Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum, and Ark Encounter is ever on the watchtower looking for a conspiracy he can gin up to rouse the faithful. Several years ago, Ham wrote that public school students were being taught to worship the sun. Here’s what he said:
Imagine if public school students in their science classes were encouraged to worship the sun. And yet this is happening! But how do they get away with it? Well, they just call worshipping the sun “science,” and then claim they can teach this “science” in the public schools!
You see, the following statement is allowed to be made (and is being made in a number of instances) to public school science students:
Our ancestors worshipped the sun. They were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and stars because we are their children. The silicon in the rocks, the oxygen in the air, the carbon in our DNA, the iron in our skyscrapers, the silver in our jewelry—were all made in stars, billions of years ago. Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are stardust.
This statement was made by Neil deGrasse Tyson in the new Cosmos series. Evolutionists are encouraging teachers to use this series in public school classrooms.
Evidently, Ham doesn’t know what the word revere means. While the word “worship” can be thought of as reverence, it is almost always used in a religious sense. Neil deGrasse Tyson is NOT using the word “revere” in a religious sense. Of course, Ham denies this because he believes atheism/humanism/secularism is a religion. Ham needs to buy himself a dictionary so he can learn what words such as “worship” and “revere” actually mean. Will he do so? Of course not. The coffers at Ham’s monuments to ignorance are running low. He needs to attract people to his creationist amusement park to keep his “ministry” afloat. Scaring Evangelicals is a surefire way to get them to Kentucky to get their fears allayed. For $44.99 a person, Christians can learn the “truth” about sun worship, and every other lie Ham peddles from atop of his creationist empire.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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It has been exactly ten years since Williamstown, Kentucky, underwrote $62.5m worth of bonds that made possible the building of Ark Encounter. This anniversary seems the perfect opportunity for Ken Ham to (finally) apologize for the fact that his big unseaworthy boat has not come close to producing the attendance numbers and economic impact that Answers in Genesis (AiG) promised in seeking support from this little town.
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Of course, Ken is a busy guy, fighting the atheists and secularists who, as he said on Facebook this past weekend, “are becoming increasingly intolerant of Christianity—in fact, trying to outlaw the Christian worldview in many places.”
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Because he is so busy warring against the forces of evil, I wrote the following letter on his behalf. And Ken, there’s no need to thank me. Just sign your name and send it along to the Williamstown powers-that-be and enjoy the good feelings that come with a sincere (albeit ghost-written) confession!
Of course, I know very well that you said yes to providing us with this wonderful windfall in good part because of what we said in the Ark Encounter feasibility report that we provided you. As I know you will recall, we told you that our attendance numbers would an “estimated average of 1.6 million visitors” in the first year. More than this, we told you that these attendance numbers would simply keep going up. And for July 2022- June 2023, our “scientific” formula projected an attendance of 2,177,737.
Oops!! We have never even made it to one million paid visitors in a year. Here’s a breakdown from this past year (and yes, that busybody Dan Phelps makes it his business to collect and publicize these numbers, instead of allowing us to come up with our own numbers, which I can tell you would look much better!):
July 2022: 110,098
August 2022: 83,638
September 2022: 68,301
October 2022: 74,864
November 2022: 39,125
December 2022: 37,959
January 2023: 14,724
February 2023: 23,020
March 2023: 66,390
April 2023: 70,700
May 2023: 82,585
June 2023: 111,256
TOTAL: 782,660
Yes, yes, yes – I know. This total is only 36% of attendance we told you we would have this year.
So that’s why I am writing. I am so sorry that we “misled” you so badly. Sure, some of this is on you. You should have conducted a closer analysis of the information we gave you. But I don’t want to play the game of blaming the victim (that is, you!) Instead, I want to own the fact that what we told you in our feasibility report was, well, false. Sorry about that!
All this said, I hope you keep in mind that we at AiG are soldiers in the Christian army saving America from the radical Marxists (not exactly sure what this means, but we know that these folks are bad!), from the hordes of LGBTQ militants storming the cultural gates, from the Critical Race Theorists (not exactly sure what this means either, but we know that these folks are bad too!), and from the vaccine-crazy climate cultists.
That is to say, members of the Williamstown City Council, we are on your side (unless, of course, you belong to any of the aforementioned groups or are liberal)! So we are confident that you will forgive us for misleading you. And in turn, we will pray for you and your local economy.
