Ham and Wilkins on Downe

I prayed, "Lord, bring down this 'house'--this 'house' of evolution that has permeated cultures around the world."

I hope that beautiful house has some protection. The fundies are nutjobs that may bring that wish to fruition for several reasons.

From Ham's site:

In the last exhibit in Darwin's house, I stood there and read the results of Darwin's legacy. Read this for yourself and weep:

Many Christians believed that the world and everything in it, including mankind, had been created by God in the beginning and had remained unaltered [sic] ever since.

... (E)very living creature looked the way it did because God had designed it that way. Darwin's theory made nonsense of all of this [emphasis mine].

These quotes were actually superimposed over the text of Genesis chapter 1 presented in the exhibit!

Does anyone have a link to a picture of that? I love to see "Darwin's theory made nonsense of all of this" superimposed on a copy of Genesis.

PZ:

It may interest you to know that I pray that the 'Answers in Genesis house' come crashing down, metaphorically speaking. Or that, alternatively, that those of us who care about biology play predator to his 'pray.' And what is it with us Americans? I sure do see a lot of Brit and Aussie expatriates peddling products on infomercials/shopping networks, as if the mere fact of speaking differently lends a veneer of class to the enterprise; in that respect, Ham's just another in a line of folk who dress up a misleading con with an accent.

Peeved at our gullibility....Scott

After looking at that wedding picture, I can't believe the bride went through with it.

Genesis is lovely, as creation myths go. But Christians ought to realize there are any number of other creation myths, all equally lovely. And none nearly as interesting as the scientific theories of how all things came to be. ;^)

After looking at that wedding picture, I can't believe the bride went through with it.

Neither can I. That guy would scare cattle.

Ken Ham tells us about the subject of his new book:

Our new book, coauthored with me by my youngest brother Stephen, is called Genesis of a Legacy. This book traces our upbringing and shares the influence that a godly father (and mother) had on the lives of their six children.

funny, I thought there were already plenty of books on child abuse out there.

"I hope that beautiful house has some protection. The fundies are nutjobs that may bring that wish to fruition for several reasons."

I haven't been - it's only a few miles away, but I'm not the pilgrimage type. I'd be surprised if it had any protection.

But if it did get attacked or destroyed, better believe that something better would be put in its place. As a nation, we're dead proud of Charles Darwin and have him on our money (we also have By The Grace Of God and Defender of the Faith on the coins, but as these are in abbreviated Latin and only apply to the Queen, I reckon we can get away with it).

R

Ken Ham (and I do adore it when people I despise have been Xened or adopted names right out of a Charles Dickens novel like that!) reminds me of that line from "Airplane!" that I can never remember quite right.
It's near the end, as the plane is coming into the airport, and the ATC is reading off its altitude. It goes something like:

"20,000 feet! 5,000 feet! 12,000 feet! What an asshole!"

If he wants to defeat us, he'll need to campaign against logic, evidence, skepticism, the scientific method, and thinking...oh, wait. Darn.

Somehow that reminded me of

He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious.

PZ, I second Donna when she says "Genesis is lovely, as creation myths go."

Genesis is no more nonsense than Oedipus Rex. What's nonsense is reading it as if it were history or science. The problem isn't the text but the reader.

Just for sheer, laugh-out-loud hilarity regarding the so-called "Answers in Genesis" site, one must read the numerous explanations that Ken Ham et al have come up with in an effort to describe how it is that in a universe supposedly only 6,000 years old (or, as someone on this site said, a universe that was formed around the same time the Sumerians were inventing glue), starlight from points billions of light-years away had somehow made the trip in less than 1/1,000,000th of the time necessary.

I was slightly impressed (only slightly) that Ham and his idiot bunch scoffed at the "created light" possibility, but his true explanation, that light was somehow sped up by riding on the crest of an expanding "white hole" left me gasping for relief from the utter nonsense of it all. I have absolutely no educational background in the field of quantum mechanics and astrophysics, but a quick Google search for "white holes" led me to a number of sites that explained how such entities could not exist in our universe, something I'm sure Ham and company were hoping their less-astute readers would not bother to do.

