Uh-oh, get the muzzle: Ken Ham is practically foaming at the mouth. He’s upset that I pointed out that one of his displays is a relic of a racist theory of human origins. And it is! He does a bit of yelling about credentials, too.

And this professor seems to have a fixation on me–yet, our own full-time PhD scientists and many other scientists who work in the secular world provided the research for the museum scripts. But, then again, he wouldn’t want to acknowledge that people with better qualifications than he holds (qualifications obtained from secular universities, including PhDs from Ivy League schools like Harvard and Brown) were behind the Creation Museum teaching. This man is obviously very angry at God and relishes in mocking Christianity–spending a lot of his time fighting against Someone he doesn’t believe exists!

These highly qualified PhD “scientists” believe in talking snakes, global floods, an earth that poofed into existence more than 10,000 years after the domestication of the dog, and that they can make a case against evolution by ignoring almost all of the evidence. They can wave their diplomas all they want, but against that palpable nonsense, I reject them bemusedly.

By the way, I’m not fighting against any of the gods, since they don’t exist. I do oppose the charlatans who claim they speak for the gods, because those frauds do exist. See “Ham, Ken” in the Kentucky phone book.

His anger stems from the fact that I showed this image from the museum.

I then wrote this:

With complete seriousness and no awareness of the historical abuses to which this idea has been put, they were promoting the Hamite theory of racial origins, that ugly idea that all races stemmed from the children of Noah, and that black people in particular were the cursed offspring of Ham.

He demands that I document my claims…but I already did.

Look at the pretty picture (you can click on it to get a larger, readable version). Several times, it states that all races stemmed from the children of Noah. The picture specifically shows that Africans are descendants of Ham. Now go read the book of Genesis, which as we all know, AiG insists we must take absolutely literally.

20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: 21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. 22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. 23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. 24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. 26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. 27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

So Ham, the father of all African peoples by this account, sees Noah drunk and naked, and Noah curses his child Canaan to be a servant of servants (what a nice Grandpa!). This is the doctrine that led apologists for slavery to declare that the children of Ham, that is Africans, were ordained to be servants. That’s the Hamite theory. It’s a completely bogus theory, wrong in all of its facts, and if Ken Ham is trying to defang its implications, good for him…but he’s still promoting a racist Biblical explanation that is false in all of its particulars.

We actually know quite a bit more about human ancestry than a gang of bronze age goatherds did. This is my genetic history, a map of the migrations of various genetic groups over tens of thousands of years. Note that we all came out of Africa. Note also that this map does not correspond at all to Ken Ham’s map of the magical diaspora of 2348 BC.

It’s very nice of Ken Ham to now clearly deny the racism implicit in any literal interpretation of the Bible, and I urge him to continue in his progress towards recognizing the metaphorical aspect of these fables. Maybe soon we’ll even get him to realize that you can’t use the Bible to argue against “millions of years”, either!

However, I do recommend that he avoid the “some of my best friends are black” excuse. It’s very condescending and hokey.

Ironically, as this atheist was falsely accusing us of racism, I was in Seattle speaking in the church led by a black pastor–and a good friend of our ministry. See the photo of me and Pastor Hutchinson a former NFL football player. And I spoke Sunday evening against racism!

Keep speaking against racism, Mr Ham. But I think your words would be more meaningful if they were accompanied by commendable actions…such as ceasing the promotion of ignorance.

Ken Ham is spluttering in indignation. It’s wonderful. He’s really peeved at the ABC News report because it mentioned a detail that is thoroughly trivial, but he claims is wrong. The report describes how animals spread around the world after the Flood on floating islands of matted logs and plants.

We do have replicas of Darwin’s Finches in the exhibit on Natural Selection where we discuss genetics and speciation, not God’s will!!–and we do talk about floating log mats after the Flood, but certainly nothing about “mankind spread from continent by walking across the floating trunks of trees knocked down during the Biblical Flood.”

Now see, this is where all the pictures we took in the museum become a very useful resource. I just rummaged about, and there they are!

Here’s a text panel that talks about his imaginary “floating forest”, giant rafts on which plants and animals spread around the world.

Here’s his big map of the routes life took. One thing I can’t find a picture of, because it was a video that was playing, was this same sort of map, animated, with streams of log shaped objects swirling about in the ocean currents. It was there, believe me.

And then there’s this. It was a huge painting of one of his giant floating islands. I remember it vividly, because it contained the only image in the whole place of a cephalopod (the small blob on the far right).

This is precisely how Ham explains the dissemination of humanity after his Big-Ass Flood. Humans rode across the oceans on mats and clumps and lumps of floating debris that were churning about in the ocean currents.

PWNZ0RED, Ken Ham!

One more display from the museum: see, they were talking about log rafts.