The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

In Which Ken Ham Unsurprisingly Fails To Address James McGrath’s Key Points

(Note: This post took me a lot longer to write than I expected.  In the interim, other posts have appeared that either directly supplement this one, or add background.  NCSE commented on the video on their Facebook page, and also has a book excerpt up dealing with Ken Ham.  Skippy has a cogent analysis of the matter as well.)

A couple of weeks ago, James McGrath posted an article on his blog, Exploring Our Matrix, containing this video:

This is part of a longer HBO documentary called Friends of God, which can be found here.

Anyway, in his post, James (who, I'll point out, is an associate professor of religion at Butler University)  calling out  people like Ken Ham (who, near as I can tell, isn't an associate professor of anything) for "false teaching".  My take on James' post is that he feels that people like Ham are encouraging Christians to stand up for pseudoscience rather than relevant social issues.¹

So, it seems that Ham took note of James' post and took exception, and wrote this little screed to whine about it.

A few things that immediately jump out at me:

1. Ham fails to link to James' original post.
2. Ham fails to address James' main complaint - that Ham and folks like him are distracting people from what should be the main efforts of Christianity.
3. Ham does little more than accuse James of not being a real Christian - he plays the No True Scotsman card.²

Really, when all is said and done, Ham hasn't done much more than complain that James was mean to him and that he's right and James is wrong.

This puts James in the same Ham-category as folks like P.Z. Myers,³ which is rarefied company indeed, so in an odd way, Ham may have done James a favor (I'd venture to say that Exploring Our Matrix will be pretty close to the top of Google hits for  "McGrath Ham Answers in Genesis").

Now, there are several facets to this little kerfluffle.

One is that it becomes obvious very quickly that Ham is using a different definition of Christian than James is.  James' definition is fairly broad and inclusive.  Ham's is much more narrow, and appears to mean "evangelical fundamentalist Christians who espouse a literal interpretation of the Bible."  It's interesting, but not particularly surprising, that Ham's definition excludes the majority of people around the world who would self-identify as Christian, including most Catholics and many mainline Protestant denominations.  What's interesting about this is that Ham's brand of Christianity seems to be much more concerned with pushing an agenda based on reinforcing a literal/inerrant view of the Bible rather than doing the sort of humanitarian things that we like to think of religious organizations as doing.  Ham's Creation Museum cost around $27 million to build.  What would $27 million buy in humanitarian aid?  Based on numbers from Doctors Without Borders, here are some possibilities:⁴

And Ham would rather spend the money convincing people that this is a true story:

Another is that Ham is counting on his readers not to look any further into the matter than what he (and by extension Answers in Genesis) say.  He's banking on the fact that his readers are content to believe him without bothering to check into the matter for themselves.    To put it more bluntly, Ken Ham doesn't want his readers to think for themselves.  He wants an unthinking "Amen, Brother Ken!".⁵ Ham assumes that his readers are ignorant not only about science but about Biblical scholarship, and that they won't bother to fact check him.

A third is that Ham makes the claim that "the Gospel" is not dependent on the age of the Earth, which I initially thought was meant to leave open the possibility that if someone were to somehow prove to him that the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, he would still believe the Gospel messages.  The problem is that Ham has stated clearly (and even says at the start of the video clip above) that he believes in the literal truth of the Bible, and he's festooned his Creation Museum with exhibits and unscientific propaganda that presupposes a semi-literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories.⁶ On further reflection, though, I think he probably meant the  statement to imply that the age of the Earth is dependent on the Gospel, which would be more consistent with Ham's overall message.

One thing that James didn't comment on was the fact that in the video, Ham was going directly after the kids.  His audience appeared to be composed almost entirely young children, and he had them under his spell.  He wasn't attempting to educate them - he was attempting to indoctrinate them, and he appears to be fairly successful at doing that.⁷ For many of those kids, the message Ham sends to those kids gets reinforced at home, at church, probably in school, and perhaps in the books and videos they're exposed to.  How are children (or adults, for that matter) supposed to develop the ability to think for themselves if they're never given the chance to see any information that contradicts what they've been told?

A bit later, but still early in the video, there's a sound-bite from a woman talking about how the Biblical creation myths are much easier to explain to children.⁸ As if ease of explanation is an indicator of accuracy.   Sure, evolution can be a complicated subject to explain to kids, because it necessarily requires giving them some background, but there are resources that can help, such as  Daniel Loxton's Evolution - How We and All Living Things Came to Be. (NCSE has a sample of the book available here.)  I can appreciate the desire of a parent to want to give her children simple, concise explanations to complex questions,  but the creation myths really don't explain anything.  They just push the questions away and substitute nonsense for answers.

But I digress.

What Ham has done with regard to James' comments is not unusual - in fact it's a very predictable response:

1) Gainsay your opponent's criticisms without substantively addressing them.
2) Accuse your opponent of apostasy.
3) Reiterate your position as many times as you can, and back it up with sources that agree with you.
4) Move on to a different topic as fast as you can.

This technique works surprisingly well in live debates (because the format of discussion favors quick, broad responses and isn't usually conducive to detailed rebuttals), lectures (because they tend to be less interactive and it's relatively easy to dodge difficult questions), and books (I trust that I needn't explain why).  I take some comfort in the fact that it's less effective on the internet for many reasons, not the least of which is that a certain number of intellectually honest and curious people will take the time to look at both sides of the matter and make an informed choice for themselves.

