Ken Ham is having a snit

Ken Ham is spittin’ mad. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear made a statement in support of LGBTQ+ people and the importance of inclusion…but he didn’t plug Ken Ham’s little roadside attraction! How dare he? He’s supposed to advertise the stupid wooden “boat” with every breath!

Can someone help me here? I want to know what Kentucky Gov Beshear means by “more equal and inclusive.” The reason I as is that the Ark Encounter @ArkEncounter is the biggest themed attraction in Kentucky and the biggest Christian themed attraction in the world.

Also the Ark Encounter and @CreationMuseum are the two leading Christian themed attractions in world and they have had billions of dollars of positive impact on the state of Kentucky.

I’ve been to both of Ham’s sideshows, and if those are the leading Christian themed attractions in the world, then Christianity has a problem. Those are boxes full of lies and nonsense, distortions of scientific facts that promote foolish myths that they can’t support with evidence. You could say that of every religious center for every religion, but most of them, unlike Answers in Genesis, try to promote myths that support their beliefs — AiG is dedicated to lying about science and the nature of the universe outright. That is their sole purpose, to tear down the reality that exposes their folly.

Even if we ignore their lack of a dignified intent, they are a bad attraction. There is nothing inviting about the Ark Park, unless you’re desperate for displays that prop up your ignorance. They’re fucking weird. You’ve got a few animatronic displays of Adam & Eve, or Noah speaking with a heavy Yiddish accent, and unanimated baby dinosaurs in crates, and lots and lots of hectoring signs explaining why the Bible is true and you’re going to hell if you don’t believe it. It’s boring.

If I were to compare it to anything, it’s the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, which trust me, is not appealing to non-Mormons. Lots of empty space, paintings and sculptures and dioramas promoting LDS history, and hugely grandiose buildings. It’s much more elaborate than the Ark Park. The Ark Park is an embarrassingly gauche red-neck version of what some particularly ignorant set of anti-science gomers think a temple should look like, and they failed to even build an impressive facade for the whole thing.

And yet when Gov Beshear is giving talks on Tourism and listing tourist facilities he never mentions the Ark (or Creation Museum). And the Ark is not mentioned in most State promotional materials.

Also Gov Beshear calls his administration “Team Kentucky.” AI sums up “Team Kentucky” as “”Team Kentucky” refers to a broad concept encompassing different initiatives and programs under the leadership of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. It’s used to promote unity, economic, development, and various state-wide efforts.”

Beshear is probably trying to promote Kentucky as a beautiful state with great economic potential, and the citadel of stupidity Ken Ham has built is an embarrassment. Ken Ham had to go to ChatGPT to interpret Beshear’s slogan, and it came back with an accurate explanation that Ham just ignores. Unity is not promoted by a narrow religious sect. Economic development is not going to be built on the back of an egregiously idiotic theme park.

So Gov Beshear uses terms like “inclusive,” “equal,’ and “Team Kentucky” to promote unity, but the Ark and Creation Museum are basically excluded.

Now I understand an LGBTQ group would never employ me as a bible believing Christian who builds his thinking on God’s Word and thus adamantly believes that there’s only one marriage, that of a man and woman (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-7) and only two genders of humans (Genesis 1:27). Now that is not hate speech. It just means we have different worldviews. I wouldn’t expect an LGBTQ group to hire a Christian who believes as I do based on the bible. But they have the freedom to exist as a group. And the Governor has the freedom to promote them if he wants. But how about promoting the Ark and Creation Museum as well to be truly inclusive and a team working for unity?

Impressive. He somehow brags about his regressive views on homosexuality and trans issues (it’s only his “belief”), and then requests that he get more free advertising for his theme park under the banner of inclusivity. If you were truly inclusive, you’d be promoting his exclusionary views. It’s the paradox of intolerance, but there’s no point in explaining it to him because Ken Ham is to narrow and bigoted to comprehend it.

