In the latest issue of American Atheist magazine I wrote a piece for my Danthropology column titled, Preferring Fear to Understanding, in which I dissect the weekly reviews of the latest installment of the Cosmos series that was hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, by Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis and by the intelligent design lobbyists, The Discovery Institute.

During the Cosmos series I was doing a weekly piece at AlterNet.org in which I followed these “reviews” of each episode and picked apart these creationist groups inability to understand scientific concepts. These two groups of course saw each episode as a direct attack on their fringe version of Christianity.

Well it seems Ken Ham got his hands on a copy of American Atheist magazine and was not exactly pleased with piece that focused on David Klinghoffer’s decision not to show his son one of the episodes called, The Immortals, because of how it handled Biblical fiction.

This episode begins focusing on the written word and discusses The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which a man rescues animals on a great boat from extinction in a great flood. Sound familiar?

I wrote in the magazine:

In the episode entitled “The Immortals,” Tyson explains the origins of the human drive to tell and then later write stories. He recounts the Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of a man who built a massive ark to protect two of every kind of animal from an impending flood. The flood ends when a dove is released from the ark and returns with a branch in its beak. Anyone familiar with Judeo-Christian myth knows that this is also the story of Noah’s Ark. The only difference is that the Epic of Gilgamesh is thousands of years older than the Noah story.

Ham writes of my comparison of the two stories:

Now, obviously atheists don’t believe the Bible’s account of Noah’s Flood, but to equate the biblical account with the Gilgamesh epic displays an ignorance of both. For example, the animal-gathering activities in the Gilgamesh flood legend were quite vague. The Gilgamesh story doesn’t refer to pairs of animals or the reason for gathering them. But God’s Word makes it clear that God sent a worldwide Flood as a judgment for the overwhelming, widespread wickedness of that time. But in grace, God spared Noah’s family and representatives of all the kinds of air-breathing land animals to repopulate the earth.

So the authors and storytellers of the Noah’s Ark version were slightly more elaborate, so obviously their story is true, while they one they ripped off is not. Obviously. Right?

Ham then looks at my criticism of Klinghoffer:

The author of the American Atheist article, Dan Arel [hey that’s me!], then accuses Discovery Institute’s David Klinghoffer of lacking confidence in the Bible because he chose not to show this particular portion of the Cosmos series to his child.

At this point Ham applauds Klinghoffers decision to keep his child ignorant of scientific truths:

We applaud the approach David Klinghoffer has taken in using material like Cosmos as a tool to teach both biblical and scientific discernment. He did not simply abandon his child to be taught by the television and Tyson but rather guided him through the maze of observational science and evolutionary claims that are so interwoven in most Cosmos episodes.

No, he did not abandon his child to be taught in front of a television, and no one should do this, but he did abandon his child intellectually by forcing him to miss an episode that explains how written word and stories came to be and to have an understanding that you can question a 2000 year old book full of plagiarized stories. He stole a chance to teach critical thinking to his child and chose to keep him cloaked in the dark for his own selfish and ignorant reasons.

Ham then employs some really skillful circular reasoning to prove the flood happened. How does he know the flood happened? The Bible says so!

Now, Tyson, like the American Atheist, asserts that because the distorted flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh was written down earlier than the Mosaic account, it was the source of the Old Testament account. However, the shared source was the historical global Flood—not a shared piece of literature. Moses, inspired by God (2 Peter 1:21), wrote down the authentic account of the Flood, as preserved in the book of Genesis.

Oh well, if the Bible says it’s true, well by-golly it must be true.

Here, in the article I wrote, I explain why letting your children watch such programming is important:

“As Tyson brings science into our living rooms, he is talking to the very children who . . . will go on to make discoveries that will forever change and enhance our understanding of the world.”

To which Ham replies:

Both evolutionists and Bible-believers wish to influence children. But biblical young-earth creationists want children to grow up trusting the Creator of the universe who loves them and understanding that, using science, they study what God made.

Sorry Ham, that is not using science. You cannot start with an answers that “God did it” and use science to study it. You have to do the opposite, but of course this is the last thing you want because you know anyone with an actual scientific understanding of the universe can see why naturalism is true and that your idea of a God is downright useless.

This is basically where Ham’s argument ends because the rest of the article he wrote is trying to sell you a book about questioning the Cosmos, a book written by one of the most incompetent “scientists” on staff at AiG, Elizabeth Mitchell.

Ham ends by saying:

Contrary to the atheist author’s claims, neither the online reviews nor these discussion guides debunks the science in the episode—at least not the observational science!

That right there is the glaring ignorance and lie being sold to his readers, the idea that there is observational and historical science. The same argument Ham used and failed to implement in his debate against Bill Nye.

It was a nice effort Ken, but you and Klinghoffer are a danger to a child education and shielding ones child from an education is intellectual child abuse. You should both be ashamed.