Taking Jesus Out of Christianity
by William Trollinger
It may be the Christmas season, but at Answers in Genesis (AiG) fighting the culture war is a 24/7/365 operation.
See, for example, AiG’s gigantic Ark, which has been lit, not in Christmas colors, but in rainbow colors. As Ken Ham has explained, lighting the Ark in this way serves not only as a reminder of God’s promise not to repeat the drowning of all but eight human beings in a global flood, but also as encouragement for Christians “to take the rainbow back” from those who perversely understand it to be a sign of “freedom, love, pride, or the LGBTQ movement.” Of course, it is not going to end well for those who “wave rainbow-colored flags in defiance of God’s command and design for marriage.” As in the time of Noah, global judgment is again in the offing, but “this coming judgment won’t be with water but with fire.” (For more on what Ham and AiG have said about the fiery judgment awaiting defiant gays and lesbians and their supporters, see Righting America, 164-170.)
Besides reclaiming the rainbow, AiG has also been battling secularists who have been – according to AiG – very busy “taking Christ out of Christmas” and replacing it with “the religion of naturalism.” This anti-Christmas campaign has had such great success that Christ has even been removed from Christmas music, which now “focuses on Santa and presents.” In an effort to encourage Christians not to succumb to secularist “intolerance and prejudice,” AiG has even posted an article by attorneys from the Christian Law Association in which the authors assure Christians that “private religious speech, such as saying ‘Merry Christmas’ . . . is protected speech.”
Side note: We know very well that it could seem preposterous to folks outside of the AiG informational bubble that there are folks who fear they will be arrested for saying “Merry Christmas.” But it is worth keeping in mind that Ken Ham – along with other Christian Right leaders – has been saying for years that it is only a matter of time before Christianity is made illegal in the United States. Spend enough time in this alternative universe and it can begin to make sense that there exists some sort of secularist Gestapo rounding up folks who deign to say “Merry Christmas.”
But there is something profoundly ironic about AiG’s feverish concern over the alleged campaign to take Christ out of Christmas. And that is that in both the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter there is so very little Jesus. Oddly, one has to work hard to find references to Jesus in these two Christian tourist sites. Most striking, there is absolutely nothing in the museum or the Ark – 215,000 square feet in total space – about Jesus’ life or his teachings, nothing about “how Jesus called us to love our neighbor, love even our enemy, make peace, turn the other cheek, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty.”
Ironic, indeed. AiG is quite obsessed with “secularists” taking Christ out of Christmas while simultaneously being quite comfortable with taking Jesus out of Christianity.
Or perhaps it is not ironic in the least. It is Answers in Genesis, after all, and not Answers in the Gospels.
Intolerance is a Virtue
by Patrick Thomas
In today’s post, Patrick Thomas examines Ken Ham’s use of “intolerance” as a tactic to frame non-creationists as anti-Christian secularists.
Last week, we examined the ways Ken Ham and AiG are re-writing history, whitewashing the past in favor of young earth creationists. Despite evidence that Christian literalists employed the Bible to support slavery, and despite the noticeable silence on contemporary hate crimes against people of color, Ham continues to assert, rather vaguely, that racism and intolerance are unbiblical. Who could disagree?
What’s confusing, though, about his claims against intolerance is that Ham often upholds intolerance as a virtue of a Biblical worldview. And yet, intolerance is often the brush with which Ken Ham paints all other worldviews. In his recent blog post, Ham claims
Christians, like myself, who start with God’s word often hear things like, “You can’t say gay marriage is wrong — that’s intolerant!”…Those secularists who claim to be tolerant will be intolerant of positions they disagree with and often intolerant of the person who holds them. This isn’t tolerance at all! It’s a false definition of tolerance that tolerates only those who agree with them. (emphasis in original)
Setting aside the assumptions that secularists do, in fact, claim positions of tolerance and that people intolerant of a position are equally intolerant of the person who holds said position, what’s important to recognize here is what a useful strategy this is for Ham. Painting secularists – essentially, anyone who doesn’t adhere to AiG’s interpretation of the Bible – as intolerant allows Ham, as a person of extreme power in AiG, to play victim; that is, to claim that he is oppressed by secularists who will not tolerate his Biblical worldview.