If Ken Ham and his "Answers in Genesis" crowd are the worst that Down House has to worry about, I believe the house will be just fine: Ham's creationists probably believe the world is flat anyway, and would end up falling off the edge if they tried to make the trek to merry old England.

Where to begin, where to begin.

Ham's site said:

Darwin's legacy, according to his home, was to make "nonsense" of the authority of God's Word in Genesis. But my father's legacy was to stand on the authority of God's Word beginning in Genesis: two very different homes.

Ham clearly has difficulty distinguishing fact from "what authority said." Jefferson warned us there would be illiterates who could not read the Bible and so would make hash of it, like Ham does -- Jefferson held particular contempt for people like that. He held in higher contempt people who could read, but who misinterpreted scripture for others, as Ham does (if he can read). These people are tyrants, Jefferson warned -- and around the dome of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington is inscribed his response to their pettifoggery, in a letter to Benjamin Rush: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal opposition to every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Thomas Jefferson's legacy is in direct opposition to Ken Ham's disinformation efforts. Don't forget that. This is a very old fight.

Apart from the awkward phrasing -- Darwin's home doesn't really say anything, it's an inanimate object -- assuming Ham quotes the display correctly (and I don't think he could do that), there are better authorities on Darwin's wishes toward the church. Darwin bore no ill will toward Christianity in general nor to any church, but he expressed great displeasure at people who advocated abominable doctrine and claimed it as Christian. As a Christian, I regard most of Ham's work in that latter category. Darwin did not intend to "make nonsense" of Genesis; that was the opposite of what he wanted. It was also the opposite of what he set out to do, aboard the Beagle. Darwin's task was to find the evidence that would, once and for all, confirm Genesis as scientifically accurate. When he had the evidence assembled, it revealed a different story. Darwin, being an honest man, told what the evidence revealed. Ham, lacking the ethics of Darwin, tells a different tale. Whom should the good Christian listen to -- the man who ethically tells the truth, or the one who does not?

Why doesn't Ham know the story of Charles Darwin? What in the world -- or out of it -- keeps him from telling the truth?

Christians will tell you that the Word of God can be found in scripture; but wise, schooled and honest Christians know that not all words in scripture is to be taken literally, nor is all of it the Word of God. If Ham's father told him something different, he lacked the good character of a man like Darwin. Ham may revere his father and never see that, and that's too bad.

Consider the good that could have been done with the $25 million Ham spent on his mis-information emporium in Kentucky. We can see now what a waste that was.

Hmmm. There was some guy mumbling when I was there. I thought it was just one of the attendants compaining about colonials...

Ed,

I like you I really do and agree with much of what you say here but this is, well, odd.

He held in higher contempt people who could read, but who misinterpreted scripture for others, as Ham does (if he can read

This implies that there is one way to interpret 'scripture' which is just profoundly silly. No one has settled on anything and never will simply because there is no real way to know. My way? If it conflicts with reality choose the one that conflicts the least.

and then

but wise, schooled and honest Christians know that not all words in scripture is to be taken literally, nor is all of it the Word of God.

I gotta tell you this reeks to me. There is no way to prove which parts are literal and the word of God or not. Simply no way on Earth. Not only is there no way, there never likely will be. In this regard I find the AIG folks much more consistent than those that pretend they can tell what is Gods word and what isn't.

That idea puts a large stink on the entire thing.

Genesis is lovely, as creation myths go.

Eh? Can you name any other such myth which includes the creator putting an eternal curse on the entire human race?

Our old friend Timothy Birdbrain is back. This time he is talking about panspermia, ID, and evolution; and his whole argument ends up as one big confusing mish-mash:

