by Paul Braterman

Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus in Chemistry, University of North Texas, and Honorary Research Fellow (formerly Reader) at the University of Glasgow. His research has involved topics related to the early Earth and the origins of life, and received support from NSF, NASA, Sandia National Labs, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is now interested in sharing scientific ideas with the widest possible audience, and was involved in successful campaigns to persuade both the English and the Scottish Governments to keep creationism out of the science classroom. He blogs at  Primate’s Progress, paulbraterman.wordpress.com.

Editor’s Note: This review originally appeared at 3 Quarks Daily, where Braterman is a regular contributor. You can find the full review here. And we are grateful to the editors for their permission to republish.

You need to take Ken Ham seriously. This entrepreneurial Brisbane high school teacher has put together the world’s largest Young Earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG). This has a worldwide presence, publishes its own magazine, Answers, and emails a constant stream of highly repetitive messages to its followers. It has built the Creation Museum in Kentucky, as well as the Ark Encounter, featuring a (very unbiblical) so-called replica of Noah’s Ark, and now plans a replica of the Tower of Babel. Its annual income (June 2022 filing) was over $60 million, its YouTube channel has 667,000 subscribers, and its website claims over a million visits each month.

So what? Bible Belt lunatic fringe? Unfortunately no. AiG has allies who are close to the center portion of power, and who will be even closer to the center of power should Donald Trump once again become President.

Ken Ham has among his friends Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, whose law firm represented AiG pro bono in a successful attempt to ensure Kentucky State funding for its activities, despite its fundamentally religious nature, which goes so far as to require all employees accept its six-day creationist Statement of Faith. And among the contributors to its magazine is Calvin Beisner, director of the Cornwall Alliance, whose entire purpose is to deny the importance of human-caused climate change. Cornwall in turn has direct links to the Heartland Institute and to the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025.

If you have not studied modern creationism, you may well think that it is a curious aberration, like flat-earthism, regrettable in its denial of whole areas of science, but otherwise (!) harmless. Not so.

The modern creationist movement in the US is not only about the beginning of the world, but about its ending. Genesis is pivotal, but so is Revelation. So are the many hints of the end of the world that are explicit in the New Testament, and can be discovered with sufficient ingenuity in the Old.

Such thinking underlines the apocalyptic tone that underlies current US right-wing politics. If the Earth does not have a deep past, we cannot expect it to have a prolonged future. We should not be concerning ourselves with conservation, but with righteousness.

The individual responsible more than any other for the resurgence of Young Earth creationism in the second half of the 20^th century is Henry Morris, co-author with John Whitcomb of The Genesis Flood, the movement’s foundational document. But a decade before this, Morris had written a much shorter book, The Bible and Modern Science, whose final chapter is devoted to claims that biblical prophecies are being fulfilled in our own times, and are signs of Christ’s imminent return. Prominent among these is the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. Similar thinking explains why US fundamentalist evangelicals are now among Israel’s most unquestioning supporters.

You will find a succinct summary of Young Earth thinking, and clues to how Young Earth creationism has developed politically, in The Lie, the book whose 1987 and 2024 editions I am reviewing here. (I suspect that few readers here will need persuading that the Young Earth position is misguided, and that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, but for reference let me mention the Index of Creationist Claims, and 29+ Evidences for Evolution.)

My method was to write a review of the older version (1^st ed), and then go through the later (3^rd  ed), modifying what I had written to show the development of the movement of which AiG is a part. (Unless otherwise stated, everything in 1^st ed is also in 3^rd ed, though I have ignored minor changes in wording and layout.) I was shocked by what I found. The connection between creationism and right-wing American politics goes back over a century, as discussed in Carl Weinberg’s Red Dynamite, and is present in 1^st ed, but has become much more prominent in 3^rd ed, which raises issues completely unrelated to its ostensive theme while promoting the agenda of present-day American Christian Nationalism.

Otherwise, there is not much difference between the two editions, though 3^rd ed is more repetitious and, where direct comparison is possible, less vigorous use of language, and more hectoring, than the original.

