Oh boy. There are places on the internet that are still full of arrogant ignorance. A creationist charged into a subreddit with some, ummm, assertions.

Why is it that these guys who hate atheism so much don’t know how to spell atheism? That’s especially ironic given that nothing he complains about are actually tenets of atheism. His gripe is with science, not atheism — a great many religious people are entirely comfortable with accepting every idea on his list. It’s just that most (not all) atheists don’t have any problem with the authority of science, it takes a dedication to religious dogma to so readily accept counterfactuals.

Let’s look at his claims one by one.

1. We are stardust

This is not an atheist idea.

The base material of the universe is hydrogen — it’s mostly hydrogen. So the question is, where did the heavier elements come from? The religious belief is that a god simply poofed them all into existence. A better, non-miraculous explanation is that the process of nucleosynthesis, a fusion reaction that takes place in stars, built up the carbon and iron and oxygen etc. over time, and that these elements were scattered throughout the universe and used as building blocks for planets and people etc. We have evidence for nucleosynthesis. We lack evidence of divine poofing.

2. Human beings are apes

This is not an atheist idea.

Humans definitely belong in the ape clade — the morphological, genetic, and molecular evidence link us. If an alien were to classify and categorize life on Earth, they would group us with the other primates. There is no evidence to suggest that humans are discretely unique in a way that makes them non-apes. This is an old, failed argument by creationists that there is something in the human brain that isn’t shared with other apes.

3. The earth is 5 billion years old

This is not an atheist idea.

Go argue with the physicists and geologists. We know for sure that the Earth is older than 6000 years old, the usual number trotted out by creationists.

4. Human beings share a common ancestor with apes that we evolved from in Africa millions of years ago

This is not an atheist idea.

Geneticists and anthropologists have the details. We can, for example, measure the differences between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees, measure the rates of mutation and fixation, and estimate how long the two species have diverged. It’s millions of years. The anthropologists can tell us our ancestors were African. Where is the creationist evidence for, for example, the Garden of Eden or Adam & Eve?

5. Everything evolved from a single cell organism

This is not an atheist idea.

Likewise, we have evidence of all the shared commonalities between us and all other organisms. We have evidence of the processes that generate the differences. Common origin is the most parsimonious explanation. Meanwhile, the Christian Bible doesn’t even contain the concept of cells, or single-celled organisms. Would he like to argue with the evidence for cell theory?

6. Fish evolved into amphibians, and then into reptiles, and then birds, and then mammals?

This is not an atheist idea. It’s also not a scientific idea. It’s a creationist bogosity.

For someone trying to argue with evolution, he sure doesn’t seem to understand the theory. He presents a linear caricature of evolution, and claims that’s what we teach? Mammals didn’t evolve from birds, or from modern reptiles, or from modern amphibians, or modern fish. Come on, do better.

All of these claims are not proven. Yet, they are taught as fact. The definition of fact is a thing that is known or proven to be TRUE. Again, none of these claims are nor can they ever be proven to be true. Therefore they are not factual and should not be treated as factual. That is Where the indoctrination accusation claims stand because these beliefs are treated as proven factual science when they are an indoctrination of athiest beliefs being taught as factual science about the origins of life which is religious.

Allow me to quote one of the slides I present in my introductory biology class.

There is no such thing as “truth” or “proof” in science! All knowledge is provisional and subject to revision.

Scientists do use the word “fact”, but only in the sense that Stephen J. Gould defines:

In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

This class has nothing to do with atheism; it’s not a subject we discuss at any point in the semester.

Another thing I teach:

Science is not a catalog of facts to be memorized.

Science is a process for acquiring and evaluating new knowledge.

Religion does the opposite of that; it’s an interpretation of a few old myths presented as inviolate dogma. There’s no way you can regard science as a religion.

And why is a religious dogmatist using “religious” as a pejorative?

He throws in a few references, but they’re all from Answers in Genesis, and therefore can be dismissed out of hand.

Daniel Phelps reports:

Ken Ham wants $20 million more! More! More!

