A former Brisbane science teacher-turned-religious leader who created a life-size Noah's ark in the US says Australia would not have had the population or the business to support such a structure.Queensland-born Ken Ham taught science at Brisbane high schools during the 1980s before he packed up and left for the US in 1987, becoming one of the most prominent religious leaders in the southern Bible Belt. Mr Ham went on to lead Answers in Genesis, an organisation that promotes a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative in the Bible.He then helped build the $27 million Creation Museum in Kentucky in 2007 to promote this creationist view, then set his sights on a life-size Noah's ark - but not in Australia."I recognised when working over here with the Creation Institute in San Diego that you couldn't build such a facility really in Australia," he said."We contemplated that idea when we were in Australia many years ago but it didn't have the population to support it and, really, America was more the centre of the Christian world and business world."It did have the population here and is easy to get to from other parts of the world."The ark, which will open to the public on   July 7, took 100 Amish craftsmen 23 months to build and is considered the biggest timber frame structure in the world."It is beyond Hollywood, this thing is so massive, it makes the Matterhorn at Disneyland look small," Mr Ham said.It is one-and-a-half times the length of a football field, about half the width and is seven storeys tall from the ground to roof.The ark is anchored to three towers that if put together would be the size of a 200-room hotel.There is also an Ark Experience theme park with a zoo, including a kangaroo, zip lines, live entertainment and a themed restaurant.The $100 million ark was privately funded, with 43,000 families donating funds.Mr Ham said the ark would attract people regardless of their spirituality and he believed the Christian message, evident in the exhibits inside the ark detailing Noah's life, was "tastefully presented"."We have built a themed attraction to help make the Bible real that even non-Christians want to come and visit," he said."I don't think Hollywood could do this for $100 million."Mr Ham was raised in Cairns and had spent much of his adult life defending his controversial view that the Earth was roughly 6000 years old and that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man.Mr Ham said his views did not conflict with his time as a science teacher in Brisbane because observational science could not explain the origins of the world."When you are observing in the present and using your five senses you can accumulate knowledge to build great technology, it doesn't matter if you are an atheist or a Christian but if you were going to talk about origins, that is a whole different ball game," he said."I would say other teachers weren't teaching students how to think correctly in many ways when they were teaching them evolution as fact, whereas I would teach my students more about evolution probably than the evolutionists did because the more you understand it, the more you realise the problems with it."I wanted my students to understand the difference between beliefs and what you can actually experiment with."University of Adelaide palaeontology expert Dr Brian McGowran said the creationist theory was a "17th century thought" that did not stand the test of science."People believed that, say, the fossils in the chalk in western Europe could not possibly be as old as all that because if they were, then we would have the writings of the ancient scribes telling us so," he said."In fact they do 'tell us' so, via the media of geology, biology, physics and chemistry, mutually reinforcing and keeping each other honest."Evolution is simultaneously a fact, a theory and a thriving research program.  
If you can't keep those three balls in the air at the same time, you will never understand evolution or contribute anything meaningful to a discussion of of it."Stay informed. Like Brisbane Times on Facebook