You should never listen to anyone uncritically, without looking into questions such as their relevant expertise and qualifications, their biases and assumptions, and looking to see whether they are treating the subject they are talking about fairly or are engaging in spin in an attempt to dupe you.
But you should indeed listen to them. And listen carefully.
Take Ken Ham, for instance. Thanks to Jim Kidder, I became aware that Ham responded to the recent incident involving a church acting in a reprehensible discriminatory fashion towards an interracial couple. Ham responded not only by emphasizing the Bible’s teaching that all humans are descended from the same common ancestors and thus a single race (although that didn’t stop Christians in the past from using the Bible to discriminate, of course – think the infamous view many Christians had regarding “mark of Cain”), but also pointing to the Human Genome Project, which provides tangible evidence that human beings are a single species.
When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2000, scientists announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome and “the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race—the human race.”
The report also stated: “But the more closely that researchers examine the human genome—the complement of genetic material encased in the heart of almost every cell of the body—the more most of them are convinced that the standard labels used to distinguish people by ‘race’ have little or no biological meaning.”
Francis Collins, who was the head of the Human Genome Project, is an Evangelical Christian. He is persuaded that the scientific evidence points clearly to evolution having occurred. Ken Ham has had denigration and scorn to offer towards Collins in the past. Notice that Ham is happy to appeal to the evidence of the human genome project when it suits him, but is happy to denigrate a fellow Christian who is actually a scientist when it suits him, even though the two are connected.
As long as they grasp the basics of biology first, they will see that they are being lied to in the video, and I suspect that most of them would make the appropriate choice about how to view Johnson and his movement. One could even annotate the video, pointing out lie after lie.
And one could do the same in the case of many other of the popular false teachers of our time.
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