Recasting his elite position as one of an injured minority – the person put upon by intolerant secularists – one might assume that Ham offers an antidote to the intolerant secularist worldview. But one would be wrong.
In fact, framing secularists as intolerant allows Ham to re-double his own intolerance. Later in his same post, Ham states,
Secularists are opposed to Christ…because they have an entirely different religion. Evolution, the foundation of the secular worldview, is a religion based on man’s falliable word…It’s not a matter of whether one is religious or not but which religion one adheres to. Ultimately there are only two religions — that of God’s Word and of man’s word. (emphasis in original)
Ah, there it is – intolerance disguised as virtue. Ham’s religion is tolerant and all others are not. Those who do not adhere to creationist apologetics are secularists, and all secularists oppose Christ and worship evolution. All other religions – including the religion to which Jesus himself belonged – are intolerable.
Ken Ham doesn’t fight intolerance, he perpetuates it. The methods of intolerance he ascibes to secularists are the exact methods he and AiG employ: they claim tolerance of people and positions they disagree with, but are actually intolerant of both. What’s even more dangerous about Ham’s intolerance is that he affirms it as divinely inspired, virtuous and Biblical. To be sure, there is nothing God-like about it.
Whitewashing the Past
by William Trollinger
As we noted in our last post, Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis (AiG) expend a good deal of energy – in the Creation Museum and in their writings – making the case that racist hatred and intolerance is unbiblical. This would seem commendable, especially given that the Christian Right often seems (at best) unconcerned about racial inequality and oppression. But AiG’s unwillingness to say anything specific about racism in contemporary America reduces their admonitions to mere bromide.
But what about the past? What about slavery? What do the creationists have to say?
In an article, AiG’s Paul Taylor argued that William Wilberforce and other abolitionists opposed slavery because of their commitment to taking the Bible literally from the very first verse. When Taylor was challenged by a reader who argued that white Christians made great use of Scripture to support slavery, Ken Ham’s son-in-law, Bodie Hodge – the mechanical engineer who serves as AiG’s jack-of-all-disciplines – joined with Taylor to make the case that, while some Christians tried to use the Bible as a proslavery document, the fact is that it was “Biblical Christians [who] led the fight against slavery.”
Would that this had been the case. But while there were biblical literalists in antebellum America who opposed slavery, it is – as we note in Righting America – “much more accurate to say that, prior to the Civil War, ‘Biblical Christians,’ those holding to plenary verbal inspiration and a commonsense reading of the Bible, led the fight for slavery.” These white Christians – from the North and the South – not only used a literal reading of the Bible as the basis for their innumerable proslavery sermons, but they also aggressively attacked their opponents for undercutting the authority of God’s Word by making unbiblical arguments against slavery (186).
Fast forward to the twentieth century. When the civil rights movement challenged Southern white supremacy, biblical literalists rose up again to use the inerrant Word to make the case against desegregation. And when it eventually became clear that the federal government was actually going to enforce the integration of public schools, white fundamentalists established their own schools throughout the South to ensure that their children would not be in school with black children.
Most critics focus on how young earth creationists undercut mainstream and evidence-based biology, geology, and astronomy. But history is also a target, because human history – not just geological history – is very dangerous for the entire creationist apologetic. As we note in Righting America, if AiG took history seriously, they would have some very difficult questions to answer. Here are three:
1. If the Bible is clear and should be read in a commonsensical fashion . . . then how might we explain the millions of biblical literalists who were convinced that they were upholding biblical authority, and yet who turned out to be so wrong when it came to slavery and segregation?
