Yearam guided 3 vile scientists to Noah's Ark in 1916 (Talk.Origins)

Claim CH505.1:


 * In 1952, Harold Williams wrote a story told by Haji Yearam, an Armenian Seventh-Day Adventist, in 1916. According to the story, Yearam as a boy helped guide three English scientists to the ark in 1856. Upon finding the ark sticking out of a glacier near the summit, the scientists, "vile men who did not believe in the Bible," flew into a rage and tried futilely to destroy it. Then they took an oath to keep the discovery a secret and murder anyone who revealed it. About 1918, Williams saw a newspaper article giving a scientist's deathbed confession, which corroborated Yearam's story.

Source: LaHaye, Tim and John Morris, 1976. The Ark on Ararat, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Inc. and Creation Life Publishers, pp. 43-48.

CreationWiki response:

Actually 1952 is when he wrote about it not necessarily when he first told it. This may simply have been when Williams first thought to write it down.

That we have an English expedition on Mt. Ararat in the right year is at least partial conformation of the story. While they had no interest in the Ark, they may have been told of it by people in Yearam's village. This may have raised the curiosity of three of them enough that they unofficially took Yearam along to show them where it was. The result being that Yearam only actually led three of them to the Ark.

If they were told about it by villagers, they may have gotten curious, and they may have even hoped to prove that it was not the Ark.


 * 1) They were in a situation where their entire worldview was threatened, so they may not have been acting rationally.
 * 2) If the other guides were Kurdish, they may have been trying to make certain that they did not tell anyone and that Yearam himself never took any else to see it.

This is not really a problem, since people do sometimes live to be over a hundred. As a side note, there have been studies to explore why the people of that area, especially the Armenians, live extremely long lives.

This is a difficulty, but without an exact date and the name of the newspaper, finding such an article would be like finding a needle in a haystack. The problem is compounded by the date being so old, it is possible that the paper went out of business and no copies exist.

Possibly, but then again it could be true. Would Talk.Origins show such skepticism if it were an atheist relating a story as a refutation of a Biblical narration?

The fact that this is a second hand account and the fact that it was written down years later is a problem, particularly since these could result in a true account getting mixed up.