Ark and the Darkness: Interview with Dr. Daniel Biddle and Timothy Mahoney

Genesis Apologetics

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Well, hello, thinkers. Welcome back to another episode of Patterns of Evidence. And we are excited to have with us

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Daniel Biddle. And Daniel, you and I have known each other for a number of years.

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And you are the founder of Genesis Apologetics. And what has been fantastic is you make great films.

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I love how you've created them. And you've got another one coming up about Noah's Ark and the flood.

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And we're going to be talking about that today. So why don't you just share a little bit about, I'm going to use the word tongue -in -cheek, the genesis of this project.

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Sure. Yeah, you know, I think the most effective things that we do in life are things that we feel led to do by the

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Lord. I believe that God is involved in the business of multiplication. And a lot of my own personal ambitions are involved in the math of addition and subtraction.

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So I like to wait until you do get a directive, if you will, from the Lord to do certain things, because the

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Bible's clear that it's God who lives in us to will and to act according to His good purpose. And so I would like to say that I felt very led and very commissioned by the

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Lord to do this work. It was a burden that's been on my heart for about 10 years. But the movie itself, the idea for it was spawned about 2 and 1⁄2, 3 years ago.

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And in fact, I'd like to say it was my bright idea. And I wanted to do it because I wanted to get a lot of views and everything.

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But it actually came out of a time of deep challenge for my life.

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My brother had just passed away. My mom's cancer came back. I was recovering from a bad case of COVID.

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And my kids had just moved away, and I became an empty nester. So it was a rough couple of months for mine.

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And it was during that time when I was really down and out that I feel strongly that I got commissioning and an idea from the

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Lord and a culmination of things that had happened in my life to do the Flood film. And so I reached out to my friend

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Ralph Strand with Sevenfold Films, because he and I had done a lot of animation work together on Noah's Flood.

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And it was initially started just as an idea to, hey, let's do five minutes of the best CGI that's ever done, showing the mechanics of Noah's Flood.

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Then it grew into a 15 -minute piece. Hey, let's come up with a budget for maybe $60 ,000 to do 15 minutes worth of CGI.

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And then pretty much, it was just like, well, aw, shucks. Let's just do a whole movie. So it kind of started from a five -minute kernel to a 15 -minute thing.

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Then it just blew up to a whole movie. So we contacted Answers in Genesis and obtained permission to use their

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ARC Encounter out there and did the filming, and then spent about two years in post -production.

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And Ralph Strand, just with Sevenfold Films, we owned this asset, 50 -50. He just really dove in for two full years and gave it everything he could.

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And I worked on the executive side and the marketing, the promotion, the distribution. I also worked to oversee a lot of the technical aspects of the film, not from the production

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AV side, but more on the flood and geology and evidence side.

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But Ralph and I very much did it through a partnership, which was quite necessary because there was a lot of heavy lifting on both of our sides.

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So that's how the movie came about. And then we got picked up with Fathom, and it quickly grew from 800 theaters to 900 theaters to,

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I think, we're probably just around 1 ,000 now. I think it was 900 -something, 980 last time we talked.

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So it's grown really well, and ticket sales are going strong so far. Well, this is a fantastic film,

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The ARC in the Darkness, Unearthing the Mysteries of Noah's Flood. Now, I've seen it. I saw an early version of it.

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And I know that you've added lots of extra things into it since then. And there's lots of questions that are in this film that get answered.

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And it's profound how you've been able to do that. And I think, I know, like, for example, was

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Noah's ark seaworthy? That was one of the questions. I mean, if you built this kind of like a long, rectangular, narrow box, would it float?

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And what did you learn about that? You know, that was actually a very interesting challenge we had in the movie, because we had

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Dr. Mark Horstemeier from Liberty University, who's a specialist in every form of engineering and hydraulics you can imagine.

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He's really, really qualified. And he ended up just using some lay anecdotal analogies and some findings that he found when he put some sensors on a scaled ark, actually in a swimming pool.

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And that was good, because he was able to talk with the audience through the ratio and the dimensions and the build of the ark and talk about how it was seaworthy from a very practical, hands -on perspective.

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But in the early 1990s, there was actually some much more technical work that was done using some hydrophysics and some other things with water and scaling tsunamis and how stable it really was.

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That was done, actually, in the Korean Naval Research Center. And that work really technically showed how seaworthy the ark would be.

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But what Dr. Horstemeier was able to do is take a lot of those findings and some of his more anecdotal analyses and show how, from a very practical standpoint, the 7 to 1 length to width ratio and the height and the width,

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God knew what he was doing when he gave those specifications to NOAA. And it certainly would have withstood a turbulent sea.

