Ken Ham explains contrast between Democrats, GOP on evolution

Jim Brown
OneNewsNow.com
June 14, 2007
[ underlines mine ]

A leading Christian apologist says he's not at all surprised by the results of a new Gallup poll that finds most Democrats and Independents believe Darwin's theory of evolution is true, but Republicans disbelieve it by a more than 2-to-1 margin. Church attendance, according to the poll, plays a role in those findings.

The poll found that those who go to church on a regular basis reject evolution more than those who do not. Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll, also says Republicans are likelier than Democrats or Independents to attend church services.

Dr. Ken Ham is the president of Answers in Genesis (AIG), a Christian ministry that recently unveiled the new high-tech Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. Ham does not find it surprising to find that people who would be considered on the more conservative end of the spectrum would believe that God created the heavens and the earth and its inhabitants.

"Because after all, if there is no God and there's no absolute authority, who does decide right and wrong? Who does decide good and bad?" he asks. "Those on the other end of the spectrum who believe in moral relativism, of course, wouldn't want to be accountable to God and would want to believe that everything evolved by natural processes. So you'd more suspect that those people would say they believe in evolution ...."

Ham also believes that the education system fosters this belief in evolution. "What's being taught in the public education system is that life can only be explained by natural processes," the Christian apologist laments. "That is totally atheistic, the religion of naturalism, and that's not where the majority of Americans are at."

"But if you bring a whole generation [or generations] through an education system like that -- [a system that tells them] life is a result of natural processes and God has nothing to do with it -- then that's very much going to affect how they view morality and how they view themselves," Ham claims.

Ham says "creation versus evolution" has been a hot topic in the recent presidential debates because the biblical creation movement has been able to get a lot of information out into the culture, and more and more college students are starting to question their professors concerning the issue of origins.

In addition, he believes the opening of AIG's Creation Museum last month created an international media buzz that has brought the issue to light.

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Source:  OneNewsNow.com news article at http://www.onenewsnow.com/2007/06/ken_ham_explains_contrast_betw.php

Related Link:  Answers In Genesis ( AIG ) website at http://www.answersingenesis.org/

Personally I don't find Evolution and Faith to be mutually exclusive. You just have to accept that parts of the bible are more metaphorical than literal. I'm not sure metaphorical is the right word, but let me explain.

Let's say it's a few thousand years ago, and you're God. You need to get your word out to these squabbling humans you've created before they all end up in hell. Remember at this stage of history, they're barely more than cavemen. They've mastered fire and pointy sticks, and that's about it. A few have figured out that you can move heavy things by putting them on round things like logs. They're figuring out how to put words into written form now, so you can finally write them a book. These people aren't going to understand the concept of billions of years, single-celled organisms, or evolution. They wont understand that the bright hot ball in the sky is actually millions of miles away and is a product of immense gravitational forces fusing hydrogen atoms together and releasing the light and heat that would give life to the earth.

So you explain it to them in a way they can understand and give them the curiosity and free will to figure the rest out for themselves, eventually.

The more I learn about how staggeringly complex we are, the more I am convinced that there had to be a guiding hand somewhere. The odds against all this happening by accident are astronomical.

It all fits together somehow, and we've got the drive built into us to figure it out. Eventually.