Now the Ark and Creation Museum employ Christians who adhere to our statement of faith. A Federal judge in Kentucky ruled we have a right to do this according to the law and freedom of religion. But everyone is welcome to come to the Ark and Creation Museum and we’ve seen people from all sorts of backgrounds visit, including LGBTQ people. We publicly promote the attractions to everyone as all are welcome.

Now Christians are persecuted around the world and in some places much worse than others. In some countries Christians can’t meet publicly or distribute bibles. How about a Christian month to promote unity and thus be inclusive of Christians to send a message to the world?

It is true that everyone is welcome to visit his grossly overpriced dreary carnival sideshow, and I think a few LGBTQ+ people (also some atheists!) have actually visited it, but they have not been there because they found it inviting. It’s more to witness the freak show. Or to protest it.

And of course he concludes with his martyr myth, that somehow endorsing the existence of LGBTQ+ people is equivalent to persecuting Christians, and Ken Ham in particular. He says this in a country that has allowed him to con hundreds of million dollars to propagandize Christian lies, with a government that is dominated by the Christian right, in a state that gave him millions of dollars in tax breaks to subsidize his Christian cult, and goes further to ask that a month be dedicated to honoring his weird version of Christianity.

There is going to be a protest at the Ark Park next month. That is not hate speech. They just have different worldviews. But the AiG worldview is founded on hatred, ignorance, bigotry, and superstition, and must be opposed. Governor Beshear is being political and avoiding talking about the shameful disgrace located in his state, and Ken Ham ought to shut up and appreciate that that is the best he’s going to get.

Jeffrey Tomkins strikes again!

Any time the various creationist organizations — AiG, ICR, CMI, DI, etc. — start getting excited and claiming that genetics supports creationism, it usually seems to trace back to Jeffrey Tomkins, the one guy who knows a little genetics and molecular biology, and most importantly, knows how to distort the scientific literature. A new paper in Nature, the complete sequencing of ape genomes, does a detailed and thorough comparison of great ape genomic data, and Tomkins does his usual thing and butchers it.

Tomkins is known for his usage of “ungapped” comparisons to depress the percentage similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. This method relies on aligning the beginnings of two DNA sequences, and measuring whether subsequent base pairs at corresponding positions match one another. The flaw in this method is that insertions, duplications or deletions in either sequence may cause parts of it to be shifted forward or backward relative to the other, so that equivalent sets of base pairs are not precisely aligned with one another in the comparison. Ungapped comparisons interpret those parts of the two sequences as entirely mismatched even if there are no other differences between them.

If you see any creationist now claiming that humans and chimpanzees are 15% different, rather than the number reported in scientific journals of 1.5%, it’s all coming from the mangled misinterpretations of Tomkins, who really is obsessed with the idea that humans can’t possibly be at all related to other apes. Casey Luskin accepts the distortion and is stating that scientists have been hiding the magnitude of the differences.

They haven’t. The root of the problem is that there are multiple ways to compare sequences of 3 billion nucleotides. One way is to compare aligned sequences, that is, the genes and regulatory stuff that makes up the functional bits of the genome, and there you find about 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans. Another approach is to tally up all of the sequence differences, whether they have any phenotype or not, and there you can find all kinds of repetitive, noisy stuff in the genome. You can find that a human parent is 10% different from their own child! Here’s a good explanation of the whole data set, rather than a Tompkins-ish cherry-picked mess of lies.

Not mentioned, unfortunately, is the ultimate key to explaining these differences: the differences are in the genetic junk. I guess it’s fair to not bring that up, since creationists do not believe in that anyway.

It does expose the fact that ultimately, all the creationist organizations, including the Intelligent Design wackos at the Discovery Institute, do believe that humans were separately created by a deity/aliens. If that wasn’t their endgame they wouldn’t be paying any attention to Tomkins’ nonsense.

I can’t let this pass. Casey Luskin is particularly egregious in claiming that scientists are lying.

These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall where they may?

