More Nonscience From Ken Ham

Education without integrity

In a blog entry dated Dec 13th and entitled “We Love Science” Ken Ham continues to delude himself that Answers in Genesis isn’t an organization committed to delivering nonsense non-science to an ignorant and gullible Fundamentalist Christian public. I don’t want to spend too much time on the self delusions of this anti-science nincompoop, but if I were to expand upon just why Ken’s Answer in Genesis organisation is busily subverting science I would critique the following fundamental philosophical fallacies we find amongst the likes of Ken and his cronies:

1. The view that one can fundamentally distinguish between the “You weren’t there” historical sciences and the “repeatable” sciences: The motivation here is to undermine the historical sciences like evolutionary theory. As I have said elsewhere: All science, “historical” and otherwise, in varying degrees depends on historical documents and an assumed rational repeatability in the universe. There is no experiment that I can do, no historical investigation I can embark on, that doesn’t depend on documents and a posited rational repeatability. In short Ken’s philosophical fuax pas embodied in the quip “You weren’t there” undermines both Science and the Bible.

2. Ken’s Mature creation theory: I have addressed this at length here

3. The view that the Bible is the exclusive epistemic “lens” with which we see the universe: One cannot read and understand the meaning of the Bible without a “boot-strap” epistemic “lens” already in place – although of course the Bible effects one’s epistemic lens. What is being missed here is that epistemology and ontology have a two way coupling: Epistemology leads to knowledge of ontology and knowledge of ontology in turn modifies epistemology.

4. YEC failure to do justice to the equation “Meaning = Text + Context”: I have looked at this subject here.

5. An obsolete view of uniformitarianism that fails to understand power law catastrophism.

There are a lot more reasons I could find for pinning an anti-science charge on AiG, but really this unreasoning and bigoted fundamentalist group have consumed too much of my time already. It is irony that AiG’s position is liable to undermine all of science and history and would ultimately put irrationality on the throne. The vehement atheist and professional scientist PZ Myers has little patience with anyone who so much as entertains the subject of deity, but there is no need to unnecessarily antagonize an already very sore atheist with the anti-science bilge we get from Ken Ham. It is clear from the posts here and here that PZ Myers fully understands why Ken Ham’s junk science is the road to irrationalism and why it would lead to the ultimate demise of science and history as disciplines of hope and intellectual integrity. What an irony that secularist PZ Myers understands the role of rationality, intellectual integrity and hope in science but Ham’s organization doesn’t.