Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, Bristol
Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm does quite seem to be what it claims. Go to its web site at http://www.noahsarkzoofarm.co.uk and you will not, when you first open it up, find anything about creationism there. It all looks to be offering a nice day out for children and the family.
Until you look again. Click on the Education tab, and you will notice it looks to be passing itself off as the type of place where children will learn and meet some of the requirements of the National Curriculum. Indeed, it brags that it can help children and students right up until the age of 18 and goes into some depth how.
Bizarrely it then immediately goes into pushing hard-line creationism, which isn’t part of the national curriculum. And it pushes creationism in volumes. It’s not even pushing what some might consider to be the more intelligent version of creationism, intelligent design. It’s pushing hard YECer stuff – Noah’s Flood, the world only being thousands of years old.
It throws fundamentalist boilerplate stuff at the reader about how wrong radiometric dating techniques are. It pushes Baramin crapola on animal “kinds”, loss of genetic information over time and irreducible complexity.
And when it has finished with contradicting vast swaths of science needed to pass public examinations, it starts preaching.
A creationist’s dreamworld? Well, perhaps not, because this place is heavily into recolonisation (see http://www.earthhistory.org.uk/), which contradicts what mainstream fundamentalists believe. Answers in Genesis, the largest of the creationist groups, hates it – see http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2006/0307recolonisation.asp – and even attacks Anthony Bush as a compromiser (see following comments). Compromise is a dirty word in the AiG Lexicon.
And even more bizarrely, this place is run by an Anglican!
So, by the time your children have left the place they will have been –
1. Messed around with bogus science that even the creationists don’t agree with.
2. Exposed to the undermining of their religious education by an Anglican who contradicts the position of the Church of England on evolution.
3. Told that their science teachers are completely wrong, and proselytised to by a commercial farmer.
Let’s have a closer look at Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm. It’s a commercial farm about six miles outside Bristol which has been partly converted into a small zoo. It was opened in 1999 and is run by Anthony and Christina Bush. Anthony Bush appears to be no rural hayseed. He studied mathematics at Oxford University and is a professional farmer (he has, apparently, being farming for 40 years or more and is 68).
He also studied at a theological college and trained as a Church of England lay reader. As pointed out, Bush is also seen as a recolonisation extremist by other fundamentalists. Basically, as far as the author can make out, recolonisers like Bush argue that the world is older than 6,000 years (how much older is not clear to the author). In the UK it appears to have two advocates, Anthony Bush and Steven Robinson. Bush seems to have derived his opinions from Robinson. Moreover, Robinson has been involved in the zoo – he apparently designed some of the displays.
Robinson’s creationism appears to be very unpopular with other creationists in the UK. It looks to be largely a product of his own mind. Having read through his web site, it is far from clear to this author exactly what Robinson means, but he seems to be suggesting some kind of indeterminate length for the age of the earth, with Noah’s flood occurring not 4,000 years or so ago but much earlier. However, they consider themselves to be YECers, so it is not that far in the past.
In particular Andy McIntosh has been very outspoken in attacking Bush and Robinson. The AiG article that attacks them is almost surreal (McIntosh was involved in it). The Answers in Genesis paper is aghast that Bush and Robinson have suggested that the world is as much as 18,000 years old. (Other reports suggest that Bush is suggesting 21,000 years old.) AiG is forever throwing around the insult “compromiser” at those creationists it disagrees with. It doesn’t spare the insult in this paper either, but patronisingly suggests that Bush and Robinson are not as bad as other compromisers.
Some references: here is a report on the Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm - http://www.banneroftruth.org/pages/articles/article_detail.php?491. Read it and you will find it glowing. Except, right at the end, the author gives his name, Steven Robinson. The same Steve Robinson that has been involved in it!
The Guardian has reported that the zoo had 100,000 visitors in 2005 (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1676558,00.html).
PRV