According to Ham himself,  it was The Lie that positioned Answers in Genesis as a biblical authority ministry. That is a strange reading of history, since when it was published in 1987, Ham was an employee of Morris’ Institute for Creation Research. Ken Ham had come to the US in 1984, after establishing himself as an effective creationist spokesman in Australia. He then worked for seven years with Morris’ Institute for Creation Research, achieving great success as a writer and speaker, before breaking away to form his own organization, which developed into Answers in Genesis, while his Australian partnerships gave rise to what is now a completely separate organization, Creation Ministries International (here I pass over much unseemly and litigious infighting). Ken Ham has a great talent for self-promotion, and very recently, Answers in Genesis has announced the opening of an Australia-based branch, thus continuing its long-standing policy of out-competing its own colleagues

Ham’s approach is unsubtle, uncompromising, and unburdened with excess erudition. It is also completely devoid of originality, since all the ideas he expresses are already there in the writings of Henry Morris and his precursors. The book describes itself as concerned with “the foundational nature of the book of Genesis to all Christian doctrine.” By “the book of Genesis,” Ham means a plain literal meaning, with a 6-day 24-hour creation, ignoring two millennia of exegesis and two centuries of literary and archaeological scholarship, and reducing the beautiful, complex, many-layered text to a cardboard cutout.

The title of the first chapter tells us that “Christianity is Under Attack,” or, in 3^rd ed, “Under Massive Attack”. Modern society has moved away from Christ, but the book promises to outline “a Biblical (and therefore successful)” approach. Note the assumption that calling something “Biblical” guarantees that it is in every way correct.

The 3^rd ed takes the opportunity to claim victimhood for Christianity, and to attack an unspecified secular wokeness, signaling the book’s political tendency. It then shows a figure cataloguing our modern ills; Abortion, Pornography, Paedophilia, Transhumanism, racism, LGBTQ, CRT (Critical Race Theory, which accuses our social institutions of structural racism), Inclusion, Identity Politics, Social Justice, Transgenderism, Mandates, Intersectionality (which advocates common cause between the victims of different kinds of social injustice), No Religious Freedom, and Woke, all combined together in the Secular Worldview.

This is an extraordinary list. Something very strange is happening when those who call themselves followers of Christ object to the idea of social justice. Of the 16 items on this list, seven (CRT, Inclusion, Identity Politics, Social Justice, Mandates, Intersectionality, and Woke) express political views, with some of which one might have expected a follower of Jesus to sympathise, and none bear any relationship to the book’s ostensive agenda.

It gets worse. The 3^rd ed at this point questions the concept of separation of church and state, asserts that the public education system is not neutral, since it teaches naturalistic explanations, quotes Matthew 12:30 that one is either for Christ or against him, and says that:

To help parents understand the reality of the situation, I suggest we say “anti-God schools” instead of public (secular) schools to remind us of what these institutions really are.

Since the public school system teaches naturalistic explanation, it is indoctrinating into a religion of atheism, thus undermining Christianity and Christian morality. Here we have the reason for creationist advocacy of voucher schemes, designed to use public funds for children to be educated at creationist schools, and for homeschooling.

We soon meet an asymmetry of argument that is foundational to Ham’s approach. He denies that he needs to tolerate different religious beliefs, since

[T]his ‘tolerance’ really means an intolerance of the absolutes of Christianity

[Emphasis in original, here and throughout] and

It is not a matter of whether you are dogmatic or not, but which dogma is the best dogma with which to be dogmatized!

For Ham, tolerance means acceptance of his right to impose intolerance and when people argue for tolerance, they are themselves showing intolerance towards the absolute truth of Biblical Christianity. There are only two possible world views – man’s word and God’s word – and there is no such thing as neutrality between them.

We soon meet Ham’s obsession with sexual behavior, especially homosexuality. Here the book is disarmingly open. We know that homosexuality is wrong because marriage is defined in Genesis as union between one man and one woman for life, and because homosexuality is condemned in numerous Bible verses. But without the Bible, we would not have convincing reason for calling it wrong, although it clearly is. Thus, in a typical creationist circular argument, homosexuality is wrong because the Bible says so, and the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality confirms that biblical morality is correct.

Ham pre-empts the scientific case for evolution by arguing that since it concerns past history, it is not science at all. For science involves repeatable observations, and we cannot repeat the past.

This argument is central to the creationist claim that the evolutionist and creationist perspectives are philosophically at the same level, since they both depend on using faith to go beyond the evidence. It is what Ham used, when teaching, to undermine students’ confidence in the scientific curriculum. It is also very attractive argument, since those who accept it believe that they have been granted a superior insight, and he commends its use in schools.

