You Should Definitely Listen to Ken Ham and Philip Johnson – Carefully!

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.

Why do Christians choose to listen to someone who is clearly being duplicitous, engaging in picking and choosing as Ken Ham clearly is, rather than someone who brings not only personal faith in Jesus Christ but also relevant scientific expertise to the matter? Why do they trust Ken Ham when he treats the results of the Human Genome Project as evidence one day and as something to be ignored another?

One could say the same thing about Philip Johnson. Jeffrey Shallit suggests showing this video to all biology students:

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.

Ignoring deceivers and charlatans of this sort only allows them to dupe the poorly informed without objection. The answer is to encourage people to listen to them – carefully – and to help them understand just how these folks are attempting to deceive them, not only about science, but about the Bible.