Ken Ham, Evolutionary Creationism and Reality

Ken Ham has recently taken to the airwaves to lambast those of us who accept the science of evolution but also profess a faith in Jesus Christ as savior and Lord.  This was reported in the Christian Post a few weeks back and I am just now getting around to commenting on it.  Stoyan Zaimov writes:

Young-Earth Creationist Ken Ham, who is getting ready for the opening of the Ark Encounter in Kentucky on July 7, has accused Christians who support the theory of evolution as being people who follow a "religion of death."

"Christians who accept millions of years are mixing the religion of death with the religion of life — death came after sin, Jesus conquered it. Evolution requires death over millions of years, death is a 'friend' that produces life and death ends it all," Ham wrote in a Facebook post over the weekend.

"The Bible describes death as an enemy that will one day be destroyed — through Christ's death and resurrection we are offered life with God. Creation is a religion of life — death is a result of sin, our Creator paid the penalty for sin and offers the free gift of salvation — it's all about life. Christianity vs. secularism is really a battle between the religion of life and the religion of death," he added.

This notion that physical death is the direct result of the fall is a pervasive teaching in modern evangelical Christianity. Has it always been this way, though? Leaving aside all of the genetic and palaeontological evidence that humanity cannot be traced back to a single pair of individuals, is the notion of no physical death before the fall a tenable idea? It isn't from a population standpoint as a world such as that would be massively overpopulated in very short order. As one person wrote about that post: “Was God bad at math?”  Another commented: “How would the threat of death have meant anything to Adam had he not been acquainted with it?”

Theologically, the doctrine of original sin has also been the recipient of much scholarship over the centuries such that Ham's perspective is but one of many.

The current construct of original sin owes much of its formation to Augustine, who, Otten argues, misread Romans 5:12.  He writes:

The RSV reads the following: ‘Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned’. Yet unlike contemporary exegetes Augustine does not read that death spread to all men because all men sinned, as has the Greek original behind the RSV, but ‘because all men sinned in this one man’. All emphasis is therefore on Adam as the progenitor of the human race, whose role is synecdochical for all humanity. Hence we find the human race thrown or
‘lumped’ together as a doomed mass (massa damnata), as it depends entirely on God’s grace for its redemption. If we pursue this line of thought, Calvin’s teaching of double predestination, to the effect that before creation God has elected some for salvation and others for damnation, does not seem that far away, given that it operates on a similar idea that the genealogy of the entire human race can be telescoped into the one figure of Adam in Paradise.

Otten is not the only one who argues for an alternate understanding of original sin. Duffy notes, for example, that there is no actual doctrine of original sin in scripture. He writes:

Notwithstanding, the classical doctrine emerged from reflection on Genesis 2-3. The Adamic myth, however, is not primarily speculation about the first humans committing the first sin, the guilt and consequences of which mark all succeeding generations. As Paul Ricoeur insists, the story is penitential in motive, a reflection of Jewish penitential spirit as revealed in the Psalms and the prophetic literature. The real thrust of the Yahwist's Adam myth is to separate the origin of evil from the origin of being.

John H. Walton argues for a priestly role for Adam, which he is given in Genesis 2: 15:

We can presume that it is in this role that Eve serves as a complementary helper to Adam (not simply as a reproductive partner5). This priestly role, not mentioned in the first account, would support an understanding of Adam and Eve as the fountainhead for humanity that may be understood as representational rather than biological. Adam (and eventually Eve) is plausibly differentiated not as the only members of their species, but as the designated representatives of their species in the center of sacred space—a species that has been endowed with the image of God (an act of [functional] creation). If one were to adopt this hypothesis, Adam and Eve would not necessarily be the first humans in God’s image or those through whom all humanity is descended.6 But as the human representatives (priests) serving in God’s presence, the disorder of sin would be seen as entering the world through them, and all humans would now be subject to that disorder and would be seen as being corporately subject to sin through these representatives. That disorder has permeated human nature.

And:

The most important issue in Romans (and theology in general) is that people in the image of God sinned, and therefore all are subject to sin and death and in need of salvation. Adam was our first High Priest, and Christ is our ultimate High Priest. The Bible therefore could be read as requiring only that the sin of our representative Adam extended to us all, as the salvation of our representative Christ is extended to us in a similar manner.

If sin did not originate in one biological man, then it has no fixed point in time.  Seen in this light, the necessity of having a six-thousand year creation is removed, allowing for the span of time that conventional science suggests describes the universe in which we live.  It also opens up the possibility that the prehistory of humanity is one of an ongoing saga of evolution.

Zaimov closes with another Ham quote: 

In another message in March, he said Christian leaders who do not interpret the creation account in Genesis 1-11 literally are leading people astray.

“Genesis 1-11 is like the foundation to a house. The whole structure stands upon it — all of our major doctrines like sin, salvation, the coming consummation, marriage, and more are grounded in Genesis," Ham wrote in his post at the time.