2. More dangerous, if millions of biblical literalists in the not-so-distant past were so wrong about what the Bible had to say about slavery and segregation, is it not possible that in twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred years we will have a great host of biblical literalists fervently arguing that egalitarian marriages and gay rights are the obviously biblical position?
3. Perhaps most threatening, if millions of biblical literalists were on the wrong side of history when it came to slavery and segregation, and if ‘less literalist’ Christians were on the right side of that same history, what happens to the absolute, good versus evil, God’s Word versus Human Reason binary that undergirds the Creation Museum, AiG, and young Earth creationism? (188)
One way to answer these questions is to go the route of evangelical pastor Doug Wilson, who, in his books Southern Slavery As It Was and Black and Tan, has argued that – biblically speaking – owning slaves is not a sin (and it is wicked to say it is), that the antebellum South was a time of racial harmony, and that slavery offered African-Americans real benefits (in fact, they were better off as slaves than they are now in America). Particularly telling, Wilson asserts in Black and Tan that “Christians who apologize for what the Bible teaches on slavery will soon be apologizing for what it teaches on marriage” (14).
But Ken Ham, Bodie Hodge, and AiG do not want to go Wilson’s route. They desperately want to claim that it was Christians who took the Bible literally from the very first verse who were the Christians who led the fight against slavery.
So they have to invent a whitewashed history. As it is for science, so it is for history. Ideology trumps evidence.
Whitewashing the Present
by William Trollinger
In a recent blog post, “What ‘Race’ Are You?,” Ken Ham asserts that
God’s Word makes it clear that there is only one race – the human race. We are all one big family – all descendants of one man and woman, Adam and Eve . . . Think how much our culture would change if we started thinking with the firm foundation of God’s Word! There’s no room for hate, intolerance, or superiority for those who believe what the Bible says.
What a refreshing word from the CEO of Answers in Genesis (AiG)! Given the recent presidential campaign, which featured the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalists aggressively promoting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and which featured the hiring of Steve Bannon – who bragged that his Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right” – as Trump’s chief strategist, the word from Ken Ham that racism is anti-biblical would seem to be a promising indication that at least the creationist corner of the Christian Right would fight back against racial hate and racist incidents.
But when one looks more closely at Ham’s post one notices something odd. Ham introduces the topic by noting that
So-called racial issues are continuing to heat up here in America. It seems that most nights when you watch the TV news there’s a report of violence caused by hate and intolerance toward those of a supposedly different race.
Who and what is Ham talking about? Is he referring to the reported post-election spike in hate crimes and racial intimidation? Is he referring to the Klan’s announcement of a rally in North Carolina to celebrate Trump’s victory? Or does he have in mind those who have resisted such incidents? Could he have been more vague?
When it comes to race, such vagueness is standard practice for Ham and AiG. While they make much of the “One Race – ‘One Blood’” display in the Creation Museum, when it comes down to actual matters of race in contemporary America they have nothing to say. Nothing to say about the 2013 Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. Nothing to say about the 2015 Confederate flag controversy. Nothing to say about the fact that the individual who donated “Ebenezer the Allosaur” to the museum is a neo-Confederate secessionist. Nothing to say about white nationalist groups and voter intimidation. Nothing to say about the persistence of institutional racism (Righting America, 179-191).
For all of the vague pronouncements about “one race – ‘one blood,’” the silence from Ham and AiG regarding actual examples of racism in contemporary America has been deafening. Whitewashing, indeed.
Bodie Hodge Has All the Answers!
by William Trollinger
Answers in Genesis (AiG) is a “creationist juggernaut” that “produces a mind-boggling flood of print, media, and social media material” (Righting, 11). Remarkably, this deluge is generated by a very small cadre of creationists – one sees the same few names again and again. But among this cadre of hyper-industrious young Earthers, one figure has displayed an almost-superhuman productivity and a mind-boggling versatility that stands him above all the rest: Ken Ham’s son-in-law, Bodie Hodge.
