Richard Mason Williams Jr. drew the following quote from Ken Ham’s Facebook page to my attention:
I spoke to a couple of guys last night who claimed they were atheists (although there are no true atheists). One of them said he totally agreed that Christians need to believe a literal Genesis if they are to believe the rest of the Bible. I often find the skeptics understand how foundational the book of Genesis is Christianity more than many Christian leaders!
Richard added a comment, which I wanted to share part of because it seemed to me really insightful:
It is curious to me that KH reads the Bible the same way that atheists do and agrees with their ideas more often “than many Christian leaders” do. Perhaps that says both atheists and KH have similar hermeneutical principles, that KH reads the Bible with these ideas and sees truth and the atheist sees falsity, but both read it the same way, only their conclusions differ. What is even more curious is that he believes this is a good thing.
Ham reads the Bible the same way that atheists do, the same way that leads more and more people to atheism, but he has no qualms about doing so. Quite the contrary! He prefers to reject the conclusions of the Christian (and other) Biblical scholars who have dedicated their lives to studying the Bible, and opts for an approach that leads many to atheism.
Someone remind me again why there is in some Christian circles the belief that this man represents Christianity, and does so more faithfully than others? Does that not show how possible it is for Christians to be misled and yet to take pride that they are following the true path even so? How has he managed to deceive so many people?
Let me end on a lighter note. In the same post on his Facebook page, Ham linked to a web page for the Belfast Skeptics, which included an image from Ham’s organization, Answers in Genesis:
I know that the message of such propaganda is supposed to be that young-earth creationists and everyone else looks at the same evidence, and it is just that one chooses God’s Word as the lens while the other chooses mere human theories. That is of course bogus, both because dedicated Christians who work in Biblical studies or the natural sciences regularly draw the same conclusions based on the same evidence as other scholars and scientists, because the evidence itself points clearly in one direction. And the lens of young-earth creationism is in fact one that twists the Bible to fit its needs.
But putting that to one side, my first thought when seeing the image, and in particular the man on the right, was that its message is this: in order to draw young-earth creationist conclusions, it is not enough to be looking at dinosaurs through the lens of the Bible. You have to be Ray Comfort looking at dinosaurs through the lens of the Bible.
See also Dan Phelps’ post “Behind the Scenes at the Creation Museum” at The Panda’s Thumb.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In