We Believe in Dinosaurs

female announcer: A museum built

to re-create Noah's ark...

- We want 7 billion people to come here.

- We want to be able to bring that same level

that you see at the Smithsonian

but without the evolutionary fairy tale, so to speak.

announcer: Becomes the front line in the fight

between creationism and evolution.

- This park tells people that evolution is not true.

Not only is it not scientifically accurate.

It's immoral.

- I really wish there were more people

helping me fight this.

announcer: Filmmakers Clayton Brown

and Monica Long Ross take a behind-the-scenes look

at the controversy surrounding a biblical theme park.

- Creationists have been pretty vocal.

They're gonna build new museums,

and they're really gonna try hard

to leverage everything they can.

announcer: "We Believe in Dinosaurs"

now, only on "Independent Lens."

- Deep in the heart of Kentucky,

a man is building an ark.

He doesn't think he's the new Noah,

but he does think the Bible story

may in fact be factual,

and he wants to open a theme park to make the case.

- The $100-million ark is expected to draw

about 1.4 million people a year.

- Folks here in Williamstown say the ark

is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

- That would be incredible to go see.

- There's gonna be scientists on-site to talk with folk

about what Noah's ark is all about.

- This is monumental. It's huge.

It's--oh, my goodness!

- Did man and dinosaurs live together?

Folks in awe.

- When finished, his ark will be

seven stories tall

and a football field and a half long.

- Kentucky's tourism department

has awarded $18 million in tax breaks

for a biblical theme park.

- If they want to set up the Noah's ark theme park,

that's all fine; I'm all happy with that.

Let them use their own money.

- People get off the interstate

to come to the Ark Encounter,

they're going to encounter this first.

- Ark Encounter is immoral, impossible, and un-American.

- There's all kinds of stuff in there

that's not in the Bible.

- The Ark Encounter is a project

which ultimately will entail 800 acres,

and it's a 510-feet-long ship set 12 feet off the ground,

and it's gonna be about 65 feet

if you're standing on the top of it.

A great lasting ability to be able to really introduce people

to biblical truth and biblical history, so yeah,

I would ultimately say this is gonna be the greatest thing

I will have ever had a chance to do.

This first phase is something like $57 million.

The whole park itself is somewhere around $160 million.

People will enter it from behind here.

All of the queue lines that we have

are all teaching queue lines,

so basically you're really kind of learning

about the preflood culture as you walk along,

really starting all the way from Adam

and the beginning of creation.

So the ark is just one huge museum,

the way that it functions.

- Check one. Check two. Check, check.

- Check one. Check two. Check, check.

I'm speaking, I think... Oh.

On the relevance-- I'm pretty sure.

I do one of two talks usually,

but I'm pretty sure it's on the relevance of Genesis,

so kind of focusing on how that's relevant

in our culture today

and young people leaving the church.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here with you this afternoon

and to talk with you about creation versus evolution.

Is Genesis relevant?

And what we're gonna talk about is...

We live in a very visual society,

and we want to be able to bring that same level

that you see, for example, at the Smithsonian

but without the evolutionary indoctrination,

the evolutionary fairy tale, so to speak.

We need to educate our children from a very young age

about the truthfulness and authority of God's word

because they are hearing all of this stuff out there

in the world about dinosaurs and millions of years

and evolution and being...

We know from scripture that if you

look at the genealogies, especially those

in Genesis chapter 5 and 11,

it tells the names of people,

how old they were when they died.

So we can actually add those ages up,

and if you go from Adam to Abraham,

you'll see there's about 2,000 years,

and from other genealogies,

we know there's about 2,000 years

between Abraham and Christ,

and then we, of course, know

there's about 2,000 years

between Christ and today.

So that gives us a grand total of 6,000 years.

It's only 6,000 years,

not millions and millions of years being possible.

If we don't take what the Bible says in one part as true,

then it becomes a problem for the rest of scripture,

and that's really what this is about.

And is it all true, or is only part of it true?

Because if only part of it's true,

then how do you know any of it's true?

The scripture doesn't need anything other than itself

because it is the ultimate authority,

and it is true, so therefore whatever it says is true

because it's the, you know, word of God, so--

but because it's true, we would expect science

to be consistent with it and confirm it, and it does.

We've actually gotten to the point in our home

that we do not use the term "Bible story" anymore.

It has been outlawed.

We will say "Bible account," "Bible event,"

"Bible history," but it's not a story.

These are things that really happened.

This is true.

Oh, my gosh!

- One of our themes this year is about rescuing our kids

from the evolutionary ideas, millions of years,

because it is just rampant in material for children,

whether it be cartoons or books or school.

We have a lot of stationary dinosaurs,

as well as several animatronic dinosaurs.

- Because kids really are fascinated by them.

And there's just something about,

you know, going out into the museum

and seeing these dinosaurs and seeing all those things

that you might see at a "regular" museum,

so to speak,

but from a very different perspective.

but from a very different perspective.

Our design team has been working really hard

on putting together an exhibit donated to us.

It's one of the--

I think it's one of the largest

allosauruses ever discovered,

and so that's just great for us to be able

to display something just as fine

as what the Smithsonian Museum would do,

because we believe that these things

are not millions of years old.

They're actually only thousands of years old.

But for some reason, after the flood,

just like with a lot of other organisms,

the animals weren't able to survive,

and so they've become extinct today.

As far as we know, they've become extinct today.

I'm very excited, yeah.

Yeah, it's gonna be awesome.

Oh, sorry, man.

When a guy comes at you with a dinosaur femur,

you get out of the way.

Yeah.

As a creation museum, this is great for us.

We believe in dinosaurs.

People think we don't believe in dinosaurs.

You know, we believe in dinosaurs.

We believe that dinosaurs and man lived at the same time.

The Bible does talk about, you know, creation week

and all the mammals and humans were created on day six,

so that would mean that they were on the same day.

Does it just have one clavicle?

- Yeah. It's a fused furcula. - I didn't know that.

- Furcula. - That is a leg.

Oh, that is weird.

I think that it's just a really cool thing

to have a real dinosaur of this caliber.

This is a fossil created during Noah's flood,

and so we're gonna have signage

that teaches about that idea.

Oh, yeah. Oh, wait a minute.

Oh, that looks nice.

I like that. It's easy to read.

If there was a global flood, you would expect