An indication of how prolific Hodge is that, when one visits the AiG online store and types in “Bodie Hodge,” one gets 88 results (including DVDs and curriculum kits). A look at some of the titles gives one a feel for Hodge’s unabashed enthusiasm for speaking on topics far away from his M.S. in mechanical engineering (specialty: advanced materials processing) from Southern Illinois University: A Biblical and Historical Look at Halloween; Tower of Babel: The Cultural History of Our Ancestors; The War on Christmas: Battles in Faith, Tradition, and Religious Expression; Confound the Critics: Answers for Attacks on Biblical Truths; and, World Religions and Cults, a three volume set edited by Hodge and AiG colleague Roger Patterson in which one learns that “the Catholic Church is not the true church of Jesus Christ but is a false church that enslaves hundreds of millions of people in a false gospel” (I: 110) and that “by the rejection of God’s Redeemer, Jesus the Christ, many Jews have been pruned from the tree of Israel” (I: 229) (emphases ours).
The best place to get a feel for Hodge’s willingness to range across disciplines and make pronouncements is his writings that appear on the AiG website. Here are three examples:
Ethics: In response to a question as to whether someone should lie to Nazi soldiers to save the life of a Jew hiding in their house:
Consider for a moment that we are all already sentenced to die because we are sinners (Romans 5:12). It is going to happen regardless. If a lie helps keep someone alive for a matter of moments compared to eternity, was the lie, which is high treason against the Creator, worth it? . . . Since we are all sinners (Romans 3:23), death is coming for us, and there is an appointed time (Ecclesiastes 3:2). (Hodge, A Righteous Lie?)
Philosophy:
UNESCO promotes . . . World Philosophy Day, meant to honor and respect the world’s varied philosophies as equal truth and to encourage people everywhere to study philosophy. However, one cannot miss that all philosophies are intrinsically tied to religions . . . [and] all of the religious philosophies are wrong, save one. In a subtle way, UNESCO is asking you to celebrate falsehood . . . Does UNESCO promote this day as Biblical Christianity Day? No. Instead, they would rather suppress the truth and revel in the false (Romans 1:18). (Hodge, One Glaring Problem with World Philosophy Day)
Biblical Studies:
To attack the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Old Testament then is to attack the truthfulness of the rest of the biblical writers and Jesus Himself . . . We think it very likely that Moses was working with written documents because the second toledoth [i.e., “these are the descendants”] reads ‘this is the book of the generations of Adam’ where ‘book’ is a translation of the normal Hebrew word meaning a written document. Also, the account of the Flood after the third toledoth (Genesis 6:9) reads like a ship’s log. Only evolutionary thinking would lead us to conclude that Adam and his descendants could not write. (Hodge and Mortenson, Did Moses Write Genesis?)
Adam was literate. Noah kept a ship’s log on the Ark. Moses combined twelve tablets written by Adam, Noah, et al. to write the Book of Genesis. All philosophies are false except the one true philosophy, which is Biblical literalism. True Christians would tell the truth to Nazis about Jews hiding in the house since God commands it, and anyway, we are all going to die.
Bodie Hodge’s Creation World. Perhaps you feel as if you have entered an alternative logical universe, one that is wonderfully well suited for today’s world of fake news and bizarre conspiracy theories. But then there is his understanding of history. More on that in the next post.
A Literalism of the Elite
by Patrick Thomas
In this post, Patrick Thomas critiques the “plain sense” of AiG’s literal reading of Genesis on display at the Creation Museum.
To accept a literalist reading of Genesis means that you must also take a number of suppositions as “givens.” Some of these suppositions have long histories in various Christian traditions; for example, the perspicuity of scripture or the idea of creatio ex nihilo. But to accept the literalism on display at the Creation Museum requires visitors to take even more suppositions as “givens,” as the Trollingers point out in the “Bible” chapter of Righting America. These include the supposition that two distinct stories of creation in Genesis can be combined un-problematically, that using a Bible verse or a snippet of a Bible verse without any textual context is acceptable, and – especially important for the Creation Museum – all other attempts at reading creation are elitist, sinful and antagonistic to the “plain sense” of the Museum’s literal reading.