Ken Ham is begging for $20 million from his followers in order to 1) provide new space at the Creation Museum, 2) turn the 4th deck/floor of the Ark into a virtual reality moneymaker with a view, 3) create a Young Earth Creationist AI program to give Biblical competition to abominations such as ChatGPT, AND 3a) create an AI operated holographic Noah! Wow gee whiz! I can hear you opening your checkbook at this very moment!

Of course, Ham might be apprehensive at expanding his enterprises because attendance at the Ark is way down from this time last year; but is only other people’s money. Perhaps he could sell AiG’s corporate jet to help raise the money… Nah!!! That might mean traveling coach with smelly evil heathens. Also, if the jet were sold, there would be no more flying off to the Cayman Islands by AiG’s executives to do whatever it is they do down there.

https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2024/10/15/new-developments-planned-museum-ark/

I am most intrigued that Ham believes he can replicate all the work behind OpenAI for a few million, and using only creationist text sources. I wonder who on his staff is trying to convince him that they have enough in-house talent to whip that one out? I guess he felt like he was missing out on a new grift.

I am unsurprised that what got him most excited was the fantasy that he could hear donors opening their checkbooks. That’s a sound that fills his dreams at night.

I look forward to interrogating AI Noah about his drunkenness.

An engineer named Rob Webb has been inspired by Ken Ham to write a book about space and the Bible. It doesn’t seem to have been written yet — he keeps posting articles on AiG to tease the book, and he uses the future tense, that the book ‘will include’ stuff that he doesn’t actually explain yet.

He promises that his book will be unique.

No doubt, there have been many books written on rocket science—with just about all of them from a secular view. But how many of them are written from a biblical view? As of writing this, there likely aren’t many (in fact, none that I know of) that address the field of rocket science through a truly biblical worldview (i.e., through the “lens” of Scripture).

The Bible says nothing about rockets. The authors did not have any concept of space, or of vacuums, or of Newton’s laws. To them, the stars and planets were small bright lights in the sky. Webb has literally nothing to spin a story from, but that doesn’t stop him from dumping multiple long articles telling us what he’s going to say in this astounding book on the AiG website.

The faint glimmerings of an argument that emerge in his ongoing promissory notes are not encouraging.

And yet, one of the leading pioneers of rocket technology, Werner von Braun, was a creationist! But I pray that trend changes soon . . . starting with this book! That said, the purpose of this book is to give you a starting point in understanding rocket science from a biblical perspective and how to defend your faith in a currently secular space industry—standing on the authority of God’s Word.

I don’t give a hypergolic-fueled flying fuck what Werner von Braun thought of evolution — he was not a biologist. He was an old Nazi who used slave labor to build flying bombs to rain down on civilian populations — is that Biblically OK?

I would hope the rocket industry was secular. They’re supposed to be building machines using reliable engineering principles, not some imaginary nonsense that some guy dreams are in the Bible.

His latest chapter is a lengthy discussion of how he came to Christ. It does not tell us where rocketry is discussed in the Bible, but it does tell us how he came to resign from engineering and embark on a new career as a Christian apologist. You won’t be shocked at his motivations, unless you think you have to be smart to be a rocket scientist.

But then, in 2020, everything changed. Not only was the world hit hard by the COVID pandemic, but also by the popular rise of social-justice (Marxist) ideologies, such as critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality, especially in the US. In particular, the space industry, in general, had gone completely “woke” by embracing—and even promoting—Marxist-led organizations and aggressively pushing the latest LGBT agenda.

I had no idea Marxism was synonymous with social justice! But then again, I should trust that a guy who can pull rocketry out of the Bible would be able to extract any old bug-a-boo he doesn’t like out of Karl Marx’s corpse. It’s a skill.

Many agencies were pushing these religious viewpoints—regardless of an individual’s convictions. There was a widespread concerted effort to make sure everyone had the same religious beliefs that were being promoted by the government and the culture at large.

Obviously, this was an attack against my Christian faith! Inevitably, this turn of events led me to start looking for other employment. At one point, someone even said, “You don’t have to actually agree with it, but at least pretend that you do.”

