A grove of aspen trees that proves Ken Ham is full of it

Meet Pando, also called the Trembling Giant. It’s a single grove of quaking aspen trees in Utah.

The grove is “essentially one massive root system” containing “around 47,000 stems that create the grove of trees that keep the root system going.”

And it has been growing, continuously, for 80,000 years.

The Pando aspen grove, in other words, began growing 74,000 years before young-earth creationists like Ken Ham say the universe began.

So you can study legitimate biblical scholars and learn from them that Ken Ham is full of crap and that his “Answers in Genesis” are based on recent, illiterate misreadings of the Bible.

Or you can go to Utah and stand in the shade of trees that prove it.

Pando is in Fishlake National Forest, near Richfield. It’s less than a three-hour drive south of Salt Lake City.

If Ken Ham or Al Mohler or Denny Burk or any other prominent advocate of pseudo-biblical young-earth creationism wanted to, they could book a flight to Salt Lake City, rent a car, and drive to Fishlake. There they could rent a cabin and spend a relaxing vacation walking among the beautiful trees — trees they can see and touch and smell — that stand as proof that their exegesis is nonsense and must be changed.

I suspect they don’t want to do that, but they should. The price of a trip to Utah is a lot cheaper than the price of spending the rest of your life promoting ideas that can be, and have been, disproved.

(See also, Michael C. Grant, “The Trembling Giant.”)