The charge of elitism is especially useful for Answers in Genesis (AiG) and the Creation Museum, as it brings together a whole host of non-fundamentalist stances (including many Christians) under the singular category of folks who, according to AiG, claim to know more than God. Of course, the charge also allows AiG to claim the status of the underdog and occupy a position of grace as the people to whom elites cast their blasphemous biblical doubts.
What’s striking about the AiG’s charges of elitism is precisely how elitist their own Genesis 1 account is presented at the Museum. For one thing, I’ve previously noted the shift that appears in the Creation Museum from the word of God as told in scripture to the creation story shown in experiences and encounters at the museum highlights the fact that the Creation Museum cannot follow a literal reading of Genesis. The move to show rather than tell the creation story is a step away from the literalist reading that AiG claims, one that requires the Museum to fill in so many gaps, to answer questions as apparently germane as “How many races are there?” to “Why did the dinosaurs go extinct?” I wonder, doesn’t the ability to ask and answer such questions from the position of Biblical authority demonstrate an elite position?
What’s more, the particular kinds of displays at the Creation Museum help us to see how elitist the Creation Museum’s claims to literalism really are. One convenient example is the noticeable lack of female figures aside from Eve and Noah’s wife. This reinforces a patriarchal elitism that, as the Trollingers suggest, presumes sexual inequality as an essential component of the created order (Righting America, 173). Thus, while the Museum notes that Adam’s sin (and not Eve’s) is responsible for the fall of man, Eve is repeatedly shown in subordinate roles to Adam. She’s fashioned this way by, we’re meant to assume, God.
Finally, justifying incest in the ancient world as a familial and biological imperative without any Biblical evidence, concocting instead, “an argument on behalf of incest that includes questionable claims regarding human genetics, an attack on those who criticize incest on any grounds other than the Bible, and the suggestion that incest is not as bad as it seems” (Righting America, 177), provides the most glaring evidence of AIG’s elitism at work. Beyond providing a justification for the argument that Adam and Eve’s son Cain had sexual relations with his sister, the defense of incest also appears as an attack aimed at proponents of gay marriage: according to the museum, “marriage ‘between close relatives was not a problem in early biblical history,’ as long as ‘it was one man for one woman (the biblical doctrine of marriage).’”
All of these examples appear as part of the museum’s representation of creation, in the narrative that aims to show humans’ struggles to be closer to God. These elite representations appear among the people who tried to follow God’s word most carefully – Eve, the prophets and apostles, Noah and his sons – and thus represent the people God speaks to directly. Certainly, these representations evince that what the Creation Museum offers is not a literal but an elite reading of Genesis. And it is a reading that frames a highly charged ideological platform serving only to reinforce both the elite status of AiG’s doctrine and of its leaders as “plain sense” reading.
Despite Ken Ham’s claims that everyone is welcome at AIG’s destinations, the visual experience of the Museum sends a contrary message. To those whose beliefs differ from or question the Museum’s plain-sense reading of creation, the message is clear: you do not belong in God’s creation.
Science “Behind the Scenes” of the Creation Museum
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
In our last post, we talked about the strange manner in which much of the science that appears at the Creation Museum is used. Specifically, we talked about the fact that a lot of science appears to be on display at the Creation Museum but precious little of it appears to be mobilized on behalf of a scientific argument for a biblical creation.