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And it didn't have to go anywhere. It just had to stay stable while it was floating around, only for about 150 days of the 371 -day flood narrative.

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So before it was locked into land, and then Earth began drying out, and the water receded.

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So very fascinating. But yes, it was a very stable build. And it's,

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I mean, you could just take the dimensions itself and give it to ship engineers and would say, yeah, whoever designed this knew what he was doing.

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In fact, a lot of the cargo ships that come over from international seas and go back and forth take that same length to width ratio.

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So from every level, you'd want to look at it. God knew what he was doing with respect to the design of the arm.

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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the film is beautiful. Also, I mean, what you're going to do is you've got this sort of,

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I'm just going to use the word Jurassic Park approach to it, because you're showing dinosaurs.

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You're showing what the world pre -flood would look like. And well, just for those who are going to be watching this on video, let's just play a trailer so that you could see it.

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Ever since 2020, the world has irrevocably changed.

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With every month passing, seeming to get stranger and stranger.

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It's scary to think what the future holds as we march forward together, facing a certain inevitability, a prophetic time that can only be described as biblical.

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There was an ancient world. The fall of man. That's why God sent the flood.

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It was a judgment that happened. It changed the world profoundly. There is yet a future judgment coming.

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It'll be just as it was in the days of Noah, in the last days, the end times.

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They will be surprised when Jesus comes. The Ark and the

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Darkness, in theaters March 20th and 21st only. That was fascinating.

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You know, a lot of people have wondered, was the flood a worldwide flood? And you're going to be getting into that evidence, aren't you?

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We do. There's really two different categories of evidence to look at that.

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The first would be a theological lens, and then the second would be a geological lens.

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And I think, personally, I'm very convinced that it was a worldwide flood through both of those filters.

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I think, scripturally, what I found was important was just the nature of the judgment itself. When God says,

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I will destroy them with the earth, so God used the tool of the earth and the mechanism of the flood to pulverize humanity, because the judgment was very much a worldwide judgment against all of humanity, not just some humans in a local region.

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And I think, textually, there are 60 other indicators that where God uses the term all, everything is going to die, all the mountains under the high hills, every creature with breath in its lungs.

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So there's a very clear repetition in scripture. But I think, for me, the other thing that did it was just the nature of the geology.

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I think when I look at America itself and look at the Morrison Formation, which is the 13 states of interconnected flood burial zone, it's about 600 ,000 square miles, where these dinosaurs are buried with mud and sand and ash.

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And those three products would very much require a worldwide upheaval with subduction of volcanism and tsunamis and the whole bit.

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And these creatures are buried under 50 or 100 feet of mud. And then I just had to ask myself this question about, well, how much higher did the water have to be to put 100 feet of mud on top of millions of dinosaurs?

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And for me, a worldwide flood was the answer. A lot of people don't understand either where the oil comes from.

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It is from organic material. So we've got, just in the United States, we have huge oil wells.

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And in other parts of the world, it's the remains of the dinosaurs from this upheaval.

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Yeah, you know, I've studied that quite a bit because I was curious on that strand of evidence.

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And what I found, it gets even scarier and more real the deeper you go into the oil subject.

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In fact, what I learned is that there are studies out there that have shown when you fit the continents back together, when you look at the

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Mid -Atlantic Ridge, which was the fountains of the Great Deep that broke open, and you take those continents that are now separated by 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 miles and piece them back together, the oil that's on each side of the matching edges of the continents is actually chemically correlated.

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So when you put the continents back together, there's 12 different types of signatures of this oil, deposits on this side and on this side.

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And when you piece them back together, these 12 different samples are perfectly correlated, showing it used to be one habitat when those continents were put together.

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But then they were catastrophically separated. And now they're buried with the mud that was responsible for killing the fossils and the animals that are also correlated when you put these two continents back together.

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So for me, that really is clear evidence that the mechanisms of catastrophic plate tectonics was what was responsible for pushing these continents apart and burying the oil and the creatures that were on either side of the continents that are now separated but were once together.

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Yes, yeah. I think that this is probably one of the better, if not best, examples where you go through and you really show when people see this movie, they're going to be seeing evidences for dinosaurs and evidences that support the flood, the age of the

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Earth, which I thought was genius. When you talk about the Pangaea we were just talking about, which is the continents being all together, and you're giving evidence for a worldwide flood.

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And there's so many different evidences that are going to be coming up here. But there's even, when you think about, well, from this flood, there was only eight people on the ark.

