Ken Ham at BVG

So... I did a thing! Well, my dad and brother and I did a thing. We saw Ken Ham speak at Big Valley Grace tonight. It's been around 5 years since we've set foot on these grounds and it evoked a lot of emotion for us. It was awesome coming back to our old stomping grounds and seeing some people we hadn't seen in a long time (but still retain contact with on Facebook). We had a lovely ride from our parking spot to the building on a really cool shuttle. The music was excellently played and emotionally intoxicating. But it was weird for us also, not so much in the ways the church has changed but maybe more in the ways it was familiar and unchanged. Familiar architecture. Familiar ideas. I spent so much time on this campus! The building feels like home.

The message Mr. Ham gave really wasn't very rich in apologetic arguments like we were hoping. He started by explaining the dramatic and consistent decrease in church membership through the generations of the last 100-ish years and made his case as to WHY he believes apologetics is an important endeavor. He also noted statistics in the steadily decreasing condemnation of homosexuality. He blames the increase of atheism on the failure of the church. He gave a lot of citations from the book of Genesis and emphasized that chapters 1-11 are foundational to all of the 'truths' of God's Word. Ham is VERY fundamentalist and that much was clear (not that it wasn't obvious to us long before). He spent a considerable amount of time lamenting the increasingly widespread LGBTQ+ acceptance, which was a consistent theme in his message while justifying that he's not being "hateful." He argued that "two of each kind" on the ark does not mean "two of each species" but explained how it would have been two dogs or two cats, for example, which were then the ancestors of all known species of canines and felines, while, in the same breath, insisting that the speciation following the flood is NOT evolution. He says all animals before the fall were vegetarian and that the fossil record showing evidence of disease and carnivorous diet came AFTER sin was introduced to the world. Many of his arguments rested on reductions of complex issues into simple dichotomies. The lobby had tables piled high with books, disks, and curriculum for sale with Ken Ham's name on them.

I left the church feeling sad. It was kind of hard on all three of us in different ways. We love the people and the community, but it was clear that there was no place there for people who think like us. Though there were friendly faces and joyful reunions with people that we love dearly, they were a contrast to an environment that, to us, felt hostile - partially because of what we've learned since we left and partially because of the face that community showed us when we dared to question their core beliefs. It feels so much safer when you don't know too much. The "us vs. them" mentality, the homophobia, the condemnation of not only atheists but even other Christians who have different understandings of the world... those things saturated the language of the music and messages. We were blind to it when we were under the spell. It was so enticing to want to unsee everything we learned that made us now feel alienated where we used to feel "home." There was no way that the church had seemed to grow intellectually since we left. I still long for community, but I want one that celebrates exploration of ideas, growth in understanding, and a willingness to challenge traditional attitudes. This could never be "home" for us like it once was because I think the world is so much more amazing when we stop trying to protect beliefs that are dear to us.

"We are honored to host Ken Ham, CEO and founder of Answers in Genesis and founder of the highly acclaimed Creation Museum! Ken is a biblical apologist, originally from Australia, who is passionate about the relevance and authority of God's Word. He gives numerous faith-building talks to tens of thousands of children and adults each year, along with authoring many books. He is one of the most in-demand Christian conference speakers and talk show guests. In 2016, he opened the Ark Encounter, which drew over two million visitors and media in its first two years. As millions of people have experienced the life-sized Ark, the truth of God's Word has been explained and shown through the exhibits. Ken's emphasis is how the book of Genesis is relevant to every Christian and how compromise on God's Word opens dangerous doors regarding how the church and the culture view biblical authority."

Notice how he depicts the secular worldview as being made of sand while the Christian worldview is made of stone - per the house's foundation parable.

Graph depicting natural selection is a degradation of quality and weeding out of information. Strange because the process labeled as "natural selection" shows an example of artificial selection. He acknowledges slight evolution but refuses to call it by its name.

Ah... yea... racism is NOT a part of "the secular worldview," but but I see your earnest effort to make it look like you're on higher moral ground. Notice again the use of sand and stone imagery.

My review of Francis Collins's "The Language of God"

I finally got around to reading this "The Language of God" and I have to say that it was one of the most unexpectedly memorable books I've read. I became interested in this book after seeing a couple different authors mention it in their own books and I found a copy at my local used bookstore. Francis Collins is a human physician/geneticist, led the human genome project, and one of the world's leading scientists in the search to treat genetic diseases. He is also a devout Christian.