Logically at least, it is easily refuted. In geology and paleontology, we have multiple examples on which we can repeat our observations. Devonian marine sandstones always date within the same age range, and always contain Devonian fish, never ichthyosaurs (much later), or whales (later still). And even when we are interested in a singular event, we do not need to repeat the past in order to repeat our observations about it. Scientific evidence – DNA tests of relatives – has shown that the biological father of Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, was not the man named on his birth certificate, and we can repeat the tests, if we wish, without having to beget more archbishops. And it is DNA testing, more than any other single method, that present-day evolution science uses in order to establish family relationships, common ancestry, and the relative times of divergence between different groups of living things.

There follows an argument that to most readers will seem a bizarre self-serving sophistry, but to which I think Ham is completely committed. Unbelievers, and scientists (for him the two terms seem at times interchangeable) claim to be following the evidence, but the evidence is always interpreted in terms of their own prior beliefs (this is true). It follows that they cannot be persuaded by evidence, since that would involve their ceasing to be unbelievers. Thus, in emphatic font,

It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias as the best bias with which to be biased.

Here Ham is claiming that for all of us, presupposition and identity trump evidence. Indeed, it is virtuous to cling to presuppositions, as long as they are the right ones. That’s faith, and faith is of course necessary for salvation. I think that he is genuinely incapable of understanding the scientific commitment to fallibilism, the acknowledgement, at least in principle, that what we now believe is always open to revision in response to new arguments and evidence. For him, invulnerability to evidence is a virtue, an attitude that may explain why he and those like him are able to carry on supporting Trump.

It gets worse. There is only one way and people can come to believe in the Bible, and that is with the operation of the Holy Spirit. We are, all of us, either “for Christ or against Him.”

Evolutionists (I will accept his term for those who accept the standard scientific account of deep time and common descent) are unable to understand the creationist position, which is:

As creationists, we understand that God created a perfect world and fell into sin, the world was cursed, God sent Noah’s Flood as judgment, and Jesus Christ came to die and be raised from the dead to restore all things.…

At this point, 3^rd ed tells us that

At the Creation Museum, we summarize biblical history as the Seven C’s of History — Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, and Consummation.

As Susan and William Trollinger point out in their book about the Museum, these 7 C’s are strongly reminiscent of the 7 D’s of dispensationalism, a premillennialist interpretation of history. Both editions continue with

However, because evolutionists are used to thinking in “uniformitarian” terms (i.e. basically the world we see today – the world of death and struggle – has gone on for millions of years), they do not understand this creationist perspective of history.

Ham is incapable of even considering the possibility that unbelievers, and believers whose theology is different from his own, understand his position perfectly well but reject it. As for the mountains (literally) of evidence for the uniformity of nature over time, he will claim that he is free to reject all of it, since, as we have seen, inferences about the past are assumption-ridden and unscientific. Since his own thinking is, as he says, presupposition, he sees views opposed to his as imposed on the evidence, rather than emerging from it. We do not merely presume that rain in the distant past was the same as rain today; we see raindrops on desert sandstone that predates the dinosaurs.

Worse, he appears completely oblivious to the fact that his own interpretation of Genesis is heavily laden with assumptions. Or if he is, he no doubt attributes them to the operation within him of the Holy Spirit.

Christians who accept the findings of secular science are being inconsistent. If they choose to accept millions of years, they have succumbed to the disease of naturalism, of which evolutionism is merely a symptom. And naturalism is itself a religion, since by denying God’s role it is a form of atheism.

. . . . . . . . .

It is difficult to know how to deal with an argument so confidently presented while being totally at variance with reality (right now, the problem also arises in areas other than evolution). The evidence for evolution was conclusive, by all reasonable standards, over a century ago. Moreover, the time interval between the 1987 and 2024 editions of the book have produced further layers of evidence, based on the DNA similarities that I referred to earlier. The creationist organizations themselves are well aware of these developments. However, as I mentioned earlier, Ham has set up his rules of evidence in advance, in such a way as to be free to ignore them. We see here the rhetorical device of demanding the impossible. Ham is asking for proof, but has already stated that the relevant evidence is unacceptable. He then uses the absence of proof that he would regard as acceptable, as conclusive evidence that his opponents are arguing in bad faith.