His Christian faith is being attacked by the idea that one should treat your neighbor as yourself! I guess his faith imagines Jesus as a white capitalist overlord. That’s no weirder than thinking that it prophesies satellites and escape velocities and moon landings, I guess.

He was also pissed off about NASA being unbiblical.

The main challenge I faced was NASA’s unbiblical motivation for each of its missions. Once you get past all the “fluff” from the media, the primary goals of every mission that I’ve worked on are based on evolutionary beliefs, which normally included the constant search for “evidence” of life in outer space and the attempt to explain the origin/evolution of our universe (without God). Of course, the reason is that the people I worked with, in general, follow a view of origins based on naturalism (meaning “nature is all that exists,” governed by natural laws, and thus no need for God).

Evolution, like wokeness, has taken over all the sciences. I think he confuses materialism and naturalism with being antithetical to Christianity…or does he? Maybe his version of Christianity is anti-science, but I don’t think that’s true of all versions of Christianity.

If ever he gets around to writing the damned thing, Rob Webb’s book will be a blast.

I guess this is what retired professors are reduced to, flogging their ideas over whatever little venue will accept them for publication (I’m not retired yet, but feel free to poke fun at the irony in a few years), but you know, you’d expect a little more sophistication and logic. You ought to learn something from those years of professing, after all. But not Jerry Hopkins! He’s a retired history professor who writes these amazing little ditties for the opinion pages of the Marshall, Texas newspaper. He’s got a recognizable style as a creationist: he makes a stupid assertion, and then plows ahead repeating the assertion until, apparently, the reader is supposed to believe it.

Evolution is not an empirical science. It is a matter of absolute faith. In fact, it cannot be proven by any exercise of science. It cannot be demonstrated by observation, tested or otherwise verified. It is unproved and has no way of being proved. The transmutation of one species into another has never been observed and will not, because no man can live the millions of years necessary to verify the process. Evolution should not be classified as a theory, because by definition a theory must be testable so as to justify that designation.

All it takes is one observation or test to shoot this claim down. Fortunately for Jerry, though, he’s so ignorant of the field he’s critiquing that he isn’t aware of any counterexamples. But it’s easy to find them: I just opened the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and here’s one interesting example: “Breeding phenology drives variation in reproductive output, reproductive costs, and offspring fitness in a viviparous ectotherm”. They’re looking at the effects of climate change on all these parameters of reproduction in a lizard, Zootoca vivipara. It’s got observations, measurements, experiments, and is most definitely an empirical study of how organisms change in response to a changing environment. It takes less than a minute to look this stuff up, but apparently Jerry is extraordinarily busy in his retirement.

Oh, but there’s the problem: he thinks a researcher has to live for millions of years to directly and personally observe a phenomenon, or it didn’t happen. This is a very peculiar attitude for a professor of history to take. He must be very old to have lived through all of the history he taught in his classes.

Evolution is a speculative philosophy, a religious construct devised by man to exclude God. Evolution exists outside the realm of science and experimentation. It is not questioned or doubted in the scientific or academic worlds. Evolution reigns supreme in universities, even those who claim to be Christian and supposedly believe the Bible. It has become “a sacred cow” that no one challenges or opposes. If you question evolution, you are immediately condemned as an ignoramus, a religious fanatic and uneducated. Brilliant scientists and well-educated academics have lost their positions, tenure and respect when they have merely used the forbidden term “intelligent design.”

But Darwin, to name one prominent example, was agnostic, not at all anti-religious, and he suffered years of anguish because he feared his ideas would be used to attack the religious people he loved. There are lots of scientists who believe in God and yet also accept evolution — Jerry dodges that one by calling them those who claim to be Christian. I guess I’ll have to break the news to Ken Miller that sorry, guy, you’re actually an atheist, according to Jerry Hopkins of Marshall, Texas. Welcome to the club!

Jerry’s argument could be stronger if he named a few of those Brilliant scientists and well-educated academics who have been fired for using the words intelligent design. I don’t know of any; if one of my colleagues at my university proposed it, I’d probably give them an epic eye-roll, and that’s about it. Maybe I’d challenge them to a public argument, if I thought they were doing a disservice to the students. They probably would lose my respect, but you don’t get to enforce respect.

