Creation Science Rebuttals

Answers in Genesis Daily Feature

Ham Can't Tell the Simple Truth! (They Can't Allow "It")

12 September 2005

Review by Greg Neyman

© Old Earth Ministries

First Published 8 Sep 2003

Once again, creation science advocate Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis is showing his willful ignorance of old earth belief. In an article titled “They can’t allow “it”!," he says that old earth creationists cannot allow belief in a global flood, because it would destroy millions of years of supposed history.1 The flood would “destroy (rightly) evolution’s millions of years of history, as supposedly recorded in the fossils found in the layers of rock.”

It’s not a matter of destroying the evidence for evolution…it’s a matter of what the fossil record actually testifies to. As it is, the evidence supports evolution quite nicely. Isn’t it strange that a global flood would produce perfectly ordered fossils that support evolution!

A global flood, as proposed by Ham, would have mixed up the fossils, giving them no recognizable pattern with which to formulate an evolutionary theory. The fact that they show increasingly complex organisms, and are stratigraphically separated, is indication that millions of years is correct. For instance, the young earth creation science model says the layers of the Grand Canyon are Flood deposited, but they contain no dinosaurs. Dinosaur fossils are all located in the Mesozoic rocks, which are stratigraphically above the Grand Canyon layers. How did the dinosaurs survive to this point? At a minimum, over a mile of sediment was deposited by the floodwaters, yet the dinosaurs lived through it all!

To get around this problem, some young earth creationists claim that the dinosaur bodies floated, and were deposited in the higher layers after their bodies reached a certain point of bloating. This theory fails also, due to the trace fossils. All the trace fossil evidence for dinosaurs (eggs, footprints, nests, etc) are located in the rock layers with the fossils, indicating they lived at the time the rocks were deposited. Now we have dinosaurs walking, breeding, eating, etc., right in the middle of Noah's Flood! The young earth creation science model does not make sense of the dinosaur evidence. The position of the dinosaur fossils within the geologic column is all the evidence you need to disprove a global flood 4,300 years ago.

Ham’s simplistic approach will convince the young earth reader, who is trained to accept the words of young earth experts without question, but it falls flat on its face when examined. For instance, he says, “Well, let me put it another way: if there really was a global Flood, you would expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth … which is exactly what you do find!” He is correct that we find billions of dead things…but they are arranged in such a way which defies a global flood. Although the premise of Ham's statement about fossils is true, the logic behind the claim that it supports a global flood is flawed. If you stop at Ham’s statement, and take it as fact, then you will never know the full truth.

For instance, consider mammals. In the global flood model, there should be an even mixing of fossil types, such as dinosaurs with mammals, mammals with trilobites, humans with dinosaurs, etc. But this is not what we see. Why did the flood not kill any mammals during the first 20,000+ feet of deposited rock layers? All the mammals must be excellent swimmers to have survived such harsh conditions!

He criticizes Dr. Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, for saying that a flood of only one year and ten days duration would not deposit a notable sedimentary layer. He goes on to chide Ross, with “So, what do you do when the evidence is obviously there? You just wave it away with a “magic wand” by saying there is no way an event we’ve never witnessed could do that.” Again, he oversimplifies the argument. Ham is basically saying that Ross is ignoring the thousands of feet of sediment with fossils, which Ham interprets as caused by the Flood. His emotional tirade will sound good to young earth creationists, but it is not based in fact. The layers of rock do not match the young earth creation science model, and they all indicate great age. There is no evidence for a worldwide flood…there is no need to wave a “magic wand” to dispose of evidence which does not exist.

Ham then deliberately misleads the young earth creationist reader by saying, “To believe in a local flood, then, is to say that God broke His promise.” This is not true. God never again killed mankind with a flood of the same magnitude as the Flood of Noah. He said He would never again wipe man off the face of the earth, and our being here today is proof of his fulfilled promise. The promise is still good to this day.

He again deliberately misleads by saying that those who believe in millions of years are “proclaiming that the words of Genesis 6-9 cannot be taken as written.” Old earth creationists, including Ross and myself, have shown that you can take a literal interpretation of Genesis 6-9, and believe in a local flood. Ham knows this, yet he does not present the information this way. Instead, he twists it to slander the old earth creationist. Is it so hard to accurately portray what old earth creationists actually believe? I honestly believe that if Ham were truthful, he is fearful that young earth creationists would realize that you can be a Christian and believe in an old earth, and they would abandon young earth creationism. Therefore, Ham resorts to emotional appeals, distortions of the old earth viewpoint, and omissions of key points, to keep his readers in the dark.

It is certain that Ham has read some of Dr. Ross' books, so he must clearly understand that Ross and those known as progressive creationists believe in an inerrant Word, and a literal translation of Genesis. However, you will not see this in Ham's tirades against old earth belief. Why is he afraid of reporting the truth about old earth creationism?

If you have read the article on the AiG website, go there again and read it, paying particular attention to the emotion of the article. If you didn't notice it the first time, it may surprise you the second time around.

1 answersingenesis.org/us/newsletters/0805lead.asp

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