Note that this is a response to Nature publishing the complete and detailed results of a complex genetic comparison — they did state the results clearly, and published all of the data. None of the creationist critics have added any new information, every complaint they’ve made is the product of extracting bits and pieces from the Nature paper. It’s not their fault that the paper doesn’t state the implications more plainly because the creationist implications are not there.

It annoys the hell out of me that Nature can publish a 28 page paper with 82 tables of data in the supplementary information, and Luskin can whine that they didn’t dumb it down enough that a lying creationist can find the part where real scientists say god did it.

It’s because the data don’t support your claim, you ass.

Astronauts can be total dumbasses, too

I have talked to many creationists who, when asked for evidence that the universe was created by a god, tell you to look at the trees. They think the fact that the world can be beautiful is sufficient to prove the existence of a supernatural being, and therefore you should be converted to Christianity by contemplating biology, but I’ve been thinking about biology for a few decades, and I look at a tree and am impressed by the chemistry of photosynthesis, and don’t see any Jesus in it.

Look at the trees is shorthand for the most vapid, shallow, stupid kind of creationist argument. In a propaganda coup, Answers in Genesis has found three astronauts who are willing to endorse religious beliefs because they saw the grandeur of the Earth, because people float in space, and the Earth is a beautiful planet. They claim the Bible is absolutely true, it’s inerrant, it’s sufficient for everything we need, it’s not a science book but where it speaks to science it is absolutely accurate, 100%. Watch this video and see your respect for these men plummet.

Nauseating. AiG is hosting them at some event at the big fake Ark this summer (buy your tickets now!), but all I see is a couple of pilots and mechanics who have been persuaded by religious nonsense to believe in anti-scientific ideas. Sad.

Ironically, there’s a chunk in the middle of this video where they get quite irate about people who think the Earth is flat or that the moon landings were fake. It’s utter foolishness. And frankly it’s becoming more concerning, If you can get caught up in that kind of system of belief, you’ve completely detached yourself from the truth. The truth of scripture, that is, he quickly adds, before going on to denounce the wicked lie of evolution.

Stop letting creationists host your ideas

I sat through the whole debate last night, which was supposed to address the premise that “The hominin fossil record demonstrably supports human evolution”, with Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) on the pro side, Jerry Bergman against. It was half bad. Erika was well-prepared and tightly on-topic, and her part was worth listening to. Bergman, as I predicted, was a sloppy mess with a scattershot collection of slides which were mostly off-topic and irrelevant, and was full of wrong examples that didn’t make his case. Would you believe he talked about Nebraska Man, a hoary old chestnut of tabloid excess that never had the support of the scientific community, presented alongside Piltdown Man as evidence that the fossil record was fake? How about the claim that Australopithecines were just the bones of pygmies?

But I almost gave up in the first few minutes, before either had a chance to speak, when the screen loaded and there across the top in big capital letters was the banner “STANDING FOR TRUTH BIBLICAL MINISTRIES” with the logo for that disgraceful organization popping up throughout. The moderator/host was that smug twit, Donny Budinsky, a hardcore young earth creationist with no education in science, geology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology, who promotes these inane “debates” between creationists and sane evolutionary biologists. WHY? This was a promotional event for the dumbest collection of ignorant yahoos on YouTube. These are terrible people, and yet so many science educators will voluntarily send traffic their way, and, by the way, platform dogmatic buffoons like Jerry Bergman.

I don’t understand it. Most of the people on our side are educators who know how to deliver a presentation, and have the ability to do it well. It has become easy with tools like StreamYard and Zoom to host a video session with multiple simultaneous contributors. We don’t need grifting yahoos like Donny Budinsky to organize and host these “debates”, and if you ditch mind-numbing parasites like Bergman, you don’t even have to waste time on them — Erika had a robust, informative 45 minutes of science talk imbedded in the superfluous, distracting garbage of the Jerry and Donny Show, with an ad for creationism layered on top.

You know I despise debates, but even worse are debates that donate unwarranted attention and respect to lying apologists for anti-scientific claims. Stop it, everyone.

Missionary Lizards!

