Ken Ham poses with dinosaur models in his unfinished $25 million Answers in Genesis museum.
Posted on 05/23/2005 3:29:06 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Ken Ham has spent 11 years working on a museum that poses the big question - when and how did life begin? Ham hopes to soon offer an answer to that question in his still-unfinished Creation Museum in northern Kentucky.
The $25 million monument to creationism offers Ham's view that God created the world in six, 24-hour days on a planet just 6,000 years old. The largest museum of its kind in the world, it hopes to draw 600,000 people from the Midwest and beyond in its first year.
Ham, 53, isn't bothered that his literal interpretation of the Bible runs counter to accepted scientific theory, which says Earth and its life forms evolved over billions of years.
Ham said the museum is a way of reaching more people along with the Answers in Genesis Web site, which claims to get 10 million page views per month and his "Answers ... with Ken Ham" radio show, carried by more than 725 stations worldwide.
"People will get saved here," Ham said of the museum. "It's going to fire people up. If nothing else, it's going to get them to question their own position of what they believe."
Ham is ready for a fight over his beliefs - based on a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.
"It's a foundational battle," said Ham, a native of Australia who still speaks with an accent. "You've got to get people believing the right history - and believing that you can trust the Bible."
Among Ham's beliefs are that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, a figure arrived at by tracing the biblical genealogies, and not 4.5 billion years, as mainstream scientists say; the Grand Canyon was formed not by erosion over millions of years, but by floodwaters in a matter of days or weeks and that dinosaurs and man once coexisted, and dozens of the creatures - including Tyrannosaurus Rex - were passengers on the ark built by Noah, who was a real man, not a myth.
Although the Creation Museum's full opening is still two years away, already a buzz is building.
"When that museum is finished, it's going to be Cincinnati's No. 1 tourist attraction," says the Rev. Jerry Falwell, nationally known Baptist evangelist and chancellor of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. "It's going to be a mini-Disney World."
Respected groups such as the National Science Board, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Science Teachers Association strongly support the theory of evolution. John Marburger, the Bush administration's science adviser, has said, "Evolution is a cornerstone of modern biology."
Many mainstream scientists worry that creationist theology masquerading as science will have an adverse effect on the public's science literacy.
"It's a giant step backward in science education," says Carolyn Chambers, chair of the biology department at Xavier University, which is operated by the Jesuit order of the Catholic church.
Glenn Storrs, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the Cincinnati Museum Center, leads dinosaur excavations in Montana each summer. He said the theory of dinosaurs and man coexisting is a "non-issue."
"And so, I believe, is the age of the Earth," Storrs said. "It's very clear the Earth is much older than 6,000 years."
The Rev. Mendle Adams, pastor of St. Peter's United Church of Christ in Pleasant Ridge, takes issue with Ham's views - and the man himself.
"He takes extraordinary liberties with Scripture and theology to prove his point," Adams said. "The bottom line is, he is anti-gay, and he uses that card all the time."
Ham says homosexual behavior is a sin. But he adds that he's careful to condemn the behavior, not the person.
Even detractors concede that Ham has appeal.
Ian Plimer, chair of geology at the University of Melbourne, became aware of Ham in the late 1980s, when Ham's creationist ministry in Australia was just a few years old.
"He is promoting the religion and science of 350 years ago," says Plimer. "He's a far better communicator than most mainstream scientists."
Despite his communication skills, Ham admits he doesn't always make a good first impression. But, that doesn't stop him from trying to spread his beliefs.
"He'd be speaking 20 hours a day if his body would let him," said Mike Zovath, vice president of museum operations.
Ham's wife of 32 years agrees. "He finds it difficult talking about things apart from the ministry," Mally Ham says. "He doesn't shut off."
Ham said he has no choice but to speak out about what he believes.
"The Lord gave me a fire in my bones," Ham says. "The Lord has put this burden in my heart: 'You've got to get this information out.'"
Wasn't that a "Quasar"?
Of course, I've had older TV's that turned into Pulsars.
Just before the Big Bang.
Well congratulations, you're an icon among Darwinists on the "list", someone who actually gives a crap about conservatism, though a small crap it would seem.
Did I miss anything?
Yeah, but why fill your head with unnecessary conservative clutter.
Just before the Big Bang.
ROTFLMAO!
BTW, those were Quasars that blew up? (should have bought a Curtis Mathes back then) LOL!