The philosophy of evolution is not scientific. It is a religious belief. Evolution is a worldview, a belief system, built on atheistic presuppositions without proof intellectually or materially. This religious philosophy is based on religious presuppositions held to by faith. This philosophy is an assault on the biblical doctrine of creation and the reality of God as Creator. Romans 1:18-32 clearly holds that unregenerate man rejects God as Creator, defying God as sovereign, seeking to “hold down” this special revelation. Verse 25 clearly shows man substituting willfully his “new reality” in vain reasoning, accepting a God-defying worldview that worships and serves the creature and creation rather than the Creator God. This is how Paul stated it — “who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen” (Romans 1:25). The use of the prepositional phrase “more than the Creator” (πаρá τòγ κτίσαντα) uses the preposition πаρá denoting a position “alongside of” or “parallel to” or “adjacent to” as its basic sense (based on S. E. Porter’s Idioms of the Greek New Testament). Such an expression indicates that man deliberately and hostilely rejects God as Creator-Designer. Man has “exchanged” truth of God for “the lie of godlessness.”

I’m going to take a wild guess here and figure that Jerry Hopkins was a professor at a Bible college, just from that glurge of Bible vomit.

While there is a philosophy of evolution, it’s more diverse than he realized, and it’s definitely not built on atheistic presuppositions. There’s no such thing as proof in science, except in the sense of disproving claims. Nowhere in the long list of things I was expected to know to earn a degree in my field is there a statement that “there is no god”. There is a pragmatic assumption that one will provide evidence in support of a claim…and “there is a god” is one of those claims that is hard to support. Provide that evidence, and we’ll incorporate it into our theories. Them’s the rules.

This explains why many academics and modern thinkers object to the use of “intelligent design” and reject any discussion of God or special creation. As I prepare this, I’m thinking of how some of you will respond because of my experiences in the past when I’ve raised this issue in classes, academic settings or in columns such as this. I anticipate that I will be charged with unscientific thinking, anti-intellectualism and foolishness. My plea is that we civilly discuss the alternatives and come to a reasonable and sensible conclusion to explain what exists and what we can observe. Consider all the marvels in our bodies — our brains, eyes, ears, hands, feet, sex organs, lungs, digestive system, nerves, cells and many other things. There is no way these marvels could have come into being by chance or thoughtless actions. The “Big Bang” could not have created anything. Evolution is not a reasonable explanation and has no scientific proof supporting it. I cannot accept it. I confess that I accept God’s creative design of all things and believe this is a more acceptable explanation than an irrational and unprovable “theory” like evolution.

No, we object to “intelligent design” because you have to provide good evidence for the existence of your hypothesized intelligence. Got any? Listing “marvels” isn’t it, because we know how hands, for instance, evolved. We’ve mapped out the genes that generate the pattern, we have extant organisms that demonstrate the range of morphological variation, we have the fossils. The evidence contradicts your claim that there is no way they could have evolved, because…yes, way.

Evolution opens the door for all kinds of irrational and illogical ideas regarding human beings and the natural realm. This is why the first eleven chapters of Genesis are so important for us to understand who we are and what really exists and how it came to be. There are critically important elements that God’s creative acts establish and confirm. In our foolish and irrational day we need to return to God’s creative order and plan or we will persist in idiocy and idolatry as described in Romans chapter 1.

Right. You believe a few short chapters in a religious text accurately and completely describe the origin of all the biological diversity on planet Earth, but we’re the irrational and illogical ones.

Uh-oh, here it comes: Jerry Hopkins’ ultimate message is that everyone must live their lives how he tells them to, and anything else is icky.