How many ignorant claims can a creationist pack into a short clip?

If there’s one thing the world uses to steal the hearts and minds of our kids it’s dinosaurs.

One thing? Absurd. We have all of reality to entice kids away from the lies of Answers in Genesis.

“Hey look kids. Look at these fearsome creatures. They’re amazing. They’re fascinating. They died out 65 million years ago. They’re products of evolution. They’re just the results of chemicals bumping together over millions of years.

Come on. If you’re going to convince people that evolution is not true, you should start by accurately describing it. No one claims that dinosaurs arose spontaneously from simple chemical processes.

Just like you, evolution’s true.” They use dinosaurs to convince our kids they’re nothing but rearranged pond scum.

We also don’t claim that.

Stop and think. Why would scientists be arguing that, when it’s not true, and wouldn’t accomplish much of anything? It’s clear that this guy is proselytizing and trying to recruit followers, so if we just assume that scientists have a similar, competing motive (we don’t), how does telling someone they are rearranged pond scum serve our purpose? Or Satan’s purpose?

We use dinosaurs to call our children back to the authority of the word of God. We call dinosaurs missionary lizards because we want to give children sound biblical scientific answers about these incredible creatures.

I do appreciate that contradictory phrase, biblical scientific answers, especially given that the Bible says nothing about dinosaurs. But AiG will tell us all about it! The next AiG video linked to by the above short is titled You’ve Been LIED to About How Dinosaurs Looked, which explains how a creationist artist uses the Bible to help him figure out how dinosaurs actually looked.

The unfathomable question is why AiG chose to use this AI-generated image of “dinosaurs” on their video?

Abomination, I say! Who is lying to kids about dinosaurs now?

Poor Martyn Iles

Martyn Iles lost his status as Ken Ham’s successor at Answers in Genesis (there’s a story there, I’m sure, but no one is talking), and now he’s an immigrant wandering loose in the United States, which is definitely not a good position to be in. Normally, I’d be sympathetic, but Martyn Iles? The Young Earth Creationist and far right kook? Nah. Deport him.

Prayer request: | need a new visa for the USA so | can come and go freely for our new project.
The lawyer recommends going for an O-1 visa, but it’s a high bar.
I’ll need some senior political and church figures to help me out with letters that verify my past activities… essentially to confirm that | have been a national leader in political, legal and grassroots advocacy work. And trust nobody who really hates my beliefs ends up with the application on their desk.
But once it’s granted, it’s a very good visa, and very durable.
So… Pray everyone is suddenly overtaken by a desire to do me just a small favour

OK, I’ll be generous: everyone can give him all the prayers he might want. I don’t know what his “new project” is, but I’m sure it’s garbage pandering to ignorance.

Fun times at AiG!

Well, this is interesting. Answers in Genesis has had a bit of a shake-up. You may recall that Ken Ham is stepping back from the responsibility of running his money-making scam; for a long time, it looked like his successor was going to be his son-in-law, Bodie Hodge, but then Ham brought in an Australian evangelical Christian named Martyn Iles and declared him his official heir to the throne of AiG. Bodie left to start his own evangelical mission.

I’m sure there was some drama going on behind the scenes. I hope someday someone comes out with a tell-all book.

Now there’s big news. Martyn Iles is out!

Some have noticed I’ve been quiet for a while. It’s because | amin a transition to something new.
In conjunction with some wise counsel and Christian colleagues, we are in the process of prayerfully discerning what’s next, now that | am no longer at Answers in Genesis.
We do have a fantastic project which appears to be coming together well… but we are just taking it a day at a time to confirm that it is of God and we’re meant to do it.
There is plenty going on behind the scenes. | am in the USA talking to donors, partners, and suppliers. Back in Australia for Easter.
The project (should the Lord enable it) has a purpose to evangelise, educate and entertain children and young people. It’s a technologically revolutionary, integrated, accessible, and high quality Christian education platform.
I’ll post updates. See where this goes.
“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” (Ps 127:1)

Fascinating. I’d love to know what conflict drove him away. I’m also curious to know what “technologically revolutionary” platform he plans to build; do you think it’s as “technologically revolutionary” as building a fake wooden tourist attraction?

