Lying in the Name of God

The LA Times has a story about Ken Ham giving a young earth science talk to 2,300 children. It’s probably safe to say that Ham is one of the best known young earth creationist types active in the US right now. One of the things he’s best known for is the Answers in Genesis website. When it comes to distorting science, it’s hard to beat.

But I want to go through the article from the LA times and comment on the many things it presented.

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

Ken jumps off to a great start, challenging our assumptions that the laws of science worked in the past as they do in the future. Well Ken, the next time someone mentions your birth, why don’t you take the same stand? After, I’ll guarantee you that you don’t remember it. How do you know it happened? For that matter, you can’t scientifically prove the world is older than 7 seconds. It could have all be created that way to fool us… But don’t mention that to the little ones. Just stir up some good old fashioned, us against them hate between religion and science.

A former high-school biology teacher, Ham travels the nation training children as young as 5 to challenge science orthodoxy. He doesn’t engage in the political and legal fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle: He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views — aggressively.

[…]

“We’re going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles,” Ham, 54, recently told the 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple here in northern New Jersey. It was a Friday night, the kickoff of a heavily advertised weekend conference sponsored by Ham’s ministry, Answers in Genesis.

The tried and true technique of any snake oil salesmen or two-bit evangelist. Tell the people what they want to hear, and only what they want to hear.

Answers in Genesis is the biggest of these ministries. Ham co-founded the nonprofit in his native Australia in 1979. The U.S. branch, funded mostly by donations, has an annual budget of $15 million and 160 employees who produce books and DVDs, maintain a comprehensive website, and arrange more than 500 speeches a year for Ham and four other full-time evangelists.

With pulpit-thumping passion, Ham insists the Bible be taken literally: God created the universe and all its creatures in six 24-hour days, roughly 6,000 years ago.

Hundreds of pastors will preach a different message Sunday, in honor of Charles Darwin’s 197th birthday. In a national campaign, they will tell congregations that it’s possible to be a Christian and accept evolution.

Ham considers that treason. When pastors dismiss the creation account as a fable, he says, they give their flock license to disregard the Bible’s moral teachings as well. He shows his audiences a graphic that places the theory of evolution at the root of all social ills: abortion, divorce, racism, gay marriage, store clerks who say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

And quite a ministry it is. That’s an impressive budget to push pseudoscience. Also notice how dishonest Ham’s claim is that evolution is the cause of all social ills. Take for example his claim of racism. The small number of people advocating that evolution leads us to believe one race is superior to the other pails in comparison to the number of Christians during the same time period (or slightly before it…), that literally thought God made some people more human than others. I would disagree with anyone that says Christianity is the cause of racism. In the same way, Ham’s claims of the evils of evolution are ridiculous.

He’s building a $25 million Creation Museum near the Cincinnati international airport.

The pride of Cincinnati, I’m sure. It makes me want to cry that this amount of money gets spent on spreading outright falsehoods, rather than promoting a genuine wonder and joy in science. Or for that matter, spend the money helping people that need it! I guess that’s not Mr. Ham’s view of the church.

In six hourlong lectures, Ham and his colleague David Menton, an anatomy professor retired from Washington University in St. Louis, laid out their best arguments for creationism. Ham described the fossil record as “billions of dead things … laid down by water” — proof, he said, of Noah’s flood. Menton marveled at the mechanics of the human eye, far too intricate, he said, to have evolved by random mutation.

Using Noah’s flood as an explanation for the fossil record is about as dishonest as one can possibly get. I’m sure Mr. Ham has excellent ways of avoiding the fact that all across the world, the composition of fossils changes as one goes deeper and deeper into the geologic record. For those who think evolution isn’t falsifiable, sure it is. If the fossil record revealed the arrangement of fossils showed no pattern, if dinosaurs and people existed together, that would pose a problem for evolution. Now Ham and a handful of others will tell you this happened. People love to talk about human and dinosaur footprints occurring together. But not a single scientist believes it. It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s a message that some people gobble up because they want so badly to believe it.

As for the human eye, there’s not a hawk on earth that doesn’t have a better pair than we do. As mammals, we have typical cruddy vision. A little better than most (not all) other mammals, but pitiful compared to birds. Eyes in nature show a wonderful spectrum, from single light sensing cells to complex arrangements of cells with brains to processes the imagery. And these amazing eyes have evolved more than once. Cephalopods have amazing eyesight, yet the eye is clearly built differently than ours. This argument about the eye is nothing more than William Paley’s “you find a watch…” argument.

“We often come across to the world as if we have blind faith: ‘The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it,’ ” Ham said. In his view, creationists need more than faith to win over the world. They need answers to the questions skeptics toss their way.

“We’re giving you answers,” Ham said. “We’re like bulldozers, coming in to reclaim the ground.”

Oh you’re like bulldozers all right. I don’t know if I’d consider that a compliment… And what’s so pernicious about a Christian with faith? You’re criticizing this mantra of ‘The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it,’ yet this is precisely your reason for promoting junk science. You believe it’s got to be “settled” and it could be viewed no other way.

As the session ended, Nicole Ableson, 34, rounded up her four young children. “This shows your kids that there are other people who are out there who believe what you believe, and who have done the research,” she said. “So they don’t think ‘This is just my parents believing in fairy tales.’ ”

About the only research involved here is figuring out what people like Nicole wanted to hear. From her reaction, you can see how much she’s tied her whole Christian identity into a scientific question. (The question of how something happened.) That’s a mistake that’s really painful when someone who chooses to think honesty about these issues.

Emily Maynard, 12, was also delighted with Ham’s presentation. Home-schooled and voraciously curious, she had recently read an encyclopedia for fun — and caught herself almost believing the entry on evolution. “They were explaining about apes standing up, evolving to man, and I could kind of see that’s how it could happen,” she said.

Ham convinced her otherwise. As her mother beamed, Emily repeated Ham’s mantra: “The Bible is the history book of the universe.”

It’s funny. I never read anything about black holes, gravity, the American revolution, or biogeography in the bible. That claim is the most destructive idea I think fundamentalists are pushing. It just rapes the Bible of it’s real meaning and intent.

Ham encourages people to further their research with the dozens of books and DVDs sold by his ministry. They give answers to every question a critic might ask: How did Noah fit dinosaurs on the ark? He took babies. Why didn’t a tyrannosaur eat Eve? All creatures were vegetarians until Adam’s sin brought death into the world. How can we have modern breeds of dog like the poodle if God finished his work 6,000 years ago? He created a dog “kind” — a master blueprint — and let evolution take over from there.

And Ham thinks a Christian who accepts evolution is taking liberties with the Bible? Where in the Bible does he get these ideas? T-Rex — a vegetarian? No wonder they went extinct. Eating a diet of grapes with teeth like that would lead anyone to starvation… But I’m sure he enjoys the cash flow from dreaming up all these fairytale ideas.

About the only thing that separates someone like Ken Ham from the intelligent design folks is that he’s brutally honest about why he’s advocating his views. There’s no doubt about who he thinks the “designer” is.

Still, these tactics, and this approach, amount to lying. I know that’s strong language, but to set ones self up in opposition to every branch of science, and carefully present one-sided and inaccurate claims of the evidence, can be called nothing less.

I long for the day when the church runs snake oil salesmen out of town on the horse they rode in on.