The assault and denial of human sexuality as defined by God must be clearly understood. Homosexuality is a sin issue, not a civil rights issue. It demonstrates the insidious, immoral efforts the Devil has triggered to discredit God and His Word. A primary impetuous in this regard is the philosophy of evolution that opens the door to any emerging sexuality or perversion. Genesis 1:27-28 states simply that God created man in His own image, male and female. God blessed them and said they were to be fruitful, to multiply and replenish the earth, subduing it and having dominion over all — fish, birds and every living thing. Genesis 2:24 clearly stresses that “a person shall leave his father and mother, cleave to his wife and they shall be one flesh. Homosexuality has never been and will never be something God intended for the human race. It maybe falsely advanced under evolutionary thinking, but it cannot be affirmed by God or His Word. This is merely one example of the flawed assumptions that evolutionary thinking brings people to embrace.

Jerry Hopkins just doesn’t like what other people do with their genitals, and thinks his Holy Book justifies his opinion. I don’t believe in any gods, but if they existed, I’d trust what they wrote in the big book of nature to what some blue-nosed prig claims is written in archaic language on a few pieces of paper. And Nature seems to celebrate sex in endless variety.

There is a town in Washington state which has built almost 30 dinosaur statues and installed them in parks. It’s called Granger, WA, and I have probably passed through it in the past — it’s near Yakima and the Tri-Cities, but they only started celebrating dinosaurs after 1994, after my time. As you might predict, some people don’t like it.

Here’s one old man complaining about it in the Tri-City Herald.

During my grandson’s dinosaur obsession, he brought home an elementary school library book that taught dinosaurs came into existence by means of evolution. He told me that he asked the school librarian if there were any books that taught that God created them, and he was told no.

I wish our public schools would present creationism (Intelligent Design) as a possible alternative. I shared my story with a local school board member to bring awareness and, hopefully, to include a few books that promote a viable option to evolution.

We are frequent visitors to different branches of the Mid-Columbia Library and at the time, we couldn’t find any physical books on dinosaurs that didn’t teach the theory of evolution. We requested they purchase “Dinosaurs for Kids” by Ken Ham, who is noted for building the full size replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, named Ark Encounter. This particular book offers a view based on creationism. They were kind enough to purchase the book, and it is now a welcome addition to the library for our grandson and others to enjoy.

Or laugh at, as the case may be.

He does obliviously fail to notice one thing, though: the libraries aren’t afraid to include a wacky book from a religious source, but you won’t find any science books at the Ark Park. He does not, in fact, have any factual basis for presenting the narrow, sectarian cult beliefs of Answers in Genesis as comparable to the books the library did stock. Oh, he does have the usual argument from personal incredulity.

Both creationists and evolutionists easily acknowledge that the modern day inventions of a F-22 fighter jet, the Freedom Tower, or Mount Rushmore couldn’t have happened by accident or chance, but had to have a designer. I believe a much more complex structure, a living breathing human being, had a creator.

To me, it seems to be a blind leap of faith that the universe popped into existence as if by magic; in that matter created itself out of nothing by sheer random accident.

This seems to defy all science and mathematical probability, in my opinion. Others can consider another perspective, but I’ll stick with the idea that God, who wants a personal relationship with us, created this beautiful world by design.

So…he misrepresents evolution, which does not argue that complex organisms arose entirely by chance; he conflates evolution and the origin of the universe; he has an opinion that evolution defies science, rather than being part of it; he claims to have knowledge of the personal choices of an invisible intangible supreme being that created a universe of many trillions of stars so that he could be friends with a few mammals on one planet. I pity his grandson.

He ends his silly little opinion piece with what he probably considers a clever remark.

Dinosaurs may be extinct, but my beliefs don’t have to be.

I don’t think he understands that words like “extinct” can have multiple meanings, or that his beliefs aren’t persecuted — witness the Mid-Columbia Library’s response to his request.

You might be wondering how this random old guy has such authority in science that he can be advising the local school board. Here are his qualifications:

Lee Walter is Sunday School superintendent at Columbia Bible Church in Kennewick and vice chairman of the Tri-Cities Child Evangelism Fellowship.

No qualifications at all, no understanding of science, but his opinions are regularly featured in the Tri-City Herald — and he’s distressed that he can’t find his religious myths sufficiently represented in the public library.

Does anybody else find the concept of a Child Evangelism Fellowship distinctly creepy? What kind of person signs up for that?