answers in genesis searches for atlantis
Honestly, it wouldn’t be surprising if Ken Ham and his crew of professional anti-science demagogues went on an expedition to find Noah’s Ark in the ruins of Atlantis, but instead, they decided to use the legend started by Plato to determine a date for the destruction of the city using the Bible. By mixing Greek mythology with a very liberal Old Testament genealogy, they came up with a date range of 1818 BC to 600 BC.
In other words, a thorough scriptural analysis by these keen minds yielded a window of probability spanning twelve centuries in order to cover any and all estimates by anthropologists with sheer vagueness. And just to be on the safe side, they also declined to mention whether Atlantis even existed while pondering whether it could’ve been sunk by The Flood and looking at Google Maps to pin down its possible location. In the attempt to prove that you could pick up the Bible to answer history’s mysteries, they really demonstrated that it’s as good as a random guess.
Today, the scientific consensus is that Plato’s story about Atlantis was a morality tale since it’s mentioned in a pair of dialogues about ancient Greek theology as an exploration on the topics of virtue and humility. But it may be possible that he based the story on a real civilization in his backyard, the Minoans. Until an eruption on the island of Santorini triggered the collapse of their civilization with a devastating one-two punch of volcanic ash and a tsunami, they flourished and were among the most advanced civilizations of their time. Or at least that’s how the story goes.
According to Answers in Genesis however, the Minoans don’t fit the bill because they lived in the Mediterranean while in their interpretation, Plato’s account placed Atlantis past the West coast of Africa, deep in the Atlantic ocean. Funny enough, the eruption that dealt the blow to the Minoans also does match the timeline they derive since it happened around 1600 BC but it does so by sheer luck since they’re spanning an immense period of time in their estimate. But yet, the always accurate Bible didn’t point AiG to the civilization that seems to be the closest match to Atlantis and shares an uncannily similar history to that of the fabled city state? Well that’s a little bizarre…
Even stranger is the author’s intent of trying to find land bridges and calculating ocean levels during the end of the last Ice Age, placing all the events about 8,000 to 9,000 years ahead of when geology says they happened, often mentioning the Great Flood of Genesis as a jump off point for the dates. Of course, the problem is that a global flooding would’ve destroyed this planet as we know it and if it happened just a few thousand years ago, our world would still be recovering from its after-effects.
Having sea levels rise by over a thousand feet would require more water than is contained in the entire Earth and even if it somehow happened, the air would grow thicker with water vapor, global temperatures would soar, breathing on the surface would be impossible, and oceanic ecosystems would suffer. Land life as we know it would be extinct overnight. The weight of trillions of tons of water might trigger tremors and affect undersea volcanic activity. With no evidence for a Great Flood or a real city of Atlantis outside of parables, we’re left with the story of the Minoans being used as an allegory in a duo of Socratic dialogues heavy on theology and metaphysics as the only possible explanation for Atlantis.
And even there, the Biblical accuracy touted by the staff of Answers in Genesis and their ringleader, manages to produce an estimate spanning some 1,182 years and hits on the correct date by sheer luck. That’s roughly equivalent to you giving us a prediction that by 3200 AD there might be another world war and getting it right by both the vagueness of your claims and by giving yourself roughly 1,200 years for something to happen. When we consider that the majority of recorded human history contains accounts of one war after another, and with two world wars behind us, chances are pretty good that eventually, a global armed conflict will happen again, making your prediction an exercise in presenting a logical conclusion as prophecy.
update 03.07.2010: the first edition of this post incorrectly stated that the end of the Minoan civilization was not caught by AiG’s sweeping estimate. The error has been corrected and the post was edited to account for how this estimate managed to catch the right date, and put this kind of estimation in proper perspective.
