PETERSBURG, Ky. –Two hours into his debate with scientist and television personality Bill Nye, Creation Museum Founder Ken Ham was asked whether anything could make him abandon his belief in an Earth less than ten thousand years old.
“As far as the word of god is concerned, no, no one is ever going to convince me that the word of god is not true,” Ham said. Ham then turned and asked Nye, “What would change your mind?”
“We would just need one piece of evidence,” Nye said. “We would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another, we would need evidence that the universe is not expanding, we would need evidence that the stars appear to be far away but they’re not. We would need evidence that rock layers can somehow form in 4000 years…We would need evidence you can reset atomic clocks and keep neutrons from becoming protons.”
“Bring on any of those things, and you would change me immediately,” Nye said.
That exchange summed up more than two and a half hours of debate over science and the nature of human life, and the fundamental cleavage between creationism and science. Science requires the idea that a hypothesis can fail, that what is held to be true can be disproven. The central hypothesis of creationism, in the eyes of the creationist, can never be disproven, no matter the quality, quantity, or immutability of the available information. And where science is unable to answer a question–such as the nature of consciousness, creationism provides an answer that encourages you to stop looking.
“There is a book out there that does document where consciousness came from,” Ham said to Nye, referring to the Christian bible in a refrain that drew applause and laughter from the audience every time he used it.
Nye and Ham weren’t going to convince each other. But the debate symbolized something deeper for both men–an opportunity to sway parents about what their children should know.
“What you teach children about who they are and where they come from is very important, because if they’re just the result of natural processes, and if like Richard Dawkins says and even Bill Nye says, that’s the end of you, that’s it, you won’t even know you’re ever alive,” Ham told msnbc in an interview Monday afternoon, “then what is the purpose and meaning of life?”
It was Nye’s brief remark about children and creationism from a 2012 YouTube video that set off the chain of events leading to Tuesday night’s debate, billed as the Mohammed Ali vs. George Foreman of creationism vs. evolution debates.
“I say that to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe that’s fine,” Nye said in the video, “but don’t have your kids do it because we need them, we need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.”
Creationism needs the kids too. Every inch of the $27 million dollar Creation Museum, from the towering mastadon skeleton in the lobby to its zip lines and petting zoo, is designed to appeal to children. Animatronic puppets explain the exile of Adam and Eve from their paradise of frolicking vegetarian dinosaurs and the construction of Noah’s Ark, while videos showing teenagers consuming Internet pornography or wives dissing their husbands behind their back are used to illustrate the fallen nature of the world. With its alternative narrative of a world where the biblical flood carved the Grand Canyon, racial differences were created by a mass migration following the destruction of the Tower of Babel, and all human suffering can be reduced to a rejection of Christianity, the Creation Museum offers hope for parents who want to arm their children against the atheist indoctrination of evolution.
Other than its appeal to children, it’s the fear of death that permeates every corner of the Creation Museum. As expensive and professionally produced as it may be, the museum amounts to a fragile shelter against the storm of realization that we all die alone.
“For someone who is an atheist, if there’s no god, when you die, from your perspective you won’t know you ever existed,” Ham says in a Creation Museum produced 2012 YouTube video responding to Nye. “When people near you die, they won’t know you existed, eventually everyone dies, no one will know anything ever was, no purpose or meaning in life, what does it really matter anyway?”
Speaking to msnbc in his office the day before the debate, Ham struck the same theme. “Bill Nye talks about the joy of discovery, that’s what science is all about, but so what?” Ham asked. “When you die that’s it? you won’t know you ever discovered anything, so what’s the point anyway?”
There are several different forms of creationism. But Ham’s organization, Answers in Genesis, is perhaps the biggest proponent of young earth creationism — the belief that the Earth is at maximum ten thousand years old –and Ham is one of the ideology’s most popular spokesmen. Ham, who dresses like a schoolteacher and speaks softly in the accent of his native Australia, has also become a popular figure through his books and videos promoting creationism and lampooning the “secularists” he sees as rejecting the obvious truth of the Christian Bible. For Ham, evolution is merely another religious doctrine, part of “the religion of atheism,” as he refers to it in his talks.
The number of modern scientific concepts one has to reject to believe in young earth creationism is vast. The physics involved in radioactive dating, the geological record, or how germs resist antibiotics all have to be left by the wayside or shoehorned into established religious beliefs. An oil company that hired a young earth creationist scientist would go bankrupt, because, having rejected the modern understanding of the geological record, would struggle figuring out where to find oil.
“At the end of the day young earth creationism requires you to throw out pretty much everything we know about science,” says Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education.
One of the first exhibits at the Creation Museum features a video of Christian Paleontologist at a dig site who explains that he and his “secular” colleague simply draw different conclusions from the same data, an explanation that warps how the science actually works. A young earth creationist scientist is working backwards from the conclusion that a deity created the heavens and the earth in six 24-hour days, not testing a hypothesis through observation and experimentation and adjusting conclusions based on the results. With young earth creationism, the data must always be fit to comply with the hypothesis that the creation described in the book of Genesis is literally true.
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the Creation Museum’s rejection of modern scientific consensus, it has remained a popular destination since its opening in 2007. The Creation Museum estimates it has received almost two million visitors since opening. Depending on how the question is asked, Americans remain split on the question of whether or not humans evolved or were created in their present form. According to Pew, Republicans are now more likely to reject evolution than they used to be, which is why when asked the age of the Earth two years ago, Republican Florida Senator and presidential hopeful Marco Rubio said, “I’m not a scientist, man.”