Perhaps the most striking example of this appears in the Facing the Allosaurus room. In that room stands a truly impressive 30-foot-long and 10-foot-high Allosaurus skeleton. The skull of the Allosaurus sits in a display case nearby. Alongside this very impressive and very scientific looking evidence appear three placards, and here is what they do:
One, titled “Why the Long Face?” describes Ebenezer’s skull, noting (among other characteristics) that it is “34 inches long and 22 inches high, and is 97 percent complete,” and that “there are 53 curved, saw-edged, saber-like teeth, up to 4.5 inches long including the roots.” A second placard, titled “What Was Found?” provides “details from the dig [that yielded the skeleton],” including the fact that “this animal was found buried lying on its left side,” that “the skeleton was oriented with the head at the western end and the tail pointed southeast,” that “the remains of the animal’s spine . . . were found lying in a curved alignment,” and that “due to erosion of the hillside he was found in, most of Ebenezer’s limb bones and mid-section were not recovered. . . . Then there is a third placard, titled “Who Am I?”which explains that “Allosaurus” means “’other lizard,’” that Allosaurus “belongs to the suborder of dinosaurs that contains theropods,” that Ebenezer was likely a “formidable, carnivorous dinosaur,” and that a “carnivore is something that eats mostly meat.”
To be sure, there appears to be a lot of “real science” presented here on the topic of Ebenezer, the Allosaurus. But to what end?
Although biblical references do appear on the third of the three placards (having to do with why the skeleton was named Ebenezer), no connection is made or even suggested on any of these three placards between the science presented on them and the claim that the universe was created in six 24-hour days less than 10,000 years ago by the God of the Bible. A fourth placard does attempt to say something about a biblical creation and Ebenezer but, as it turns out, the reasoning does not move from scientific evidence about the Allosaurus skeleton to a conclusion about a global flood but rather from the assumption of Noah’s Flood to inferences about how Ebenezer must have died in that flood (Righting America 93).
Perhaps, as we suggested at the closing of our last post, the real science that makes the connections between the scientific evidence and a biblical creation is happening (as Jason Lisle suggested) “behind the scenes.”
On November 21, 2016, Ken Ham announced that he and others at AiG had the privilege of “peek[ing] inside the skull of our Allosaurus, Ebenezer” by way of a computer tomography (CT) scan of Ebenezer’s skull that was conducted by a Cincinnati firm hired by AiG. Pretty exciting stuff, to be sure. As Ham pointed out, this may be the first time anyone has had the opportunity to have such a look into an Allosaurus’s skull. Thus, he called this “cutting edge research.”
So, what has their peek revealed? Is there evidence inside Ebenezer’s skull for a biblical creation or a global flood?
To be sure, some observations were made. Ham reported in his blog post that “These scans allowed us to see the details inside the brain cavity, including the lines where bones fused together as the creature grew.” Ham also points out that “The skull is remarkable because the hyoid bones are still intact.” He goes on to say that those “bones are almost never intact in fossils.” (We should point out that Ham does not make clear whether the observation of the hyoid bones was made possible by the CT scan or whether their presence had already been observed by some other means.) In the second of two accompanying videos (they ran into a technical glitch which obliged them to make two videos instead of one), the engineer who conducted the scan shows viewers an image from a “rendering of the air pocket that would be inside where the brain used to be,” and image (is it also a rendering?) of Ebenezer’s teeth, and an image from a scan of a T-Rex egg that appears, again according to the engineer (with a background in electronics and electrical engineering and extensive experience with CT scanners), to show something dense that might be an “embryo.”
Do those observations provide evidence for a global flood or biblical creation? Ham doesn’t say. At one point in the first video, Andrew Snelling (AiG’s director of research) suggests that there is “a little bit of a compression on one side [of the skull] where the sediment landed on top of him” which apparently indicates for Snelling that the sediment accumulated “rapid[ly].” Unfortunately, we are shown no images from the scans of that “little bit of a compression.” So, once again, no direct connection is made between any observational science and a global flood or biblical creation.
That said, Ham is hopeful. In the one direct statement that suggested a scientific connection between observations of Ebenezer and a biblical creation, Ham said:
Someday we might discover all sorts of new facts about this amazing species, and find ways to help us defend the book of Genesis and expose the scientific problems with evolution.
Indeed, perhaps someday they will. But for now, as we put it in Righting America:
In the end, Ebenezer-the-skeleton appears to make no contribution to an understanding either of his demise or any other creature’s.