Your brother in Christ –
Ken Ham
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis, and the builder of two monuments to ignorance, the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, recently took U.S. Representative Ted Lieu to task for misrepresenting what a nine-week fetus looks like; saying that Lieu was a liar. In doing so, Ham told his own lie about a four-week-old embryo.
Your [four-week-old] baby, or embryo, is about 2mm long (about the size of a poppy seed) and growing rapidly in your womb. It’s protected by an amniotic sac, which is filled with cushioning fluid, and attached to a tiny yolk sac that provides all the nourishment it needs. The outer layer will later develop into the placenta and provide your baby with oxygen and nutrients.
According to the NHS, a four-week-old embryo is 2 mm long. For us Yanks, who are metric ignorant, that is .08 of an inch. As you can see, Ham lies about the size of the embryo, overstating its size by three hundred percent.
Ham also uses a classic sleight of hand used by forced birthers to distort public perception of fetal development and abortion. A four-week-old embryo is the size of a poppy seed. Yet, Ham blows up the picture to show an embryo that is five inches long — sixty-three times larger than it actually is. Ham knows that if he displayed the actual size of a four-week-old embryo, his readers would be unimpressed and might even approve of women taking Mifepristone at this stage of fetal development.
It is common for forced birth zealots (I do not use the term pro-life) to use pictures of fetuses aborted late term in their propaganda — even though very few abortions are performed in the last trimester. Why is that? People such as Ham know that abortion is an emotional issue. What better way to stir emotions than deceitfully using pictures of late-term fetuses, misrepresenting what most embryos/fetuses look like when pregnancies are terminated?
Ken Ham and the zealots at Answers in Genesis do not traffic in facts. Their agenda is to promote and advance the teachings and beliefs of Fundamentalist Christianity. Their “facts” always serve that end, and that’s why Ham was willing to lie in his post.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Most people who go to church grow up mainly hearing the Bible on Sundays, learning Bible stories in Sunday school, and hearing preaching from the pulpit. But then many of them go to schools where the education is purely secular and at least sometimes may be overtly hostile to the Bible. This leads to the impression that “religion” is subjective, emotional, and personal, while the “real world” belongs to the secularists.
One of the main battles of biblical creation is showing that this dichotomy is false—the Bible accurately speaks about the real world. Its events do not happen in Neverland but can be placed in time and space so accurately that archaeologists have been able to use it like a map of the ancient world. In fact, the Bible is inerrant—meaning that when something conflicts with the Bible, we can confidently say that it is never the Bible that is wrong.
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The Bible is, in fact, the most-studied and fact-checked book of history. And there is not one instance where the Bible has been proven wrong about a place, event, or people group it described. Of course, because the Bible is inerrant, we can be confident that it never will be shown to be wrong about anything.
While the Bible is a historically accurate book, it is more than a history book, and Christianity’s core claims about Christ’s identity as the Son of God and his resurrection from the dead are matters of faith. However, there is a solid basis for that faith; it is not subject to a personal emotional experience.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Evangelicals are fond of putting words into the mouths of atheists. They “know” the real reasons atheists don’t believe in the existence of God. They claim to know our real motives, our secret desires. It is any wonder, then, that atheists tell Evangelicals to “fuck off”? When an Evangelical shares her testimony with me, I accept what she says at face value. I don’t question her motivations, nor do I suggest that I know the real reason she is a Christian.
Last week, Answers in Genesis trotted out Liz Abrams as the latest Evangelical who “knows” the inside scoop about atheists. According to Abrams, deep, deep, deep in their heart of hearts, atheists believe in the Christian God.
Here’s what she had to say:
Atheists claim to disbelieve in God. However, if one digs down deep, one finds that professing atheists can’t really escape the knowledge of God. And this is encouraging for Christians who want to share the good news with them. Here are three ways atheists cannot escape the knowledge of God.
1. The Atheist Bears the Image of God
The atheist, like every other human being, is created in the image of God. This means he is designed for relationship with his Creator, has an inbuilt moral sensibility, and will live for eternity in either heaven or hell.
Every person has the sense that death is wrong—that we shouldn’t just cease to exist. Death feels wrong because God didn’t design us to die; we die because of sin. Everyone at some point or another has the longing for eternity. It wouldn’t make sense for us to get that desire from an evolutionary process that requires death and suffering.
Atheists hold a variety of odd ideas that they think might enable humans to beat mortality. From uploading their consciousness to the cloud to putting their bodies in a deep freeze and awaiting the day when medical technology can revive them, some atheists try to think of any way possible to eventually get around the fact of death.
