatorial battles with dinosaurs as “historical fiction,” to its dour loose canon of a president and CEO Ken Ham tweeting such gems as “When atheists use a 7 day [sic.] week, they are actually attesting to the truth of God’s Word in Genesis,” Answers in Genesis is a treasure trove of #EpicChristianFails.
Nature could hardly have delivered a more stinging rebuke to Australian creationist blowhard Ken Ham, Grand Poohbah of #ChristianAltFacts, than to have his cheesy Ark Encounter attraction–which was granted, and then lost, tax subsidies that clearly violate the separation of church and state–suffer from water damage. Even this non-believer is tempted to call it an act of God. And then, because Ken Ham is Ken Ham, he goes and makes a public spectacle of the whole thing by filing a lawsuit against AIG’s insurance provider, without which this delicious story may never even have seen the light of day.
Here’s the gist of what happened, as related by Hemant Mehta over at The Friendly Atheist:
According to the 13-page lawsuit, Ark Encounter, which opened in 2016, suffered the effects of a heavy rain that began in May of 2017 and continued for several months.
That rain created a landslide which damaged a major access road to the Ark, rendering it “unsafe and unfit for use.” It cost about $1,000,000 for Ark Encounter (and its parent company, Crosswater Canyon) to fix the road. Naturally, they wanted their insurers to pay for it.
But the insurers said no. According to them, their contract with Ark Encounter excluded payments for “correcting design deficiencies or faulty workmanship.” Ark Encounter said that clause didn’t apply because “land improvements” (which is how they classified the road fixes) were an exception to that rule.
When the folks at AIG finally decided to comment on this story, the essence of what they said was–and, to borrow a phrase from Dave Barry, I am not making this up–that the damage was not caused by a flood, so everyone should stop mocking them. As Hemant Mehta remarked in a follow-up to his first piece, “See?! No flood. Just a lot of ongoing rain in a really short amount of time. But don’t you dare call it a flood.” No flood, no flood–you’re the flood!
And that should do us for this month’s installment of Epic Christian Fails. I figure this one is good for, say 40 days and 40 nights of schadenfreude-tinged bemusement, but fear not–barring a global flood or other apocalyptic disaster, the series will be back well ahead of that. Please note, too, that this you can help me decide what to feature by tweeting about the epic Christian fails you encounter in the wild–just use the hashtag #EpicChristianFails, which I search regularly. H/t to Twitter user @fundy_ptsd for recommending this month’s selection. (I know a few others of you tweeted it at me as well, but when I went to search Twitter now I couldn’t find those tweets, so I apologize for not crediting you.)
Before you go, if you missed it, check out the first installment of Epic Christian Fails, “The Cross and the Clitoris.” Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.
And now I will leave you with a Ken Ham fun fact. Did you know that Ken Ham is an alum of the Institute for Creation Research, which is now much smaller and less influential, but arguably even tackier, than answers in Genesis? Don’t believe me about the tackiness? Check out this thread on a popular creationist children’s book about dinosaurs by one of ICR’s long-time leaders, the late–and I won’t say great, but I might say hilarious–Duane T. Gish:
Not Your Mission Field 
About the seven-day week: both Babylonians and Egyptians were keen on numerology, and number seven is a special prime number that’s been called a symbol of perfection.
Babylonians used a seven-day week well before biblical texts were written. That the early authors of Bible text were keen on numerology is no news. The twelve Zodiac signs are also clearly a reference to number 12, special in being divisible by 2,3,4, and 6 in addition to one and itself. Thus also Jacob has twelve sons.
Humanity has always thought that primes were special – hence seven – and Babylonian sexagesimal numbering system saw 12 as an especially auspicious number. 60 has the most divisors of any radix.
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