As the colossal replica of the biblical Noah’s Ark rises incongruously from the countryside of northern Kentucky, Ken Ham gives the presentation he’s often repeated. The ark stretches one and a half football fields long — “the biggest freestanding timber-frame structure in the world,” Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food-storage urns, life-sized animal models and other exhibits. It’s all designed to argue that the biblical story was literally true — that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship. That Noah and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world. “That’s what we wanted to do through many of the exhibits, to show the feasibility of the ark,” says Ham, the organizer behind the Ark Encounter theme park and related attractions. And with that, he furthers his goal to assert the entire biblical Book of Genesis should be interpreted as written — that humans were created by God’s fiat on the sixth day of creation on an Earth that is only 6,000 years old. All this defies the overwhelming consensus of modern scientists — that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that humans and all other living things evolved over millions of years from earlier species. But Ham wants to succeed where he believes William Jennings Bryan failed. Bryan, a populist politician and fundamentalist champion, helped the prosecution in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, which took place 100 years ago this July in Dayton, Tennessee. Bryan’s side won in court — gaining the conviction of public schoolteacher John Scopes for violating state law against teaching human evolution. But Bryan was widely seen as suffering a humiliating defeat in public opinion, with his sputtering attempts to explain the Bible’s spectacular miracles and enigmas. Ham is founder and chief executive officer of Answers in Genesis, which opened the Ark Encounter in 2016. The Christian theme park includes a zoo, ziplines and other attractions surrounding the ark. Nearly a decade earlier, Answers in Genesis opened a Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg, Kentucky, where exhibits similarly argue for a literal interpretation of the biblical creation narrative. Visitors are greeted with a diorama depicting children and dinosaurs interacting peacefully in the Garden of Eden. Leading science organizations say it’s crucial to teach evolution and old-Earth geology. Evolution is “one of the most securely established of scientific facts,” says the National Academy of Sciences. The Geological Society of America similarly states: “Evolution and the directly related concept of deep time are essential parts of science curricula.” The issue has been repeatedly legislated and litigated since the Scopes trial. Tennessee repealed its anti-evolution law in 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that a similar Arkansas law was an unconstitutional promotion of religion. A 2005 federal court similarly forbade a Pennsylvania school district from presenting “intelligent design,” a different approach to creationism that argues life is too complex to have evolved by chance. The Scopes trial set a template for today’s culture-war battles, with efforts to expand vouchers for attendees of private schools, including Christian ones teaching creationism, and to introduce Bible-infused lessons and Ten Commandments displays in public schools. Such efforts alarm science educators like Bill Nye, the television “Science Guy” whose 2014 debate with Ham was billed as “Scopes II” and has generated millions of video views online. “What you get out of religion, as I understand it, is this wonderful sense of community,” Nye says. “Community is very much part of the human experience. But the Earth is not 4,000 years old. To teach that idea to children with any backing — be it religious or these remarkable ideas that humans are not related to, for example, chimpanzees or bonobos — is breathtaking. It’s silly. And so we fight this fight.” Nye says evidence is overwhelming, ranging from fossils layers to the distribution of species. “There are trees older than Mr. Ham thinks the world is,” he adds.