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2. The Atheist Borrows God’s Moral Standards and Logic
For Christians, the image of God gives every human being intrinsic value. But atheists have nothing that gives humans inherent value. If life is just nature’s way of keeping food fresh, universal morality makes no sense. The only moral law is to do whatever helps your genes make the jump to the next generation. Does monogamy help your offspring have a better start, giving your genes a more established path forward? Does polygamy give your genes more hosts in the next generation? Does promiscuity give you even more chances at reproduction? Does locking your wife up ensure that any children she has are yours? It doesn’t take that much contemplation to see that a purely evolutionary ethic would be horrific. A consistent evolutionist in this area belongs in a mental institution or prison!
Most atheists don’t go around murdering people—why? Many atheists would scoff at the question and claim, “I don’t need God to be good!” But their statement assumes that objective good exists. The only objective good that exists in an evolutionary world is that the fittest survive and reproduce. Why is it good to be faithful to your wife? Who gave us an inbuilt sense that it’s wrong to murder and steal? Theft and murder could be evolutionarily beneficial in certain circumstances!
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3. The Atheist Hates God
Atheists often display more than a “benign” unbelief. There is an overt hostility to Christians and things pertaining to the faith. It does not take much searching to find blasphemous literature and works of “art.”
The fact that an atheist’s disbelief in God sometimes becomes their entire identity shows that there is more to it than casual disbelief. Almost no one today believes Thor exists, but there aren’t any anti-Thor movements. The fact that this vitriolic attitude is reserved only for the God of the Bible is revealing. There are many people alive today who believe in the Muslim god, Allah, but atheists are not nearly as strident in their opposition to a religion that is, in many ways, much more restrictive than Christianity. When an atheist starts railing against how he perceives God has been unfair or wrong from his point of view, that is as ridiculous as being disappointed that the tooth fairy didn’t give him enough money under his pillow.
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Loving Atheists
It is understandable that some Christians see atheists as our enemies. They oppose us in the public square, attempt to convert our children to unbelief, and they say some unpleasant things about Christians. But Jesus said to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44)—how much more should we pray for and love atheists?
So, what do we do when we encounter atheists? First, we should obey Jesus and share the good news of the gospel with them, as well as pray that God will work in their hearts. We can open our homes and build relationships with them in the hope that God will reach them through us. We should openly talk about our faith and attempt to win them. And when an atheist starts trying to convert others, we should be ready to oppose and refute them.
Being used by God to bring someone to Christ is an amazing feeling, and we know that there will be many former atheists in heaven—some are even associated with this ministry! And that is usually because a Christian cared enough about them to engage with them and persistently share the gospel.
According to Abrams:
Deep down, atheists really believe in the Christian God
Atheists are created in the image of the Christian God
Atheists borrow their morals and logic from Christianity (the Bible) and some of them belong in mental institutions or prisons for their “wrong” moral beliefs.
Atheists hate the Christian God
Abrams, of course, provides no empirical evidence for her claims. At best, she miserably tries to make a few philosophical arguments. At worst, as the presuppositionalist she is, Abrams makes bald assertions, demanding you accept them without evidence.
Abrams is being untruthful when she says “atheists hate God.” I don’t know of one atheist who “hates God.” Why would atheists hate a being they don’t believe exists? That would be downright silly. Abrams, as most Evangelicals do, confuses atheist hatred for some expressions of religion (including Islam and Hinduism) with hatred for their mythical deity. Atheists focus their hatred on Evangelical institutions, and, if warranted, Evangelical preachers. If Abrams wants to know if I hate (using the term in a colloquial sense of really, really, really dislike) Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham, and countless Evangelical churches, parachurch ministries, and preachers, the answer is a resounding YES!. My goal as a writer is to burn Evangelicalism to the ground, not because of who Evangelicals worship, but because of what they do in the name of that God. My hatred is reserved for Evangelical behavior, not their mythical deity. I focus on what is real, and what matters.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis and stand-in for Captain Noah on the Kentucky Ark of Ignorance, is well-known for pointing to the Bible — God’s science textbook — as THE (only/final) authority when it comes to understanding how the universe came to be. Ham is noted for telling Bill Nye that the Bible was all-sufficient, that it alone explains how everything came to be. But here’s the thing, Ham doesn’t really believe this. Here’s proof of my contention:
Ken, I ask you, why do we need to read your materials? I thought all we needed to do is read Genesis 1-3. Now you are saying that the Bible is NOT sufficient for our understanding of how the universe and biological life came to be. What’s up with that?