But that is neither here nor there; the point of this essay is to illustrate the connection between ID and Panspermia. Darwinian defenders (like the Panda`s Rectum crowd) turn purple whenever the topic of Intelligent Design is raised, and immediately try to shout down the opposition, yet they have been strangely silent about a corollary proposition-one advocated by such men as Francis Crick and Fred Hoyle. Panspermia is the theory that life on Earth came from elsewhere. It either drifted here by accident via comets or somesuch or it was intentionally engineered. (The latter was advocated by Francis Crick, who realized that life on Earth could not have evolved in the fashion Darwin believed.) Directed Panspermia argues that some alien intelligence seeded the Earth (and probably other places) with specially tailored genetic packages to produce a biological explosion. This fits with what we know about the development of life on Earth; there seems to have been a sudden explosion of life during the Pre-Cambrian (which is at odds with the view of Natural Selection, which says life should have been steadily evolving.) The Pan-Spermers (to coin a phrase) would argue that this point in time is when the seed-ship arrived. As Robert Zubrin has pointed out in his book The Case for Mars, astronauts have actually carried bacteria to the Moon and back-and the bacteria was fine! Evolution argues that developing new characteristics requires mutations while organisms retain old characteristics in their genetic makeup, and these Earthly organisms seem well adapted to space travel. Suggestive, no?

Ken Ham may be one step ahead... to financial trouble.

"Now, while we're so thrilled to see so many people becoming excited by the Creation Museum project and have given generously (the museum is scheduled to open, debt-free, in 10 months), we face a challenge this month. While we continue to raise funds for the museum, the rest of the ministry needs increased support or we cannot continue at our current level."

"Genesis is lovely, as creation myths go."

Huh? I thought it was universally understood that buddism has the loveliest and simplest myth of all religions.

Also, while personal rebirth is bogus, it happens to be a lovely metaphor for universe "rebirth" in chaotic inflation, currently the best cosmology we have. It is hard to grasp why people is infected with the christian meme instead - buddism is best from a spiritual, religious and scientific perspective. (Not that the later imply that it is correct...)

Panspermia is the theory that life on Earth came from elsewhere. It either drifted here by accident via comets or somesuch or it was intentionally engineered. (The latter was advocated by Francis Crick, who realized that life on Earth could not have evolved in the fashion Darwin believed.)

Excerpts from the Francis Crick article on Wikipedia, with my emphases:

...Steyn's critique of Crick ignored the fact that Crick never held a belief in panspermia. Crick explored the hypothesis that it might be possible for life forms to be moved from one planet to another. What "drove" Crick towards speculation about directed panspermia was the difficulty of imagining how a complex system like a cell could arise under pre-biotic conditions from non-living chemical components. After ribozymes were discovered, Crick became much less interested in panspermia because it was then much easier to imagine the pre-biotic origins of life as being made possible by some set of simple self-replicating polymers.

In a 1987 case before the Supreme Court, Crick joined a group of other Nobel laureates who advised that, "'Creation-science' simply has no place in the public-school science classroom."[47] Crick was also an advocate for the establishment of Darwin Day as a British national holiday[48].

-pr

"currently the best cosmology we have"

Ie, AFAIK compatible with the established Lambda-CDM cosmology while embedding it in the larger perspective I discuss here.

Millions around the world are being led astray by this horrible legacy. We can see the effects of it nearly everywhere: millions of students are being taught that Genesis is "nonsense."

Actually, I disagree with this - Phil Collins is really annoying and I find his music bland and uninteresting.

I prayed, "Lord, bring down this 'house'--this 'house' of evolution that has permeated cultures around the world."

Lol, there's some of that deeeep meeeesteeeerious symbolism that the Lord likes so much. As I recall, those disciple guys that used to hang out with Jesus never did get a straight answer from him about anything. I think they just kinda went around scratching their heads all day. And those poor, poor Pharisees. Man, did he ever mess with their heads. Wow.

Phil Collins is really annoying and I find his music bland and uninteresting.

Ah, but what about the Peter Gabriel years?

--pr

GH:

Theology doesn't appear to be your bag. Praising hyper-literal YEC like Ken Ham for the 'consistency' of their views strikes me as, if anything, ironic. These folk are only consistent in the sense that they are willing to commit almost any violence to the original sense of the text in order for it to agree with their preconceived view of the Bible.

Do you feel that Ken Ham's organization is 'consistent' in the sort of evidence it presents in the scientific arena, or that their arguments are 'consistent' with good scientific practice? I don't feel that either is the case; like most creationists, they 'cherry-pick' their arguments and attempt to redefine science to suit their understanding of the Bible. Surely you don't regard that as 'consistent'?