Never mind a global flood or a biblical creation.
But if AiG ever does make a compelling argument that some “real science” actually supports a case for a global flood and/or a biblical creation, we are sure scientists of all sorts will be very interested to hear it.
The Strange Use of Science at the Creation Museum
by Susan Trollinger
In Righting America, we took seriously AiG’s claim, as articulated by Jason Lisle (PhD in astrophysics and director of the planetarium at the Creation Museum), that there is “plenty of science that confirms a biblical creation” and that “[m]uch of this science is presented in the Creation Museum” (Righting America 71). Thus, to test this claim we performed close readings in the Science chapter of the many placards and exhibits that appear to display scientific evidence in the Creation Museum.
Importantly, we did not focus on evaluating the science presented there since we are not scientists. Instead, we stuck with our approach of taking AiG’s arguments are on their own terms. Rather than ask “is this good science?” we asked whether the science at the Creation Museum passes AiG’s own test for real science (it has to be observational) and whether it is it mobilized on behalf of an argument that actually supports a biblical creation.
If you’ve read the Science chapter, you know that while the Creation Museum certainly seems to display a lot of science in the form of information on placards, miniature dioramas, videos that talk about DNA, and so forth. When you look at all those placards and displays and videos closely, a very different impression emerges.
Take the Flood Geology room, the area in the Creation Museum that looks to be one of the most (if not the most) grounded in science. One’s first impression upon entering that room is that it is filled with a lot of science. There are, after all, 38 placards with various diagrams and models and information on them. But when we carefully examined these 38 placards, we found that surprisingly few (only 42%) of them display scientific evidence that passes AiG’s test for real science.
Even more surprising, to quote from Righting America:
In the end, only two placards in the Flood Geology room that offer arguments on behalf of a biblical creation reason in the traditional scientific way—that is from observations to conclusions—and mobilize scientific evidence that passes muster as observational science. Put another way, just 5 percent of all of the placards in the Flood Geology room reason from “real” [according to AiG’s criteria] scientific evidence to a global flood. Whatever one’s definition of “plenty of science”. . . 5 percent seems unlikely to rise to it (102).
A good question to ask about the placards in the Flood Geology room (and elsewhere) is: What are all those placards doing that are not making a scientific case for biblical creation? The answer, we found, was that while many display what does appear to be “real science” (according to AiG’s definition), they don’t make an argument that connects that “real science” to a claim for a biblical creation.
The Creation Museum makes odd use of scientific evidence on behalf of a biblical creation, indeed.
That said, we should point out that in the full quote from Jason Lisle (referred to at the beginning of this post), he points out that
Much of this science is presented in the Creation Museum. Some of this science in the museum is very apparent (such as information presented in the planetarium, or the Flood . . . geology room). But much of the science is ‘behind the scenes,’ and you may not have noticed it (Righting America 71).
Perhaps the compelling connections between “real science” and a biblical creation can be found “behind the scenes” of the Creation Museum.
Stay tuned.
And Now, Some Praise for Ark Encounter!
by William Trollinger
Ok. Maybe we have been unfair. Maybe we have been one-sided in our discussion of Ark Encounter. It is certainly true that we have made a point of noting that – despite all the emphasis on literally reproducing the Ark described in Genesis – Ken Ham’s Ark is not actually a boat, and the interior of this gigantic not-boat is awash in invented “facts” that are explained as simply artistic license. It is unquestionably the case that we have referred to the Ark as located in the middle of nowhere, and we have suggested doubts about Ham’s claim that Ark Encounter attendance in the first year will be close to 2.2 million visitors. There is no doubt that we have pointed out that – for all of its emphasis on being a child-friendly place – the Ark’s explicit aim is to teach children that the Noah’s Ark story is really about an angry God drowning all but eight human beings on earth, and we have mentioned that AiG population experts have determined that the death toll may have been twenty billion. And while it is hard to imagine that a place so devoted to telling the story of global genocide could actually be boring, we must confess that we have also reported that the Ark is a deadly dull place to visit, and – yes indeed – we have underscored the amazing fact that Jesus is all-but-absent at what is supposed to be a Christian entertainment site.