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And what about languages and what happened at the Tower of Babel? And I found that fascinating because we realized that there were,

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I think the Bible says, 70 nations. Is that correct, that came out of that? Just over 70, yeah, yeah.

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And the fascinating part about that script, that passage, in Genesis 10 and 11, is that it says that God gave them the languages.

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It's not like they broke apart and took decades to develop their own tongues, their own way of speaking.

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It was God who installed language, like loading a software program on different tribal groups that spread from that Babel dispersion.

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And it's very interesting because some people would take the argument that language can really help engineer culture and the personalities, if you will, of different people groups because of how language can frame and wire our minds.

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Isn't that very interesting? So it was God himself who downloaded those languages and then dispersed the people from the

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Tower of Babel. And it all lines up with just thousands of years worth of dispersion. Even genetically, when you look at the genetics of it and everything, it also clearly lines up with a recent dispersal of people group from that Middle Eastern area.

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Yeah, but there's a message here. Because doesn't the Bible tell us that as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be when

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Christ returns? Yes, it does. And that, for me, is fascinating. And there's a lot of conjecture and a lot of different ideas that will spin off from that.

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I just look at it very holistically and look at Matthew 24, where Jesus says in that passage that just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be when

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I come back, when I return. And there's other passages that talk about the spirit or just metaphorically that the idea of lawlessness is going to increase in the end days.

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And when I was a kid, if you were in high school and possessed marijuana, gosh, you'd go to jail.

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Or when I was 16 years old, if I walked into a grocery store and lifted something,

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I would be tackled by a loss prevention officer and handcuffed and brought to juvenile hall.

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But nowadays in California, you can drive down the interstate and order marijuana to your house, 1 -800 -WEED or whatever and have it shipped straight to your door.

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And I can walk in a grocery store and steal things, and they have a no -chase policy now. So there are cities in America right now where you can see the spirit of lawlessness increasing.

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And I'm not a conspiracy guy. I'm not a sensational guy. But I've seen change and a lot of lawlessness increase in my own lifetime.

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And it doesn't take very long where you look around at those other signs that are also in Matthew 24 that could indicate we're living in some very interesting days right now.

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And I think it's just a good time, regardless of your end times viewpoints, to be ready for the coming of Christ and to just know there is another judgment coming.

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And are we ready? There's nothing we can do in and of ourselves to be ready for that other than receive the gift of salvation through Christ alone.

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That's right. And I think that, once again, a movie theater is a great place that you can bring family.

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You can bring friends. It's a neutral place. You might have prodigals out there. There are millions of people that are prodigals.

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They grew up in a home that they know what the gospel is. They've decided that the world is more attractive.

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But this could be a great opportunity for you to take them to a neutral location, take your family or that guy at work, and say, hey, there's this amazing film.

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It's kind of like Jurassic Park meets the Bible. And you're going to see some amazing evidence here. And I've done this, by the way.

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I've taken people that I know in my own life and bring them to a movie. And it gives them a lot to think about.

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And this is a great opportunity to, I would suggest you even buy a handful of tickets or invite your

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Sunday school class, your Bible study group. But this is a film that's really meant to reach people also, teenagers.

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I think teenagers need to see this, because you do an awful lot of work where you're showing that the narratives that are being told in high school, college, are false narratives.

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And there's really evidences that are showing evidence for creation as opposed to evolution.

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And now here you have this great film that shows evidence for the flood and the consequences of that.

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That's why it's so important for young people to see this. I'm taking all my grandkids, the ones that are old enough, and we're going to be going to this movie.

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I want them to know the Bible is true. If you've got a prodigal, hey, pray about that.

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See if they'll go to see this movie. This film is going to be in over 1 ,000 theaters across the nation. What is the date for the film?

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March 20th and 21st. And people can see tickets and showtimes at noisflood .com.

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So yeah, it's a two -day event. And then it's going to be out on cable afterwards, but not until after the 30 -day blackout period.

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So it's only in theaters for two days. So we're trying to drive everyone to the theaters, because it's a much better movie to experience in the theaters with the great surround sound and a big screen and everything.

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Some of the visuals in this movie are just reasons alone to go see the film.

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The pre -flood landscape and everything, seeing that time lapse of Noah's Ark being built, it's just phenomenal.

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It's definitely a theater -worthy movie. But you know, Tim, the other part, what you talk about, it's just incredible that the

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Bible actually prophesied in 2 Peter 3 that in the last days, people are going to deny creation and the flood.

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And that's exactly what we're seeing today. We're going to come back for another episode. We're going to talk a little bit more about this film.

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Get your tickets. And it's at noahsflood .com. Get your tickets.