Ken Ham’s Polemic Problem

A stylized caricature of a man resembling Ken Ham standing heroically at the bow of a wooden ark-like boat on dry land, holding a sword like Don Quixote. He faces a windmill in the distance, evoking a sense of misguided crusade. — Created by DALL·E (not God)

Ken Ham built a boat. Well, technically, he built a theme park shaped like a boat, complete with animatronic animals, pseudo-science dioramas, and a gift shop that peddles “God’s history” in bulk. Ham loves to remind us that “the Bible is a history book.” And if that’s true, it’s the worst history book ever written. No footnotes, no sources, and a plot that kicks off with magical trees and talking snakes.

But that’s the problem with Ham and his literalist fan club. They mistake myth for manual, poetry for proof-text. Genesis wasn’t written to answer whether velociraptors hitched a ride next to Noah’s family pet. It was written as polemic—a counter-story to the myths of empire. Ham missed that. And in missing it, he doesn’t just get the story wrong—he drains it of its power.

Genesis Isn’t Trying to Be What Ham Thinks It Is

Genesis 1–11 isn’t proto-science. It’s Israel’s mythic prologue—the underdog’s rebuttal to Babylon, Egypt, and every empire that tried to script them into submission. The surrounding cultures had their epics: violent gods birthing the cosmos through slaughter, humanity created as slaves to feed divine egos, blood and chaos as the natural order.

Genesis flips that script. Creation isn’t born out of gore—it’s spoken into being. Humanity isn’t degraded—it’s dignified. The world isn’t cursed at its foundation—it’s called “good.” In other words, Israel’s God doesn’t need slaves or blood to prove divinity. This God creates, blesses, and invites. It’s polemic in its purest form: taking the empire’s story and rewriting it with hope.

That’s the power of the text. But when Ham reads Genesis like a middle school science fair project, he guts it. What’s left is a flat, wooden caricature of the story—and ironically, that’s exactly what he built in Kentucky.

What Literalists Miss

Literalists flatten Genesis into something it was never meant to be: a bad science textbook. They scrape off the poetry, ignore the mythic subversion, and end up with a God who sounds less like a liberator and more like a cosmic lab technician. In their hands, Genesis isn’t a story of freedom—it’s a spreadsheet of divine data points.

The tragedy is that by forcing the text to answer questions it never asked, they miss the ones it actually does. Genesis is trying to tell us about who God is, who we are, and how creation itself can be seen through a lens of dignity and blessing. But when Ham & Co. read it literally, the God they proclaim looks less like a creator of beauty and more like the guy at the DMV making sure you’ve filled out your carbon-dating denial paperwork correctly.

And this is why literalists cling so hard to their boat-shaped theme parks. If you admit Genesis is polemic, the fragile scaffolding collapses. Suddenly the story isn’t about “proving” your God is better than science—it’s about asking whether your God is good at all. That’s too scary a question for a worldview built on certainty, so they double down. Hence dinosaurs on the ark, complete with saddle mounts.

Genesis gave ancient Israel hope. Literalism gives us bad apologetics, theme park rides, and a God too small to survive a serious question.

How Literalism Warps the Lens

Literalism doesn’t just shrink Genesis—it warps an entire worldview. Once you treat mythic poetry like a lab report, everything downstream gets bent out of shape. Suddenly, defending “the truth” of the Bible means trying to outwit geology, biology, and physics with felt-board logic.

Ken Ham has spent decades and millions of dollars crusading to prove the earth is 6,000 years old. He insists humans lived side by side with dinosaurs—as if The Flintstones was a documentary. He waves off carbon dating as a hoax and paints scientists as part of a grand conspiracy against God. And then, to crown it all, he builds a fiberglass ark in Kentucky as “proof” of God’s word.

This isn’t science—it’s cosplay in a lab coat. It’s theology dressed up in safety goggles, hoping nobody notices the equations don’t add up. And it lands them right next to the flat earth crowd (and let’s be honest, the Venn diagram of followers is basically a circle). Both movements thrive on the same recipe: allergy to evidence, distrust of expertise, and a siege mentality that says, “The world is out to get us, so only we have the truth.”

The result is a bunker faith, where believing = rejecting reality. It’s no wonder their God feels small, fragile, and always on the defensive. If you need dinosaurs on an ark to prop up your theology, maybe it’s not God you’re defending—it’s your own fear.

The Fragile Faith Problem

Literalism isn’t about reverence for Scripture—it’s about fear. A fear that if one brick gets pulled from the wall, the whole thing comes down. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the reaction you get when you suggest Genesis might be a polemic rather than a newspaper article from 4004 BCE.

I watched it happen in seminary. We were assigned the Epic of Gilgamesh, and you could feel the collective theological panic ripple through the room. For some of the pastors-in-training, it was like watching their childhood pet get run over in slow motion. Genesis wasn’t original? Other flood stories came first? Suddenly, the “literal truth” they’d been trained to defend felt a lot less stable.

But rather than wrestle with the implications, they defaulted to theological triage: “Well, that’s just one interpretation.” They couldn’t let go of the idea that Genesis must be literal history because their faith was built on that assumption. They weren’t defending Scripture—they were defending their scaffolding.

That’s the real crisis. Literalism builds a faith so brittle that it can’t absorb questions, can’t explore nuance, and certainly can’t handle context. So when confronted with the ancient literary world the Bible was born into, they flinch. They retreat. And then they double down—building theme parks to insulate themselves from the reality that Scripture is far more alive, complex, and dangerous than they were taught to believe.

Hope vs. Ham

Genesis was never about fossil records, boat blueprints, or kangaroo migration patterns. It was—and still is—a protest story. A radical reimagining of God, creation, and humanity told by people who lived on the margins of empire. It was an act of literary resistance, a declaration that the world isn’t ruled by violence and chaos, but by a God who blesses, speaks life, and walks with the powerless.

Ken Ham turned that into an amusement park.

By reducing Genesis to a literal play-by-play of ancient history, Ham and his fellow fundamentalists don’t just miss the genre—they miss the heart of the thing. They trade subversive poetry for apologetics puppetry. They swap a liberating God for a cosmic fact-checker. And they sell faith like it’s a souvenir from a fake boat ride.

But the deeper tragedy? In their desperate attempt to prove the Bible is “true,” they make it irrelevant. Because once the dinosaurs are gone and the carbon dating holds up, what’s left of their gospel? Not hope. Not liberation. Just wood, nails, and fear.

The ark wasn’t built to win a debate. It was built to survive a flood. The question Genesis invites us to ask isn’t, “Did it really happen this way?” but “What kind of God shows up in the storm?”

And that answer—the one Ham can’t theme-park his way around—is that the God of Genesis sides with the vulnerable, confronts the empire, and always leaves the door cracked open for a better world.

That’s the story worth telling. That’s the boat worth boarding.