Introducing “The Lie: Evolution”: An Examination

Some years ago, nev­er mind how many exact­ly, I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to attend an Answers in Gen­e­sis con­fer­ence fea­tur­ing Ken Ham, their founder and pres­i­dent, and anoth­er gen­tle­man whose name I can­not recall but whose pre­sen­ta­tion was much more tar­get­ed toward children.

At the time, mind you, I was a fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian with a pas­sion for cre­ation­ism. I spent my time debat­ing the mer­its of “cre­ation sci­ence” in a num­ber of online forums, and great­ly enjoyed see­ing the Ken Ham live and in per­son. I even dropped $60 or so on a col­lec­tion of around ten Answers in Gen­e­sis publications.

Among those books was The Lie: Evo­lu­tion: Gen­e­sis — The Key to Defend­ing Your Faith, (Seri­ous­ly, the book basi­cal­ly has two titles for some rea­son) writ­ten by Ken Ham, “a very pop­u­lar and effec­tive speak­er with Amer­i­can church audi­ences,” accord­ing to the blurb.

When I heard Mr. Ham being an “effec­tive speak­er,” he described what he con­sid­ers one of the pri­ma­ry rea­sons why so many sci­en­tists accept evo­lu­tion despite hav­ing the same evi­dence avail­able to them as the clear­ly sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly supe­ri­or cre­ation­ists: they wore dif­fer­ent “glass­es” which col­ored their inter­pre­ta­tion of the evi­dence avail­able to them. 

A per­son with an unbe­liev­ing world­view would have to do what­ev­er they can to inter­pret evi­dence in a way which “dis­proved” cre­ation­ism, in oth­er words.

At the time I read The Lie: Evo­lu­tion, the glass­es I wore were very much those of a cre­ation­ist; the Bible was true, the great flood hap­pened, and Earth did­n’t exist until between six and ten thou­sand years ago.

When I aban­doned Chris­tian­i­ty, it meant aban­don­ing cre­ation­ism as well, and relearn­ing all that I had known about evo­lu­tion — and then some.

With what I’ve learned over the past six years, I want to sur­vey The Lie: Evo­lu­tion, to remind myself of where I’ve been, to prob­a­bly learn some new stuff along the way, and to share all of it with you.

Luther D. Sun­der­land, author of Dar­win’s Enig­ma: Ebbing the Tide of Nat­u­ral­ism, says in the fore­word to The Lie that Ham “gets to the bot­tom of the prob­lem” of Chris­tians “find­ing that even in the Unit­ed States, the so-called land of the free with a con­sti­tu­tion that guar­an­tees the free exer­cise of reli­gion, their rights are being fla­grant­ly violated?”

Sun­der­land links the promi­nence of evo­lu­tion­ary teach­ing to the “evils of abor­tion, divorce, homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, pornog­ra­phy, and drugs,” and that this con­nec­tion is so “sub­tle that even most of the large reli­gious denom­i­na­tions have been deceived and have failed to rec­og­nize it.”

Evo­lu­tion, Sun­der­land says, leads us to the real­iza­tion that “there is no Cre­ator” and that if there is no Cre­ator, there is no nihilism, or as he says, “no pur­pose in life. … [N]o one watch­ing over us to whom we must some­day have to account for our actions. … [T]here are no absolutes; there is a loss of respect for law and absolute prin­ci­ples, and man is set adrift in a pur­pose­less universe.”

The Lie is “must read­ing for al Chris­tians,” as “Mr. Ham shows that Gen­e­sis … is a depend­able account of actu­al events that are sup­port­ed by sol­id sci­en­tif­ic evidence.”

Okay, so to sum­ma­rize the fore­word of this book, the rea­son Ken Ham wrote it is because the world sucks, and it’s all because we teach evo­lu­tion. After all, we all know that BD, there were no mur­ders, no wars, no rapes, no vio­lence of any kind, no homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, no theft, no drugs, no divorce, etc. No, back then, every­thing was rosy, with every­one fueled by a stead­fast devo­tion to Jesus Christ and a pas­sion for evan­ge­lism. Yep, that was the whole world up until mod­ern times.

Fur­ther, church­es today suck because they too have fall­en vic­tim to the lie of evo­lu­tion. No mat­ter how a church wants to com­pro­mise what the Bible says with what sci­en­tists say of evo­lu­tion, that com­pro­mise is wrong, and the exact words of the Book of Gen­e­sis must be pre­served at all costs.

That’s what we have to look for­ward to in The Lie, which fea­tures chap­ters titled “Chris­tian­i­ty is under Attack,” “Cre­ation, Flood, and Com­ing Fire,” “Death: A Curse and a Bless­ing,” and the cou­plet “Evo­lu­tion Is Reli­gion” and “Cre­ation Is Reli­gion,” a pair of chap­ters which frame the dis­cus­sion not as sci­ence ver­sus reli­gion but as “the sci­ence of one reli­gion ver­sus the sci­ence of anoth­er religion.”

We have a lot to look for­ward to in this book, though I will say, I’ll be skip­ping Ken Ham’s intro­duc­tion to the book, except to sum­ma­rize it here: Ken Ham did­n’t feel com­fort­able with church­es say­ing just accept evo­lu­tion by com­pro­mis­ing it with Gen­e­sis, so he sought out teach­ing that con­firmed his bias and found a way to turn that into a career. I’m sim­pli­fy­ing, obvi­ous­ly, but that’s basi­cal­ly the gist of it. A look at chap­ter one is com­ing soon, so stay tuned!