When Ham came to Tony Evans’s church here in Dallas, he brought dinosaur replicas onto the stage.
He taught for four nights.
I made two.
A literal reading of Genesis 1-11 (including a global flood as the source of fossil deposition) as the foundation of gender and marriage and the pro-life view
Human race being a fiction as we are all “one blood”
Science confirms the Bible
Dinosaurs and kids ( a VBS was happening concurrently)
There were about 1500 people in attendance. This was predominantly an African American church.
There was a rousing worship service followed by a giveaway of two televisions. There was also a comedian.
It seems when you have large audiences you have to be entertaining (?)
Still I found it jarring for what I thought would be a lecture format.
Especially one that was going to talk about “secular darkness.”
But it was part of the church culture, and Ham at one point said he felt as if he were in a different culture.
Ham and his group at AIG consistently put Christ’s authority against the authority of “secular scientists”. “Jesus was there at the beginning, he refers to Adam and Eve, and so whom are you going to trust?”
Now how is that challenge to be answered?
His books sold like hotcakes after the nightly lectures. One of them is called “Divided Nation” and breaks the Red-Blue divide down to a clash between “the Christian worldview” and “the secular worldview”.
Evans by the way has written about voting not being a simple matter. He didn’t automatically say the Republican Party was the only one for Christians. He called people to vote as “kingdom independents”.
Ham sometimes wanders off the Darwin topic and gets a load off his chest.
In his book, he talks about contemporary worship services feeling like nightclubs where nobody sings but the professional musicians. In his talk about race, he talked about the scenario when a person of one ethnicity enters a church predominantly made of people of another and the issue of him feeling welcomed.
He went into a lot of detail about genetics one night and afterward Evans joked, “Does anyone have a headache?” That comment did make me think about what is like for an average layperson to hear a long talk about Mendelian genetics in the context of a church meeting about science.
Ham told his share of jokes as well. He did refer to how many young people were leaving the church in the last 13 years. He of course pointed to a “root-fruit” relationship.
You can Google AIG’s castle cartoons to get a sense of this
They say something like this
God’s word as the foundation
Creation
Christianity
Man’s word as the foundation
Evolution
Sexual Revolution, same-sex marriage, abortion
Ham is working hard to stay current. His castle cartoons have changed appearance since the 1980s.
His museum as well as ICR’s have distinct features. The ICR museum has holograms of “Christian” scientists, including in its opinion, Isaac Newton. No one in the late 19th or 20th century mentioned. That museum says virtually nothing about evolution. It is focused on the flood, and has video showing dinosaurs as contemperaneous with humans in the Garden of Eden.
Ham’s museum has a surprising room about what he sees as the moral chaos and nihilism of the 1960s. No such room at the ICR museum.
not a single statement you made in that long post gave me any indication of any facts that disagree with Hams worldview.
What is your point in all of this? It appears to me that you are attempting to turn stupid statements into some kind of factual evidence that proves the science of AIG wrong.
Look the point is rather simple, and very few TEists really get this…
TEism aims to be a form of Christianity. The trouble is, it rarely makes sound theological arguments to support its world view (Biologos is a good example of this issue)…the reason why is rather simple…there are none that don’t also encounter huge theological issues that completely discredit the view.
I think that is why Biologos doesnt appear to like to be called a religious denomination…its a theologically difficult position so they avoid making the claim as such (just my opinion based on comments i have had made to me from senior Biologo members).
For example:
Mosaic writings (because of Genesis 1:1) are an allegory
Problem - the earthly sanctuary and subsequent temples were real buildings we have factual evidence to prove they are real
Jewish culture still follows the Mosaic “tradition” so devoutly it’s clearly a lot more than just allegorical mumbo jumbo!
The wages of Sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ our Lord. Where is this theology found…its the theme of the entire Bible from first to the last page…the entire story of the plan of salvation is based upon this very doctrine. Its starts at the Creation of the World. The plan of salvation is only about this planet…it has nothing to do with saving anyone else anywhere else in the universe…it is specfici to planet earth only!
