Ken Ham, of Answers in Genesis, the folks who assert that not just planet Earth, but the entire universe is 6,000 years old, wrote a blog posting on 1st April all about the discovery of ancient non-stick frying pans. He wrote …
With the construction quickly progressing at the Ark Encounter site in Northern Kentucky, I frequently get asked how Noah could’ve built the Ark without all our modern equipment. I always point out that our culture often, consciously or unconsciously, has an evolutionary view of mankind. We think of our ancestors as more primitive or less intelligent than us. But nothing could be further from the truth!
… A recent discovery made in Italy sheds more light on the intelligence of our ancestors. If you cook, you probably know the frustration of everything sticking to your frying pan. Well, people 2,000 years ago did too! So they invented non-stick frying pans. Found in a garbage dump near Naples, the high-quality pottery pans featured a “red-slip coating” to keep food from sticking.
Our ancestors, descendants of Adam and Eve and made in God’s image just like us, were every bit as intelligent as we are (probably even more so). They ran into problems and came up with innovative solutions to solve these problems, just like we do. There’s no reason to assume that they couldn’t do amazing things like build an Ark for the saving of mankind.
Ha, good one, Ken Ham pulled a 1st April prank …
… oh wait, the posting is still up now on 4th April and there is no big joke reveal …
… he is not actually kidding at all, and is in fact dead serious about this.
It turns out that such pottery is quite real. There really is Roman pottery from 2,000 years ago that has an internal coating on it, but this is not some amazing new “discovery” of modern science in ancient times, and has been well-known about for rather a long time. To illustrate that, here is a description of it from a book on pottery that was published over 50 years ago.
So in summary Ken’s claim is that Noah’s Ark happening 4,000 years ago is fully credible because 2,000 years ago potters had worked out that having an inner surface made from fine clay made better pots, and this supposedly recent discovery (which has been known about for a very long time) verifies that ancient humans were smarter than we are, then to cap it all he published this claim on 1st April.
You might be tempted to think about doing your face-palm now, but this is Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, and so when it comes to doing a face-palm, well that is perhaps best skipped because if you don’t, then you would be at serious risk of face-palm overdose. These are the same folks who assert that flying fire-breathing dragons are quite real, and so apparently are unicorns.