“Sadly many Christian leaders say Genesis isn't literal history and in doing so they undermine the foundation. No wonder such a large percent of church millennials don't defend marriage as for one man and woman. They no longer have a foundation to base their thinking on,” he added.

Two things came to mind when I read this.  First, the foundation to a house can be one of several different shapes.  It might be round (Conrad Hyers' understanding that the creation story's purpose is to establish the one true God by dispelling the pantheistic gods), or oblong (Walton's understanding that the creation story is a story of the ordering of the sacred space of the temple) or even square (Ken Ham's six-day literal reading of Genesis).  There are many different ways of reading these passages, most of which do not entail a literal understanding of them. 

The second thing that struck me is that, because we might not have a six-day understanding of our creation has little bearing on our understanding of marriage, since that is mentioned throughout the Bible. Paul waxes cogently about marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 as well as other scattered places. 

Ham's statement that evolutionary creationists are compromising is, therefore, without merit and his contention that the Genesis account is literal history is fraught with controversy.  This is not the place for an examination of the deficiencies of the young earth model, theologically, but they exist and they are numerous.  Evolutionary creationists can rest assured that they are worshipping the One True God and have not compromised on their faith.

Andrew Snelling, Geology and Cooking

Sorry, this one rambles a little bit.

Jonathan Baker at Age of Rocks writes an interesting column that is a response to Andrew Snelling's preposterous statement that one can be a successful petroleum geologist and yet be a young earth creationist.  In his column, he likens the different layers of the rock record to the baking of a cake.  After a series of trials in which a cake is cooked for thirty minutes at 150º, then 350º, then 500º, he writes:

In the first trial, it seems, the batter never reached a high enough temperature for these reactions to complete; in the third trial, there were too many! Thus we all know from experience that the results of our cooking depend strongly on the chosen temperature and time. Consider also the various ways to make a roast: we can cook the meat for a short time at high temperature, for a long time at low temperature, or choose some option in between. Why? Because the rate of chemical reactions is temperature dependent, and for every ~10°C increase in temperature, the reaction rate doubles.

Why is this important to understanding the rock record and petroleum geology? He continues:

This flexibility in cooking reflects a basic principle in petroleum geology called the Time-Temperature Index (TTI). The deposition of organic matter in sedimentary layers is much like pouring a raw cake batter into a pan. As those sediments are buried deeper, the temperature naturally increases, due to what’s called the geothermal gradient (heat flows from the Earth’s center to its surface, so temperature increases with depth). Once the temperature becomes high enough, those same chemical reactions that turned our batter into cake can also turn raw organic matter into a suite of energy-rich hydrocarbons (oil and gas). But the actual cooking time depends on the absolute temperature to which those molecules are exposed.

In other words, the Earth’s subsurface works like a giant oven—in fact, this terminology is frequently used by petroleum geologists. As with cooking in our homes, the end result depends on three factors: the original recipe, time, and temperature. When geologists search for oil/gas, they try to constrain those variables as best they can.

The upshot is that, due to the nature of the geothermal gradient, there simply has not been enough time to produce oil if the earth is only six thousand years old. Further, because geologists use this gradient to their advantage in examining the geological column, they have become very good at finding oil.

One of the grand daddies of modern young earth creationism, George McReady Price, received a letter from Harold Clark, another Seventh Day Adventist and fellow creationist, when Clark went out to visit the oil fields in Texas, in 1938. When he got there, Clark received a bit of a shock.  The letter read in part:

"The rocks do lie in a much more definite sequence than we have ever allowed. The statements made in your book, The New Geology, do not harmonize with the conditions in the field. All over the Midwest the rocks lie in great sheets extending over hundreds of miles, in regular order. Thousands of well cores prove this. In East Texas alone are 25,000 deep wells. Probably well over 100,000 wells in the Midwest give data that has been studied and correlated. The science has become a very exact one. Millions of dollars are spent in drilling, with the paleontological findings of the company geologists taken as the basis for the work. The sequence of the microscopic fossils in the strata is remarkably uniform. The same sequence is found in America, Europe, and anywhere that detailed studies have been made. This oil geology has opened up the depths of the earth in a way that we never dreamed of twenty years ago"

Astoundingly, people like Snelling never seemed to learn from the experience that Clark had.  In the last seventy-seven years, oil and gas explorers haven't adopted any form of young earth creationism in their efforts to find oil.  Instead, they have become better at it by using standard, well-understood modern geological methods and an understanding of the geological column that was well-known even in Clark's time.  To debate this on the part of Snelling is willful blindness. 

In some ways, this is analogous to the problem of what you would find in terms of consistency if the geological column were only 4500 years old and really did reflect the remnants of the world-wide flood.  If you could, the experiment might work like this: construct a tank that was a mile high, fill it with about 1000 feet of dirt (remember, the geological column did not exist at all before the flood but they had to be walking around on something), then pour water into the tank, simulating rain for 365 days.  At the end of that period, let the tank drain away (what the flood waters are said to have done).  You know what you will find at the end of that time?  You will find very hard mud at the bottom, medium hard mud in the middle and soupy mud at the top.  What you will not find is sedimentary rock of any kind.  You won't find sandstones, you won't find shales, you won't find chert and you won't find limestone.  Why?  You won't find them because it takes lots and lots of time for these kinds of rocks to form.