This book's primary objective is to convince readers that faith and science are totally compatible. He addresses both skeptics and believers alike. He implores believers not to be afraid of science and makes a MOUNTAIN of excellent arguments why a believer's faith may be strengthened and matured, but not threatened by the overwhelming scientific consensus on various issues including but not limited to evolution and cosmology. He also addresses skeptics with his defense as to why belief in a God like the Judeo-Christian God he worships is the most logical worldview. I think he does a better job speaking to believers than he does to skeptics.

Unquestionably, this man is brilliant. I learned a lot reading this book. But his arguments in defense of Christian apologetics were devastatingly ordinary. I read this book primarily out of curiosity about what a world renowned scientist's theistic Christian faith would look like. Very little of what I read in this book was new to me, but I have never read a book with this combination of scientific and religious worldviews. He delivers scathing rebuttals to young earth creationism, "intelligent design," "God of the gaps" thinking, and biblical literalism - possibly better than any that I've ever read (and I've read some good ones). His rebuttals to atheism and agnosticism sadly only address very narrow definitions of very broad descriptive terms.

His Apologetic Arguments

He proposes a worldview he calls "BioLogos" which is essentially that God designed the universe and the laws in which it operates and set the big bang in motion without needing to intervene because his design was perfect from the beginning. He designed the universe to be hospitable to life and allowed planets such as our own to independently produce their own life, knowing in advance what would evolve. Unlike a deistic God, who would have created us and then left, Collins believes that God remains present in our world and throughout the universe. As for mankind, Collins suggests that at a certain point in our evolution, God endowed us with our souls or "humanity" and that, before that moment, we were just advance apes.

Toward the end of the book, he claims that this belief does not rely on "God of the gaps" thinking - that it will "not go out of style or be disproved by future scientific discoveries." Earlier in the chapter, he says,

"BioLogos doesn't try to wedge God into gaps in our understanding of the natural world; it proposes God as the answer to questions science was never intended for address, such as, 'How did the universe get here?' 'What is the meaning of life?' 'What happens to us after we die?' Unlike Intelligent Design, BioLogos is not intended as a scientific theory. Its truth can only be tested by the spiritual logic of the heart, the mind, and the soul."

Besides the fact that "spiritual logic" has never been shown to produce consistently reliable results, his worldview STILL relies on "God of the gaps" thinking. "How did the universe get here?" That's a totally scientific question. There are right and wrong answers and empiricism is necessary. "What is the meaning of life?" Philosophical question that should rely heavily on scientific data. "What happens to us after we die?" Also a scientific question about which answers should not be embraced without empirical backing.

In the last chapter, he refers to a parable about a man who went deep-sea fishing with a net with holes 3 inches wide and concluded that there were no fish smaller than 3 inches. "If we are using the scientific net to catch our particular version of truth, we should not be surprised that it does not catch the evidence of spirit." That is a lazy argument and this is why: If there is indeed supernatural activity happening around us in this world and it has ANY impact on our natural lives, it would leave natural evidence. Think like waves left by a ship. You don't have to see the ship to be able to deduce by its waves that it just passed.

He spends a considerable time discussing an objective and universal "moral law" but merely expects the reader to agree with his assumption that it is self-evident and real. He frequently cites worn out C.S. Lewis arguments. He insists that God is a monotheistic God, desires a personal relationship with us and is benevolent, but gives no defense for why he believes those things besides emotional anecdotes from his life.

Conclusion

In this, I found a surprising mix of extremely well-defended arguments with profoundly poorly-defended arguments. I think he spent more than 50% of the book making sense. The appendix of this book addressed concerns of bioethics and deepened my understanding of cloning and stem cell research. But the parts where he wasn't making sense had me pulling my hair out and scribbling comments in the margins. To me, reading this book was an overwhelming testimony to the fact that exceedingly intelligent people (and arguably Francis Collins could be in the genius territory) are still susceptible to really dumb ideas. I have no doubt that Collins is smarter than I and he is undoubtedly also a kindhearted individual, but his credibility did not make his apologetics more believable. If anything, it made it shocking that so much critical thinking could be shut off in only certain areas of his intellectual life. Nevertheless, I respect the shit out of this guy. I'm really glad he wrote this book and I'm really glad I read it. I absolutely recommend it. Whether you are a devout Christian, a fully-horned atheist such as myself, or somewhere else, it's a book that keeps you on your toes and you're likely to learn a lot.