More fossilized soft tissue

Ken Ham is excited about another discovery of traces of collagen in dinosaur bones. Me? I’m saying ho-hum, it’s mildly interesting, but it’s not what you think it is. Kenny-boy thinks it’s evidence that the bones are only 4,000 years old. I’m just wondering what processes protected collagen from degradation.

In this new study, researchers* used advanced mass spectrometry and protein sequencing to detect bone collagen in a well-preserved hip bone from an Edmontosaurus uncovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. This unexpected find is encouraging other researchers to pull fossils out of storage and look at them with these new technologies. And why?

The popular science article explains:

Furthermore, experts could uncover the biochemical pathways that enabled the preservation of organic compounds over millions of years. “The findings inform the intriguing mystery of how these proteins have managed to persist in fossils for so long,” said Taylor.

Yes, how these proteins could remain for millions of years is a big mystery. Evolutionists, try as they might, have yet to be able to present a plausible explanation for the existence of soft tissue in supposedly ancient fossils. Now the popular science article quoted Dr. Taylor, who is a creation scientist involved with this new find, saying this research will help us understand how proteins can last for “so long”—creationists too want to know how proteins can last a few thousand years. We don’t have the problem of millions and millions of years but there’s more work to be done to understand the processes that preserved them since the flood, 4,350 years ago.

The original paper doesn’t ask the question Ken Ham thinks it does. It has a narrow, specific scope: is the collagen part of the bone, or is it a product of external contamination? They show that it really is in the fossil.

They say nothing about the age of the fossil, except to briefly acknowledge it was “excavated from the Upper Cretaceous zone of the Hell Creek Formation in Harding County, South Dakota, USA.” They don’t dwell on that fact (it’s not the focus of the paper), but I know that there’s a huge amount of data screaming that it is 70 million years old. Any explanation for the preservation of soft tissue has to include all those facts. You know, the facts that Ham ignores.

Collagen is there. I’m willing to accept that. The bones are 70 million years old. The science demonstrates that. And we have plausible explanations for its preservation.

We previously demonstrated that the treatment of extant microvascular tissue with haemoglobin, an Fe-coordinating protein, can significantly enhance stability over multi-year time frames10, in effect acting as a preserving agent. Here, we extend this experimental observation to propose that enhanced resistance to degradation is due in part to Fe-catalysed non-enzymatic crosslinking of molecules comprising structural tissues, with haemoglobin suggested as the primary source of such Fe in vessels undergoing diagenesis.

This is just another example of Answers in Genesis cherry-picking the data they like and then misinterpreting/misrepresenting it.

I get email

This email was long and particularly vapid, so I’m not going into detail on it, but I do include the whole damn thing below the fold for your entertainment. To summarize it briefly, my correspondent is a friendly Muslim who wants me to know that he accepts evolution…for other organisms, but not humans. Humans are special. To make his point, he provides Evidence of the Divine.

This evidence consists of long, practically obsessive descriptions of how beautiful Mohammed was. His eyes were large, with deep black irises and bright whites, and his eyelashes were long and how good he smelled, I never smelled ambergris or musk or anything as fragrant as the scent of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Also, he knew that horse hooves could strike sparks when galloping over stones, but there are no stones in the desert! How can you not be convinced of the existence of god and the falsity of evolution when you learn this?

He concludes by telling me how persuasive his argument is.

I want to let you know that I’ve shown this to scientists and they were utterly convinced that God didn’t exist and that we evolved from a common ancestor with primates. But after I showed them this proof that the Quran has Divine origins. They started to rethink their whole world view regarding God and atheism.

I include the entirety of his “proof” below, despite the fact that apparently it’s going to convince all of you to leave this site and go running to your nearest mosque. After all, how can you resist when Mohammed bats his lovely eyes at you?

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