Young earth creationist studies of the Grand Canyon are interesting in this regard.  They fail to account for the fact that the walls of the canyon, had they been formed in a year's time, would not have been solid enough to stand up.  Being mostly mud, they would have collapsed, which is what you typically see in large-scale floods.  In fact, you see the relative hardness of rock on display in the canyon walls: the harder rock walls are more vertical, while the softer rock walls are more eroded.  If it were mud, there would be no canyon at all.

That digressed from the original point but these are just more examples of statements that young earth creationists make that are, on the face of it, absurd.  To paraphrase Conrad Hyers: you are asked to believe several impossible things before breakfast. 

Biblical Literalism or "Is That Really What It Says?"

Daniel Harlow wrote a paper a bit back called Creation According to Genesis: Literary Genre, Cultural Context, Theological Truth. The paper emanated from an origins symposium in 2006 at Calvin College. Initially, he asks the question of why the age of the earth, creation and evolution are such contentious subjects. His answer?

Religious and philosophical worldviews influence cultural values, which in turn shape both political policies and social behaviors. The value we place on human beings; the way we treat both the unborn and the born; the dignity we grant the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled; the stand we take against racism and sexism and other forms of social injustice; the steps we take to preserve endangered species and otherwise protect the environment; the positions we hold on stem-cell research, genetic engineering, and cloning––all these issues and others besides are connected deeply with how we think at the most basic theological level about the creation and the place of the human creature within it.

For many people, this is not a scientific issue, it is a moral one. Even when having conversations with my wife, it is not uncommon for her to say that she understands the evidence and accepts it but that the ramifications make her uncomfortable. Indeed, both the ID side and the new atheists write that "Darwinism" is dangerous. The reasons are similar but the motives are different. Both argue that it leads one away from faith.

Here, Harlow does not tackle the modern manifestations of science and their implications but, rather, the problems inherent in a literal (mis)reading of the creation accounts in Genesis. In so doing, he says something at once profoundly true and profoundly incendiary:

God did not write Genesis. He inspired ancient Israelites to write it, and they did not do so in a cultural vacuum. Following from this, if we take divine accommodation seriously, then Genesis must not be made to say anything that would have been unintelligible or irrelevant to the ancient author and his audience. Modern concerns and concepts must not be foisted anachronistically onto the biblical text. Genesis is God’s word to us, but it was not written to us.

This is the start of the "slippery slope" argument that is soundly resisted by most purveyors of the YEC model—Genesis must be read literally or else there is no barometer for how we should read scripture at all. Troy Lacey writes in AiG:

Of course, it is no surprise that Genesis 1–11 is denigrated by the secular scientific community. But these chapters are the foundational truths of the revealed Word of God, and if the foundation can be destroyed, then the rest of the Bible can also be discarded as a collection of nice stories with no practical value or moral authority.

Many OT historians and theologians have stated that a completely literal read of the creation accounts is facile at best and leads to serious misinterpretations of scripture. That this warning has been around since the time of Augustine and perhaps earlier has very little traction among the recent earth supporters. Ken Ham famously asks "were you there?" when confronted by skeptics. (Of course, neither was he but that is not the point.) Ham replies that God was and he left us his Word, which is clearly understandable. Hmmm. Just what did God leave behind, exactly? According to Daniel Harlow, it is this:

If we were to insist that the Bible gives an accurate picture of the physical cosmos, then to do so with integrity, we would have to believe that the earth is flat, immobile, and resting on pillars; that the sky is solid and has windows in it; that the sun, moon, and stars are set in the sky and move along it like light bulbs along a track; that the sun literally rises, moves, and sets; that there is an ocean of water surrounding the earth; and that beyond the waters above the sky is the very heaven of God. That’s what the Bible says.

Clearly, this is not what your average young earth creationist thinks. In fact, it is not clear to me that anyone within the western or Judeo-Christian perspective thinks this. They probably did around the time that this was written down but we simply know more now than we did then. As time progresses and our understanding of the world increases, hanging onto the literal, YEC viewpoint becomes increasingly difficult. As Conrad Hyers points out:

The literalist, instead of opening up the treasurehouse of symbolic imagination, digresses into more and more ingenious and fantastic attempts at defending literalism itself. Again and again the real issue turns out to be not belief in divine creativity but belief in a particular theory of Scripture, not faith but security. The divine word and work ought to have better handles!

Instead of a different way of interpreting scripture, it is now the only way to do so—with Gary Parker, among others, arguing that such a reading is a salvation issue. That such a one-dimensional read of the scripture has become the de rigueur one for the evangelical community is unfortunate.

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