You can see a pulsar with your TV :-)
I will post more tonight.
And here is a link to Doctor Stochastic's polarized sunglasses example from post 406.
How can the unenlightened, ignorant, religious, superstitious masses so intent on the destruction of science verify this proposition?
If one is capable of logic, the proposition is verifiable just by thinking about it. A regular cosine waveform is rippling by you. The distance from wave peak to wave peak is one wavelength. The frequency is the number of wave peaks per second. The propagation speed in distance/second of the waveform past you has to be the physical length of one such peak-to-peak interval times the number per second of such intervals passing you.
Shame one has to spell it out for the logic-deprived. I guess religion really isn't all that good for the brain.
I will tonight. :-)
Hmmm. Detect a pulsar ON a pulsar. Could be a first. :-)
You da man!
Nice ste you got the pic from. :-)
Slow though.
Hehehe! I waited for 4 years on FR to do that. :-)
I like your "I am a chemistry professor" as well. I busted up laughing. How often has that setup ever fallen in your lap? :-)
Citation, please! I know of no modern birds in the Solnhofen limestone. If you've discovered one, please enlighten us all.
Off to that pesky thing called work. Will se you all tonight!
Well, it's usually followed by something disparaging of academics. But it fascinates me that some creationists really seem to believe that there are aspects to evolution that a chemistry or physics professor would determine are contrary to physical laws.
A few years ago, I had a proposal to review from an organic chemist who was making tiny molecular machines. It was beautiful work, but along the way he happened to mention that he believed some of the machines violated the second law.
Too bad. It looked like nice work.
You don't think Ham and Hovind are the same animal, but Archeopteryx is an ordinary bird. I shake my head.
I post a long list of Evofraud in response.
I ignored it, although I paused to agree with someone who noted the schizophrenic articles on Archaeopteryx. I have in the past already noted creationists dismissing Archy as 1) just a bird, 2) a fake, and 3) just a dinosaur. In creationism, it isn't how you sweep the evidence under the rug so long as you do it.
You focus on the one pair of links on Archaeopteryx that initially suspects a hoax and then dismisses it after a Creation Scientist is allowed to examine the fossils.
You guys were a little late to the party. The definitive refutation of the hoax claim was done by mainstream science in a detailed forensic examination of the fossils.
First you claim creationists are trying to have it both ways, despite the fact that the intent of what I posted was clear.
Creationists are all over the map on everything except whether evolution happens. Nobody has no ape for granddaddy.
Archaeopteryx has some characteristics that resemble a dinosour.
That plus all the other extinct species that show mixed characters are evidence that the bird group arose from the dinosaur group.
But it's not considered ancestral even by evo's to any modern birds.
Can't be determined and isn't important. It's on a branch that arose from dinosaurs and led to birds. The odds are it's a dead-end twig on that branch because there figure to be more dead-end twigs in the fossil record than there figure to be true ancestors of later forms. The whole trick of dismissing a fossil because somebody said it's probably not a direct ancestor is just dishonest. Thus, it fits right into creation science.
You see, even if not one dino-bird transitional fossil is itself a direct ancestor, they all come off of a trunk that's moving from dinosaur to bird. Thus, there's this bridge of transitionals which only exists because birds came from dinosaurs, and there's no similar bridge from fish to birds or amphibians to birds or mammals to birds. (No, the bat isn't such a bridge. It can fly, but all of its homologies are with tree-dwelling insectivores.)
And there seems to be a great dispute about whether it can truly be linked to the theropods.
Source? That skeleton is far more theropod than bird. I love the way you wave away hard evidence and lots of it with some vague mumble about something somebody said. As if your reading could be trusted. As if your integrity were not suspect at best.
Instead it's just another species. An evolutionary dead end thought to have descended from yet another unknown common ancestor.
Meaningless wave-away. Every movie still-frame is just another still picture in creationist Me-No-See-ist logic.
No. What I submit is that we operate a great deal more on the basis of faith than we do on certitude. We trust propositions made to us by science without testing for ourselves whether the statements are true. With respect to the speed of light, that is something science can observe in the present day, though it only treats of one small aspect of light. Even in the matter of the speed of light, the average person lacks the tools and intelligence to measure it.
Not always. I am not a lap dog. I don't believe everything I read. Maybe you should take a class in critical thinking before you suggest I take a class in basic astronomy.
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