That crazy ark park!

Karl Giberson is indignant about Ken Ham's Ark Park:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-giberson-phd/ken-hams-crazy-ark-park_b_10893232.html

Giberson is cofounder of BioLogos, the flagship of theistic evolution. 

1. Giberson is a physicist by training. How his area of specialization makes him professionally qualified to comment on Noah's flood? 

2. Certainly the YEC interpretation of Gen 6-9 raises some daunting logistical challenges. But these are exaggerated by the fact that critics of the YEC interpretation, like Giberson, load up the text with claims it doesn't make, then proceed to show how the account conflicts with reality. They are reframing the issue.

3. The issue of vicariance isn't just a problem of creationists. It's a problem for Darwinians. You have some very remote, very isolated islands with fauna and flora. The plants and animals didn't fly there or swim there. So how did they get there? Darwinians must resort to ingenious conjectures. 

Or take the issue of "invasive species". These are generally introduced into the indigenous habitat by humans. They didn't get there on their own steam. 

4. Giberson rattles off some stock objections to the YEC interpretation. Yet the whole point of the ark park is to show how the Biblical account is feasible. Now, Giberson may take issue with the adequacy of their explanations, but it's intellectually dishonest to attack the ark park on scientific grounds when the ark park is fielding those very objections. An honest critic would at least acknowledge the explanations and then assess the explanations. 

5. Giberson also ignores scholars and scientists who advocate a local flood interpretation. For instance, when a modern reader scans the flood account, it's natural for him to filter that description through his mental image of world geography. So he unconsciously recontextualizes the account. But, of course, the original audience didn't have that frame of reference. It didn't mean the same thing to them. It couldn't. We need to make allowance for that difference. 

6. It is, however, somewhat to his credit that he's candid enough to admit that he denies the Biblical account outright. He doesn't pretend that his objection is to the YEC interpretation of the account. Rather, he openly denies the historicity of the account. 

7. I'm always struck by how nominal believers like Gilberson presume to tell both Bible-believing Christians and atheists what Christianity is really stands for.  By his own admission, Giberson is a borderline atheist. So what makes him think he should be the spokesman for a faith he himself barely believes in?

8. Finally, he says:

Noah’s story, as a tale for children, has a certain adventurous charm and I was fascinated by it as a kid in Sunday School. But I am horrified by the story as an adult. Taken literally—the point of Ham’s new park—the story suggests that God drowned all the children on the planet for their parents’ sins. Even if we assume that all adults not sired by Noah were terrible sinners deserving to be drowned, the collateral damage in the deaths of innocent children and animals dwarfs every major genocide in history combined. If Noah’s story is literally true, God is a monster.

i) The account doesn't say or suppose that children were punished for the sins of their parents. Humans are social creatures. Kids are physically and psychologically dependent on parents. For better or worse, the wellbeing of kids is inextricably bound up with the wellbeing of their parents. 

For instance, does Giberson think it would make sense for God to drown all the parents but spare the kids? Then what? Should God create a cosmic orphanage? 

ii) Collective judgment is hardly confined to Noah's flood. Jewish children suffered during the Assyrian deportation and Babylonian Exile, both of which represent divine judgment. Likewise, when Jesus threatens divine judgment on Israel, children will suffer in that ordeal. To be consistent, if you're going to attack the flood account on moralistic grounds, it doesn't stop there. You have to attack what Jesus said. 

iii) Denying the flood doesn't solve the problem Giberson raises. After all, children die outside the pages of Scripture. Children drown in floods and tsunamis. 

God made the mechanisms that generate natural humanitarian disasters. So you can't let God off the hook by denying the Bible. That simply relocates the problem of evil. You still have the problem of evil outside the Bible. 

Just about any minimally theistic position makes God ultimately complicit in moral and natural evil. That's a logical consequence of bargain-basement theism. Process theism may be the only exception. 

iv) Conversely, any theodicy that's adequate to address evil outside the Bible is adequate to address evil inside the Bible. 

v) Finally, as is so often the case with cradle Christian apostates like Giberson, they find Christianity far more objectionable than atheism. They fail to probe the utterly nihilistic consequences of atheism.