Ok. Time for a little balance. Time to hear from one of Ark Encounter’s most enthusiastic supporters, Ray Comfort. Comfort is an evangelical evangelist, founder of Living Waters ministry, and co-host (with actor Kirk Cameron) of The Way of the Master television show. Comfort is best-known for his infamous “banana video,” in which he and Cameron claim that the banana is the atheists’ nightmare because it gives clear evidence that the universe has an intelligent designer.
On October 22 Comfort visited the Ark Encounter for the premiere of his latest film, The Atheist Delusion. As part of this visit Comfort was given a tour of the Ark by Ken Ham. To say that he was awed by the experience is to understate Comfort’s response. As reported on the Ark Encounter blog:
“Many had told me that it is incredible, but they grossly understated it. It is utterly amazing, completely overwhelming, and wonderfully incredible . . . far above anything I was expecting (emphasis in original). I have been through the Smithsonian in DC and the Louvre in Paris, and the Ark is so much better in a hundred different ways. It excels in excellence.”
There you have it. The Ark “excels in excellence.”
And we have now exceeded our quota for balanced reporting.
An Even Stranger Object
by Susan Trollinger
If the object of the Creation Museum is strange, the object of the Ark Encounter is even stranger. At the Creation Museum, a central idea seems to have been to attempt to re-create certain scenes that Genesis says occurred in the Garden of Eden. Thus, as visitors wind along the set path in the Creation Museum’s Garden of Eden, they see Adam naming the animals, Adam waking up from his God-induced sleep to see Eve for the first time, and the Serpent hanging out near Adam and Eve prior to the Fall.
Importantly, visitors walk among scenes from the Garden. They do not walk through a life-size re-creation of the Garden. That is, there is no effort at the Creation Museum to re-create the Garden of Eden in its entirety. That would be absurd, to be sure. And unnecessary. Visitors can make the metonymic move from a scene in the Garden to the Garden. And, really, it’s the stories that are the focus anyway, not the Garden itself.
Not so at Ark Encounter. There, apparently, it is not enough to tell the story of the Flood by showcasing this or that scene from the story. It is not sufficient (as it is in the Creation Museum) to re-create a portion of the Ark and allow the visitor’s imagination to supply the rest. Instead, one must build a life-size re-creation of the Ark according to the (somewhat ambiguous) dimensions put forth in Genesis.
Just on the face of it, that makes for a strange object. One reason is because it means spending $100 (and counting) million dollars to construct a gigantic object dedicated to making the argument that the story of the Flood (which AiG argues was global and killed as many as 20 billion men, women, and children not to mention untold numbers of animals) should be understood as central and guiding to Christian faith.
Another reason has to do with what is at the heart of AiG’s argument—that only one particular reading of Genesis (there are many other “literal” readings available) leads to a true, authentic, and proper Christian faith. If we don’t take Genesis literally, so the argument goes, why would we take Jesus literally? If we say that the Flood is mythical why not say Jesus was too? So, to secure our faith against such a slippery slope, we need to read all of Genesis literally. And to make that point to visitors, AiG saw fit to build a full-size Ark! Just like the one in Genesis—same length and height and depth, same materials (or thereabouts), same construction methods (or something like that).
All that focus on literalizing the Word—making it literal in three gigantic dimensions. It is impressive when you approach it. But for all that literalizing, isn’t it odd that it’s not actually a boat? It’s a completely stationary structure held up above the ground by huge concrete supports underneath it and even larger vertical structures in the back.
If the point of building this gigantic thing is to convince visitors that reading Genesis literally is crucial for their Christian faith, what does it mean that the central object is not actually the product of a literal reading? Strange object indeed (with even stranger objects inside—see our earlier post).