Of course, Evangelicals don’t really believe that the Bible is a one-stop knowledge store. If this was really the case, there would be no need for the thousands of Christian books that are published every year. There would also be no need for “ministries” such as Answers in Genesis. Ham and his cadre of professional dispensers of ignorance have published over ten thousand articles that are meant to help Evangelicals understand what God said in Genesis 1-3. If God has spoken, why would Christians have any reason to read any of Ham’s articles? The answer, of course, is that Ham needs 10,000 loads of bullshit to cover up his irrational, anti-scientific, literalistic interpretation of the Bible.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Ken Ham, known as the ayatollah and grand poohbah of Kentucky and a purveyor of Fundamentalist ignorance, frequently writes articles about atheism. Several years ago, Ham asked and then answered the question, Why Do Atheists Care? Here is some of what this noted intellectual genius of young-earth creationism had to say:
Atheists get very passionate when it comes to fighting biblical Christianity. If God doesn’t exist—and life has no ultimate meaning—why do they even care?
Why do atheists get so emotional and aggressive in opposing biblical Christianity? Why does it bother them? Why does it matter at all to them?
When Answers in Genesis announced plans to build the Creation Museum, a local atheist group began attacking the ministry of Answers in Genesis and campaigning against the museum. When the museum was opened, the atheists gathered outside the museum to protest the opening of this facility. But why did they do this?
At the time of this issue’s publication, atheists are aggressively opposing a new project involving the building of a life-size Noah’s Ark, the Ark Encounter. But what is it to atheists if Christians build such a facility to proclaim the Christian message? After all, thousands of secular museums across the USA and other countries around the world are already proclaiming an atheistic evolutionary message to the public. Government schools throughout the world by and large indoctrinate hundreds of millions of the coming generations in naturalism—really atheism.
So why do atheists get so upset with a minority that stands for biblical Christianity?
During my debate with Bill Nye “the Science Guy” on February 4, 2014, Bill was asked where matter came from. In his answer he said it was a great mystery, but he loved the “joy of discovery” as he pursued such questions. In my responses to Bill’s answers, I asked him why the joy of discovery mattered to him. I explained that from Bill’s perspective, life is the result of natural processes and there is no biblical God, so when he dies, he won’t even know he ever existed or knew anything. Then, when others who knew him die, they won’t know they ever knew him, either. Eventually, from his perspective of naturalism, the whole universe will die and no one will ever know they ever existed. So what is the purpose of this “joy of discovery”? Really, the naturalistic view of life is ultimately purposeless and meaningless!
Think about the well-known atheist Richard Dawkins. Why does he spend so much time writing and speaking against Someone (God) he doesn’t believe exists? Why is he so aggressive against biblical Christianity? In an ultimately purposeless and meaningless existence, why does it matter to him if people believe in the God of the Bible and the account of creation as outlined in Genesis? Why bother fighting against such people when, from his perspective, eventually no one will even know they ever existed?
No matter how many times atheists point out to Ham that they don’t live purposeless and meaningless lives, he continues to recite these lies as a six-year-old would when reciting his memory verse in Sunday school. Ham seems to think that if he repeats the same lie over and over, it will magically become true. Later in the same article, Ham continues his lying ways by telling readers that atheists “aren’t fighting for the truth, but suppressing it” — “truth” being Ham’s literalistic interpretation of the Christian Bible. According to Ham:
Really then, when Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, and others so aggressively oppose biblical Christianity, what they are doing is this. They are covering their ears and closing their eyes and saying, “I refuse to submit to the God who created me. I refuse to acknowledge that God is the creator. I refuse to accept that I’m a sinner in need of salvation. I want to write my own rules! Therefore I must oppose anything that pricks my conscience and aggressively suppress [sic] the truth to justify my rebellion.”
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So why do these who so aggressively oppose Christianity care? They care because they are desperately trying to justify their rebellion against the truth. They don’t want to admit that they are sinners in need of salvation and thus need to submit to the God who created them and owns them.
Again, Ham continues to lie, refusing to accept the reasons atheists give for not believing in his peculiar version of God. Our objection to Christianity, its God, and the Bible is not one of deliberate denial of truth. Far from it. Many atheists such as myself spent most of our lives reading and studying the Bible. We know the Bible from cover to cover. It is not that we have some sort of intellectual deficiency or have some secret desire to eat babies or star in porn movies. Our rejection of Christianity is based on our careful examination of its claims. Are the claims Christians make for God, Jesus, and the Bible true? The atheist says no. Rather than accept this, Ham lies and tells his followers that the real reason atheists aren’t Christians is that they suppress the truth and are in rebellion to God.