Christ did once for all humanity right here on earth. Sin doesnt exist anywhere else…Satan was cast down to this earth and is bound to it. He [satan] is not omnipresent. An illustration of this is found in the millenium doctrine of Revelation 20
1Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven with the key to the Abyss, holding in his hand a great chain. 2He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. 3And he threw him into the Abyss, shut it, and sealed it over him, so that he could not deceive the nations until the thousand years were complete.
Christ was physically born, physically lived, physically died on the cross, was physically raised from the dead, physically ascended into heaven, and, will physically come again at the Second Coming…problematic if death is merely Spiritual!
My point is, TEism is not a doctrine of Christianity…it is not Christian. I wonder if perhaps Ken Ham might agree with me on this point.
I saw no stupid statements in the OP, perhaps you want to make it more specific? And there’s no such thing as science of AIG… unless you want to make it “science” of AIG
Yeah, perhaps because it isn’t. Simple.
Maybe it’s cultural differences, but this seems completely inappropriate to me. I think it says a lot about the organisation if that’s how they organise their events that meant to be educational. I couldn’t possibly take anyone seriously after something like that.
Huh? Going political too?
Lol! That’s funny coming from Ham, especially in the light of what’s been described in the OP
This assertion makes more of ‘TEism’ than it really is (and likewise then, Biologos, as well). It’s as if you walked into a chef’s convention and then demanded to know which chefs present are left-handed. And after you have them isolated out, you begin to ask them about left-handed recipes or cooking techniques, or then berate the (now confused) chefs for not having any coherent left-handed distinctives that show how they are different from all the other chefs at the convention. Why aren’t they justifying their left-handedness to everyone’s satisfaction? And the chefs reply … we weren’t aware that any justification was needed! We’re just busy being chefs like everyone else.
Well, thanks for your report on what you saw/learned/perceived during the church program. I would not suppose that having various events – like a comedian’s presentation and a TV- giveaway to be out of order --especially in a days-long environment where interests and attention spans vary. And a worship service (in a church) would not have been unusual, regardless of the day of the week.
You asked “Now how is that challenge to be answered?” — referring to the regarding of Scripture over the views of “secular scientists”. Well, there is a lot more to that discussion – but evidently the event you described was not the forum for it. Assuming that all scientists are “secular” and that the Bible gives all the details of anything (like the formation of the universe) is a bit simplistic. As a visitor to one of these museums said to me: “Sometimes you can be too smart.” That was her position. Yours is a different one But thanks again for your report.
There are a variety of theological approaches that accept evolution. Some of them are not Christian; some are. Some versions of creation science are explicitly not Christian, such as Harun Yayha’s Islamic claims, the Hare Krishna “Mysterious Origins of Man” claims (which featured Carl Baugh), or Raelian ID claims. Jonathan Wells claims to be Christian while denying Christ in his ID work.
As Paul strongly emphasized in Galatians, Christianity must be about Christ; “the gospel and X” becomes a false gospel of X, whatever that “supplemental” teaching might be. When Ham claims that accepting his scientific assertions are essential to salvation, he is teaching a legalistic false gospel and not Christianity. When someone says that we can’t believe in original sin because of evolution, they are teaching a legalistic false gospel and also probably treating evolution as “PROGRESS” rather than as biological change which can provide impetus for good or for bad, as far as our innate biological tendencies go.
Being faithful to all of Scripture, from Genesis through Revelation, particularly includes faithful obedience to the basic commands. Of particular relevance here is the command to not bear false witness. Jesus commissions His followers to be His witnesses. The job of a witness is to truthfully say what we know. Jesus doesn’t say “Please be my PR agents”. In I Cor 15, Paul expresses dismay at the prospect of possibly being a false witness for God. The young-earth movement, as a whole, shows no concern for the accuracy of claims, and thus is not honoring God. For example, there is no reason to take Ham’s claims about bird evolution seriously. If there’s an assertion that he made that you are curious about, feel free to ask, but Ham has neither any particular credentials relating to ornithology nor any track record of seriously examining the data or accurately representing positions that he disagrees with.
