Weird Claim of the week: “There is hope for Atheists”

bill nye and ken hamKen Ham, the chap who runs the Creation Museum, is I must admit a truly entertaining individual and does appear to be rather gifted at coming out with some truly weird stuff at times. His foundational thing is that not just planet earth, but the entire universe is only 6,000 years old and so apparently we are expected to dismiss all the prevailing scientific consensus and roll with the idea that a supernatural entity did a bit of magic and brought everything into existence quite recently. If indeed it all happened just 6,000 years ago as he claims, then this creation event must have come as a bit of a shock to the human civilisations that flourished in Mesopotamia at that time.

As for all those dinosaur bones, well I guess God popped the earth into place with those there to test your faith.

So Ken has a blog where we can all get a daily fix of his thinking, and a recent posting is all about the idea that there is hope for those who do not believe. It starts like this …

When I read some of the atheist blogs, Facebook posts, and news articles that display a sheer hatred against Christians (really, it’s a hatred against God), it can seem, humanly speaking, hopeless to try to reach these secularists with the truth of God’s Word and the salvation message it presents.

Hey, good news folks, he reads what we write, so there is hope for him yet.

So that first sentence has rather a lot of misinformation crammed in …

  • No atheists do not “hate” God. Does Mr Ham “Hate” other gods such as Zeus or Thor, or does he simply dismiss them as myths? If he should indeed dare to express doubts about Thor, you can perhaps suggest he view the well-documented evidence within a documentary called “The Avengers”, and if he should question that, then you can point out that he already bases everything he beliefs upon a myth, so one more should not be a problem.
  • No atheists do not generally “hate” Christians, but they will vigorously criticise the daft ideas they promote and protest against attempts to impose such beliefs upon others by force – that is not “hate”.
  • Notice also how he conflates the term “atheist” with the term “secularist” in an interchangeable manner. This are not the same thing; “Atheism” is the dismissal of various religious claims due to a lack of evidence, “Secularism” is simply denying a special privileges to any belief and advocates that the state should remain totally neutral. It is true that most Atheists are also Secularists, but there are also many religious people who are secularists.

His posting rambles on with the usual stuff … bla bla bla … “God’s Word” … (bible quote) …  “blasphemous” … (another bible quote) … “indoctrinated in evolutionary ideas” … (bible verse) … etc… and it really is all quite funny that he takes this very seriously and thinks that quoting the bible trumps any possible objection.

… and we get to this gem of a claim …

Most of them have probably never really heard a clear, logical defense of the Christian faith that would answer many of their skeptical questions

Hey, I’m blown away, I agree, but clearly where we might differ is that he thinks there is one.

To illustrate his claim he then proceeds to document a clear logical defence of the Christian faith …. whoops, no that is not how it pans out, instead he has a picture of an “atheist” who went to one of his conferences and converted. It turns out that she was actually a lapsed Catholic, and it all happened almost a quarter of a century ago. I do wonder what we should read into that,  because it appears to imply that nobody has converted since then, and so if that is indeed the rate at which people convert and join Answers in Genesis, then it will take him quite literally thousands of years to reach the folks in his local community, assuming of course they pause sufficiently long enough to stop laughing at him, and his universe lasts that long.

His finish is more of the same … “hardened heart” (bible verse) … “long-suffering” (bible verse), etc…

This is indeed all pure comedy, and while it is deeply eccentric, it also has a serious side as well. If a sufficient number of people bought into all this lunacy and it gained sufficient traction, then we risk its imposition as “truth” within either a legal or educational context, and so that is why criticism matters. He should of course be free to believe whatever he wishes, and to promote that belief in whatever way he wishes, but when faced with such ideas that are not evidence based, then perhaps the best defence is not a rant, nor rage, but rather the deployment of mockery, laughter and satire.

I did start by suggesting that his claim that there is hope for Atheists is weird, in the sense that he appears to think that individuals who have given religious claims a lot of thought and then rejected them due to the lack of evidence will suddenly convert. However, in another sense he is correct, the rising tide of non-belief does inspire a degree of hope for a better more rational world.

To finish, here is perhaps my favourite quote, it comes during the Bill Nye vs Ken Ham debate where Bill turns to Ken Ham and points out this …

bill nye and ken ham

1 thought on “Weird Claim of the week: “There is hope for Atheists””

  1. Dear Blogger,

    I am a Christian who enjoys endeavoring into the realm where science, philosophy, and beliefs clash, and I would just like to say, although you clearly disagree with the Judeo-Christian belief system, I admire what you are doing.

    Reply

Leave a Reply