Ham-Fisted Rhetoric Over at Answers in Genesis

Ken Ham, AiG’s President and coauthor Mark Looy, lead off today’s daily devotional on their web site claiming that “[e]volutionary scientists throughout America are running scared.” Even to the most casual of readers, this has got to be one of the most obviously desperately penned quips from America’s leading “Humans Plowing Their Fields Behind Dinosaurs” advocate yet.

On the heels of the catastrophic defeat in Dover, and now the domino of Ohio tumbling down, creationists from AiG to the Discovery Institute are pounding their word processors with a fury not seen since what’s-his-name broke up with what’s-her-name. I mean, this is big news!

Unfortunately for the Hamster and his fellow travelers in the anti-evo crowd, their slips are showing, and it’s not a pretty sight.

You’ve got to hand it to Ham, though, for toeing the party line in adverse circumstances. It’s tough to find any piece on their web site that doesn’t describe anyone who doesn’t share their theology as “secular humanists,” and this dribble down the chin is no exception. “The secular humanists here [Ohio] and in other states don’t want students to even know that there is observational evidence in science that totally contradicts molecules-to-man evolution.”

Really, Ken? And just where has this evidence been published? Science? Nature? Or in those little books you sell at churches with pictures of Adam patting a dinosaur on the head? Yeah, we’re supposed to read that and brush off over one hundred years of real science.

With these defeats, and the ones we know are coming, creationists are getting really desperate, and it’s getting embarrassing for them. Ken has to reach way back in the book of standard claims for this one: “If students in public schools are being taught that the origin of the universe, life, human beings, etc., can all be explained on the basis of natural processes, these young people are being taught the religion of naturalism—of atheism!”

Okay, so what we should do is stop attempting to understand how nature works, because faith should be based on ignorance. Am I on the right track, Ken? If I reject Newton and claim the planets are pushed in their orbits by angels am I better Christian? Am I closer to God if I go to a faith healer the next time I get sick? After all, the germ theory is a nothing more than an atheistic explanation of disease.

Ham calls the currently accepted definition of science “an arbitrary definition created by secularists.” There he goes again. Never mind all those scientists who go to church each Sunday, professing the full spectrum of the diverse faith here in America: they don’t believe what Ken believes, so they aren’t real Christians.

I like the closing best of all. While urging readers to contact their church leaders about hosting an AiG event, Ham says “AiG is not an activist organization in the sense that we are not directly involved in lobbying, legislating or litigating to influence school boards on origins issues…” No, that’s not their style. If you saw the PBS series Evolution, then you saw Ham standing in front of a bunch of children in a church, urging them to shout at their teachers, “Were you there?” any time the lesson includes any science that threatens Ken’s theology. Nice work, Ken, having schoolchildren do your bidding for you. Despicable.

I used to kind of like AiG, in a strange way. I liked their openness about their goals: winning souls, spreading the Gospel, and making people believe that Tyrannosaurus Rex ate daisies in the Garden of Eden. Something about the imagery of that appealed to my sense of acid-flashback -influenced fun. But now I’m as tired of them as I am the Discovery Institute. And I have to admit, I like hearing them whine.