At one time I was willing to give Ham the benefit of the doubt. I thought, Ham is sincere. He genuinely wants atheists to be saved. I no longer believe this. Since Ham refuses to accurately report the atheistic/agnostic/humanistic/secularist worldview, I can only conclude that he has some sort of ulterior motive that requires him to lie about his adversaries. What could that motive be? you ask. I think Ken Ham needs atheists. He needs an enemy to fight, a war to wage. Ham believes that True Christians® are called on to wage war against Satan and his earthly emissaries. Atheists are an easy target because most Evangelicals equate atheism with Satanism (and Ham does nothing to dispel this notion). Ham knows that Evangelicals — his primary target audience — live lives that are indistinguishable from those of non-Christians. In order to stir up the passions of these passive Christians, Ham uses hyperbolic language when speaking of his three great enemies: secularism, atheism, and liberalism. Ham knows that stirred passions mean more donations, so this is THE reason Ham continues to misrepresent what atheists and secularists really believe. Ham lies because lying is good for business. Evangelicals, thanks to rapturist eschatology, are conditioned to believe the “world” is an awful place and should be avoided at all costs. And what better way to avoid the world than to visit Ham’s monuments to ignorance — the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.
Ham knows that his Museum and Ark theme park won’t bring people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. I don’t know of one atheist who has become a Christian as a result of visiting Ham’s entertainment facilities. Ham’s goal has never been to save souls. The Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter are meant to reinforce Evangelical young-earth creationist beliefs. Why does Ham encourage Christian parents to bring their children to the Museum and Ark Encounter (by giving children free admission)? Why are most of the things in these facilities geared towards teenagers and young children (i.e., zip line, petting zoo)? Ham’s objective is to indoctrinate another generation in the creationist way of thinking. By focusing on children, Ham ensures that when these children grow up and marry that they too will bring their children for a visit, thus providing continued income for his empire.
As with much that goes on in the name of the Christian God, it is all about money. Ham knows that the key to his future prosperity rests on his ability to generate income. That was the real reason for building the Ark Encounter. Creation Museum visit numbers and income were in decline, and Ham needed something that would stir the passions of his fellow Evangelicals, resulting in them paying his ministries a visit. By building a wood replica of a fictional boat and throwing in a few amenities homeschoolers and children will be sure to love, Ham ensured that the next few years will have increased revenues. Knowing that revenues will later decline, Ham is already planning to build a new attraction, a monument to speaking in tongues, the Tower of Babel. What’s next? A water park where children can watch God drowning men, women, children, and unborn children while Noah and his clan float by in a wood boat?
Ham knows that fighting the atheist horde increases the bottom line, and it is for this reason he really doesn’t want to see any of us saved. If all the secularists and atheists got saved, Ham wouldn’t have anyone to rail against. And with no enemy, revenues would decline and Ham’s monuments to ignorance would fall into disrepair. Ham will continue to lie about atheism because, in his mind, the end justifies the means. He cares more about money than he does honesty. For those creationists who object to my portrayal of Ham as a money-grubbing liar, the easy way to repudiate my claims is for Ken Ham and his ministries to publicly release their financial reports. Of course, it will be a cold day in Kentucky before Ham ever releases his financials.
Twenty years from now, Ham’s ministries will be in decline, facing increasing financial pressures. Ham surely knows that Evangelicals won’t treat the Creationist Museum and the Ark Encounter as they do nearby King’s Island. Once Evangelicals have visited the Museum and Ark Encounter, they are unlikely to return. Been there, done that, Evangelicals say to themselves. Imagine children being forced to repeatedly visit a museum. Doing so is not their idea of summer fun. When asked what they would rather do: visit Bro Ham’s ministry or go to King’s Island/Cedar Point, I suspect most children will quickly opt to ride roller coasters. And since the Museum/Ark Encounter combo ticket is more expensive than that of the amusement parks, many Evangelical parents will decide to take their families to one of the theme parks instead. Facing financial decline, Ham will be forced to scale back his empire. As science continues to draw future creationists away from his pernicious teachings, Ham will be forced to rely on fund-raising appeals or large estate donations from dead supporters. These too will dry up as older supporters die off. By then Ham will likely be dead, leaving others with the responsibility to manage the Creationist Titanic. Eventually, Ham’s monuments to ignorance will close their doors and become decaying testimonies to the dying breaths of a thoroughly discredited system of belief. I will likely be dead when this happens, so I will leave it to my grandchildren to say good riddance.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
There’s only one way to go back in time & that’s to read the true history of the universe God revealed to us in His Word beginning in Genesis. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4)
What would a Tyrannosaurus rex with a major toothache act like? We probably don’t want to know! We know at least one T. rex was suffering from bone disease in its lower jaw when it died. This disease extended to the root of one of its teeth and was discovered using a CT-based, non-invasive imaging approach. So why is a diseased dinosaur significant in a biblical worldview?
