The latest book to start a buzz amongst the bloggers who focus on American Christianity is Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson’s new book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. It seems you can think of The Anointed as a follow-up to Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which concluded that the scandal was that there wasn’t much mind.
“The Anointed” refers to those people who have been tapped as authorities within the Evangelical community on various subject, such as history and science. The authors ask, “Why do tens of millions of Americans prefer to get their science from Ken Ham, founder of the creationist Answers in Genesis, who has no scientific expertise, rather than from his fellow evangelical Francis Collins, current Director of the National Institutes of Health?”
One way or another, the book has shocked Ken Ham and his group Answers in Genesis. Ham has already suggested that Stephens and Giberson are sheep in wolves clothing. Stephens was particularly amused by this part of Ham’s self-defense:
The authors also asserted that ICR [Institute for Creation Research] and AiG argue that evolution is “responsible for much of what’s wrong with the world” (p. 36). Answers in Genesis has never stated or implied this. We have both—in countless articles and even in the 2008 online debate between Ham and Dr. Giberson—declared instead that the teaching of evolution has caused many to doubt or disbelieve the Bible.*
To which Stephens replies with this image from the AIG website:
This one’s even better than the evolution tree picture. Of course, given how incompetently the “creation” side is firing, I’d almost think this was one of ours.
That’s actually a very interesting thesis.
Why doesn’t Collins spend himself against Creationism?
He does. He was the one who converted me from creationist to theistic evolutionist. See his website Biologos http://biologos.org/ which, amongst the clutter of defending the accomodation of faith in science, also debunks creationism from a christian perspective.
I wonder if Ken Ham actually goes through the normal response procedure of a mature adult mind, you know.
Accused of intellectual dishonesty → The accusation is true → The accusation is easily proven → Either do not comment or accept accusation is true → Do not deny and make self look more stupid.
Of everything in that photo, the one I don’t get is the racism ballon. How could Ham honestly tag Humanism with racsim? I know he tends to be a little dishonest, but that one is such an obvious lie, it’s a little shocking.
Social Darwinism.
- which term is itself an obvious lie, having nothing to do with evolution, but created in order to mislead people about the actual thesis of Origin of Species.
Revyloution,
The “racism” balloon refers to the creationist argument that Darwinian evolution reinforced racism. Historically speaking, many Western Europeans did in fact believe that Africans were less evolved and thus sub-human. So that’s what the balloon is in reference to. Of course, it’s the same sort of thing as blaming Nietzsche for Hitler, i.e., nonsense.
It also neatly ignores that Darwin was the grandson of Josiah Wedgewood – an extremely prominent anti-slavery campaigner – and argued against racism.
If ignoring inconvenient truths were an Olympic sport, these guys would take gold, silver, and bronze every time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention#Divisions_over_slavery (The southern baptists didn’t apologize for their role in justifying slavery until *1995*)
While the evolution guns all target the foundations of the christian tower only one of the christian guns shoot toward the balloons. Of the others, one shoot at the opposite direction and one seem to target their own tower. Is the cartoonist trying to say something about how the stupidity of the creationist’s arguments is helping to defeat their case?
Yes. But when you have to explain the joke, it’s not funny.
So ken Ham got an undercover atheist drawing his cartoons or did AiG nicked the cartoon from somewhere else and put their name on it without realizing it may be mocking them and without giving credit to the artist (wouldn’t put that past them).
You might be on to something because the humanist castle appears to be winning – the christian castle is crumbling at the foundation and there are cracks right through the towers. Either Ken Ham is a closet atheist, and he’s winking at us – or the artist is – or Ken Ham swiped it, as you say. I think the latter is sadly the most likely.
What it’s saying is that evolution is the cause of all these problems and Christians are wasting time attacking the symptoms, when they need to attack the cause of the problems, that is, evolution. Meanwhile other traitor Christians (liberals, science accepters) are attack creationism and biblical literalism, the foundation of Christianity (according to AiG).
Stephens’ posting of AiG’s comic proves that when they said, “The authors also asserted that ICR [Institute for Creation Research] and AiG argue that evolution is “responsible for much of what’s wrong with the world” (p. 36). Answers in Genesis has never stated or implied this,” that they were lying.
Glad to see conservative Christians think racism is a bad thing. This was not true half a century ago. It goes to show that even deeply-held concepts can change, albeit slowly.
It took me about 30 seconds of searching on the AiG site to find this article: The Evils of Evolution which also happens to contain the cartoon.
“Answers in Genesis has never stated or implied…”
Yeah sure, Ken. Seems you have to lie through your teeth to defend your moral highground.
A hypothetical person has an X that they believe tells him/her to do things, and a part of their belief in X is an afterlife where everything is so much better than this. To get there they have to do everything that X tells them to which includes incredibly violent acts of evil.
Replace X with Barney The Purple Dinosaur.
Now replace X with (insert deity’s name here).
Do you really want people like this in our society driving our buses, taking care of our children, making decisions about national defense, roaming our streets armed with guns, etc.
X is an invention of the human mind with no basis in fact/science/reality beyond what any particular person prefers to believe. What if a person’s preference changes to something evil?
Do you see how this could be a problem?
Religious people have no moral responsibility whatsoever.
That’s why they can say they value life one moment, and then call for the death of people who don’t accept their imaginary friend the next.
Religions are fundamentally death cults that portray life as a miserable thing to be endured, and after you die you will get sky pie in the sky pie kingdom, and sit next to the pie god.
It does not surprise me at all that religious people don’t care about conservation, saving endangered species, preserving the natural world, or really doing anything constructive/positive. In their eyes all is filth and evil if it doesn’t come from a book that a bunch of uneducated sand jockeys who thought the world was flat wrote over 2000 years ago.
When I first say this balloon I thought it might have been done by an evolutionist given the creationists’ incompetent firing, especially the guy firing at his own foundation (meant to represent theistic evolution?).