I give James a lot of credit.  By going against the grain of the more conservative Christian views, he's basically painting a big target on his chest.  I've seen relatively few people try to argue against his rationale - typically they do just what Ham does and resort to personal attacks.  Readers can draw their own conclusions from that.

-Jay
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¹I'm simplifying a little.

²The last time I brought up NTS here was pretty interesting.

³P.Z. visited Ham's Creation Museum a while back.  This photo came from that trip.

⁴Basically I just scaled the Doctors Without Borders numbers up to a $27 million donation. I also will point out in passing that while many religious organizations perform good humanitarian work, it's not uncommon to attach sectarian strings to it. A missionary group that goes into an area and makes conversion either an expressed or implied condition of rendering aid, be it building a school, providing clean water, providing vaccinations, or whatever, is little better than a group that goes into an area and forces conversions at gunpoint.

⁵I've said it before, I'm sure, but if a position like Ham's is so unquestionably correct, it should be able to stand up to the scrutiny of, say, pretty much the entire population of working biologists, astronomers, geologists, and so forth.  Ham's position of Young Earth Creationism doesn't stand up to much of anything.

⁶Stories. Plural. Ham does what a majority of people do and conflates the two distinctly different creation accounts in Genesis into a single story. The first runs from Gen 1:1 to Gen 2:4.  The second picks up at Gen 2:4.  Pay attention to the order in which things are created, particularly man and woman.  I use the term "semi-literal" here to emphasize that his hybridized story contains elements of both but is identical to neither of the Genesis accounts.  He's basically crafted a third story.

⁷This isn't a particularly difficult process, either, as anyone who has ever been around small children that believe in Santa Claus can appreciate.  Once they bite on the base story (Santa, for example), you convince them that questioning the story has dire consequences (Santa won't bring you presents), and you try to shield them from information that contradicts the story (like the jerk in the 4^th grade that tells everyone how he caught his dad putting his new bike together on Christmas Eve).  The same propensity that children have for believing when their parents tell them not to touch a hot stove leaves them open to believing in a fat man in a red suit handing out presents, or that a very unique rabbit leaves baskets of candy, or that Ken Ham knows what he's talking about.

⁸Shortly thereafter, the video shows some clips of a lecture addressing the question of whether there were dinosaur references in the Bible. The lecturer makes a statement about the word "dinosaur" being a new word, like "airplane", so it's not surprising that it isn't in the Bible. He then tosses out the ridiculous claim that the creature Behemoth in the Book of Job was really some sort of sauropod. There are a number of reasons why such a claim is absurd, not the least of which is that he's trying to make one creature stand in for two very diverse orders of animals. That's absurd on its face. (Also, the Biblical Behemoth is said to eat grass like an ox. Sauropods didn't eat grass. The teeth are wrong.)  I'm fairly certain that the Bible makes no mention of marsupials, either, which (in my opinion) is at least as interesting a problem as the lack of dinosaurs.

⁹Ham's position - that the Earth is young, the Flintstones could have been a documentary, and that organisms were created pretty much in the same forms that they have now should cause serious heartburn for anyone that takes the time to think it through.  If you somehow manage to stitch the creation stories together successfully, then you've got two mutually inconsistent flood stories to deal with.  Trying to weave all of this together into a c0herent history requires introducing all sorts of wild speculations and special one-off miraculous events.  It's not pretty.

The scientific evidence is completely consistent with a universe that's in the neighborhood of 15 billion years old, with an Earth that's around 4.5 billion years old, with life initially emerging around 3.5 billion years ago and gradually evolving into the various organisms we see today.

The scientific evidence is completely inconsistent with a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories.

In Ken Ham's world, science is wrong and the Bible is unassailably correct. Period. He frames the matter as an all-or-nothing choice, when in fact there are many others, such as:

• The Bible is the aggregated product of many human writers attempting to explain the world around them as best they could through the filter of their evolving religious views. Using it to explain how the universe, the Earth, and life on Earth came to be is an inappropriate use of the material. The universe, the Earth, and life are understood increasingly well through science. If you want to learn about the Earth, look at the Earth, not ancient creation myths.
• The Bible is, in fact, literally true, but God deliberately made the universe and the Earth look old in order to fool us. Perhaps this was to test us, or perhaps God has a strange sense of humor, but in any case, this requires deliberate, calculated deception on the part of God.
• The Bible is, in fact, literally true, but Satan screwed around with the universe after creation to make it look old in an attempt to lure people away from God. This raises a number of questions about why God would allow Satan to get away with this, but again we have God being a willing party to a deception.
• L. Ron Hubbard had it right and it's all about volcanic eruptions, DC-9 planes flying through space, and thetans.
• An Invisible Pink Unicorn poofed the universe into existence last Thursday, creating everyone in-place with a full set of memories and experiences that never really happened.
• The universe as we know it is really a complex computer simulation, we are nothing other than subprograms within the simulation, and the illusion of our free will is an artifact of our programming. The apparent ages of everything are just parameters of the simulation.

To me, the first option seems to be the most reasonable.

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