Well, Genesis 1:31 tells us God’s original creation was “very good.” Yet many Christians accept the secular timeline for dinosaurs, believing they died out millions of years ago and before man existed. But that puts death, suffering, and disease before Adam’s sin! [Welcome to the the irrationality of Christian Presuppositionalism and Bible Literalism.]
Examples of disease in fossils, including dinosaurs that are supposedly millions of years old, are fairly common. Those who accept the conventional evolutionary dates for these fossils must believe in millions of years of death and disease in a “very good” creation. But we know these things aren’t good! They’re horrible and are consequences of sin, not of God’s original design.
Instead of trying to add man’s ideas into the Bible, let’s start with God’s Word. When we do that, we see that God created a perfect world (Deuteronomy 32:4) just a few thousand years ago, and dinosaurs were just part of the incredible diversity of creatures God made.
Oh, and most fossils are from the flood of Noah’s day about 4,300 years ago.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Are you tired of all the evil associated with the philosophy of atheism — Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on? After all, most murderers, tyrants, and rapists are not biblical Christians, and most have rejected the God of the Bible. Even if they claim to believe in the God of the Bible, they are not really living like a true Christ follower (who strives to follow God’s Word), are they?
Do you feel conflicted about the fact that atheism has no basis in morality (i.e., no absolute right and wrong; no good, no bad)? If someone stabs you in the back, treats you like nothing, steals from you, or lies to you, it doesn’t ultimately matter in an atheistic worldview, where everything and everyone are just chemical reactions doing what chemicals do. And further, knowing that you are essentially no different from a cockroach in an atheistic worldview (since people are just animals) must be disheartening.
Are you tired of the fact that atheism (which is based in materialism, a popular worldview today) has no basis for logic and reasoning? Is it tough trying to get up every day thinking that truth, which is immaterial, really doesn’t exist? Are you bothered by the fact that atheism cannot account for uniformity in nature (the basis by which we can do real science)? Why would everything explode from nothing and, by pure chance, form beautiful laws like E=MC2 or F=MA?4
Do you feel like you need a weekend to recoup, even though a weekend is really meaningless in an atheistic worldview — since animals, like bees, don’t take a day of rest or have a weekend? So why should atheists? Why borrow a workweek and weekend that comes from the pages of Scriptures, which are despised by atheists? Weeks and weekends come from God creating in six literal days and resting for a literal day; and then the Lord Jesus resurrected on the first day of the week (Sunday). And why look forward to time off for a holiday (i.e., holy day), when nothing is holy in an atheistic worldview?
For professing atheists, these questions can be overwhelming to make sense of within their worldview. And further, within an atheistic worldview, atheists must view themselves as God. Essentially, atheists are claiming to be God. Instead of saying there may not be a God, they say there is no God. To make such a statement, they must claim to be omniscient (which is an essential attribute of the God of the Bible) among other attributes of God as well.5 So by saying there is no God, the atheist refutes his own position by addressing the question as though he or she were God!
Do you feel conflicted about proselytizing the faith of atheism, since if atheism were true then who cares about proselytizing? Let’s face it, life seems tough enough as an atheist without having to deal with other major concerns like not having a basis to wear clothes, or no basis for marriage, no consistent reason to be clean (snails don’t wake up in the morning and clean themselves or follow other cleanliness guidelines based on Levitical laws), and no objective reason to believe in love.
Are you weary of looking for evidence that contradicts the Bible’s account of creation and finding none? Do the assumptions and inconsistencies of dating methods weigh on your conscience when they are misrepresented as fact?7 Where do you suppose those missing links have gone into hiding? Surely the atheist sees the folly and hopelessness of believing that everything came from nothing.
In fact, why would an atheist care to live one moment longer in a broken universe where one is merely rearranged pond scum and all you have to look forward to is . . . death, which can be around any corner? And in 467 trillion years, no one will care one iota about what you did or who you were or how and when you died — because death is the ultimate “hero” in an atheistic, evolutionary worldview. Of course, as a Christian I disagree, and I have a basis to see you as having value.