I doubt very much that you do, GH. You know better. What's sad is that YEC like Ken Ham commit the same sort of violence to the Bible and Christian theology. They typically feel no obligation to present evidence to justify their interpretation of the text as such to their fellow Christians, for example, and they routinely 'cherry-pick' which passages to treat literally without regard to any objective standard (and such standards exist) and ignore any scholarship which points to different interpretations. Their only consistency in approaching two millenia of Christian tradition is that foolish consistency, the 'hobgoblin of little minds' who have already made up their minds how to read the Bible before they have read it.

Please don't reply with some appeal to obscurantism about nothing of the original sense of the text is known, or that all views are somehow equally valid. Such arguments have no force. We don't make this artificial (and false!) distinction about non-Christian works from antiquity. We may not know whether or not the author(s) of the Iliad believed in literal or figurative gods, for example, but we can with confidence reject absurdities: Achilles is not a woman, for instance, nor is Ullyses a caricature of one of the Pharoahs. In the same way, much of the Bible can be parsed either as a popular history or as literature, and orthodoxy has always held that the latter passages are not well served by a literal interpretation.

Now, before you crucify me for invoking orthodoxy, let me be quick to add that I am not pushing doctrine/dogma on you. I'm not arguing that orthodoxy is true; for the purpose of discussion, it might well be false. What matters is not the question of whether or not this or that religious claim is true in this case; what matters is whether or not the interpretation is consistent with the original sense of the text. We may never be able to say with confidence what the absolute intent of the author is in individual cases, but we can certainly exclude those interpretations which are ahistorical---which describes the 19th century fundamentalism and the 'Flood geology' of Ken Ham to a 'T'.

SH

I prayed, "Lord, bring down this 'house'--this 'house' of evolution..."

But didn't Darwin's house get the building permits?

Curse you, Ken Ham, you're always one step ahead of us!

Not this time: John posted his tales of daring-do a full five days earlier!

Bob

I said earlier, of Jefferson: "He held in higher contempt people who could read, but who misinterpreted scripture for others, as Ham does . . ."

GH said:

This implies that there is one way to interpret 'scripture' which is just profoundly silly. No one has settled on anything and never will simply because there is no real way to know. My way? If it conflicts with reality choose the one that conflicts the least.

I certainly didn't mean to make such an implication. Jefferson thought education necessary so everyone could read, so everyone could read the Bible and see that the "priests" were saying something quite different from what the Bible said. Jefferson's views on interpreting scripture square well with yours -- he advised his nephew, Peter Carr, to view it with high skepticism.

Jefferson took issue with the idea that there is just one way to view scripture, and he took great issue with the idea that any cleric had greater understanding than anyone else who could read the scripture.

He held in greatest contempt those who intentionally misinterpreted scripture. It's only my opinion, but I think Ham fits that latter category.

"All Christian doctrines (our Christian worldview, morality, etc.) are founded in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. They are not "nonsense"--they are real history. These chapters are part of the infallible, inerrant Word of God."

That is interesting since Genesis 2 completely contradicts Genesis 1 on the creation myth. Since they say divergent contradictory things, how can they both be the "infallible, inerrant Word of God"?

I really must go to Downe - I've driven past the house several times.
I usually go, however, to an even greater "temple" to learning and rational scientific endeavour that is also one of the most civilsed places on the Planet.
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

I wonder wat Ken Hambrain would think of there, or the equally marvellous Geological/Natural History museums in Kensington?

Interestingly enough, Genesis actually mentions the Royal Gardens at Kew ("Return of the Giant Hogweed", from Nursery Cryme).

We can see the effects of it nearly everywhere: millions of students are being taught that Genesis is "nonsense."

Actually, I disagree with this - Phil Collins is really annoying and I find his music bland and uninteresting.

Genesis died the day Peter Gabriel left.

bmurray:

Couldn't disagree with you more. Even if you don't like the slick pop enterprise they became after the success of Collins' solo work, 'A Trick of the Tale' and 'Abacab' are wonderful albums in the post-Gabriel period. And, while 'Duke' is not that much as a concept album, the single 'Turn it On Again' is one of that happy but vanishingly small set of pop tunes to employ mixed meters.

Scott