I usually don’t think the fundies over at Answers in Genesis is worthy much attention, but this article by head crackpot Ken Ham titled The Emotional Age Issue caught my eye. It says for instance:
Increasingly, I’ve noticed that when the media write reports about us, they often don’t mention the scientific points we present in our rebuttal of evolution, but instead state something like this (these words appeared in our local newspaper):
The Creation Museum employs scientists of its own but has been criticized by the larger scientific community for positions it takes that conflict with mainstream scientific belief. For example, the museum contends the Earth is 6,000 years old, rather than about 4.5 billion. It also shows humans living at the same time as dinosaurs, which most scientists say never happened.
Why is the age of the earth such a big issue with secular scientists and the media? And why is it that after biblical creationists have written so many books and scientific peer-reviewed papers that contradict the supposed billions of years for the age of the earth/universe, and expose the fallible dating methods devised by man, secularists still scoff?
Well, here’s the bottom line: For secularists to even postulate the idea of evolution, they have to also postulate an incomprehensible amount of time (billions and billions of years) so that the universe and life might have enough time to evolve. Even with billions of years, though, evolution is impossible. Mathematically and scientifically. But secularists aggressively promote billions of years to make evolution a plausible idea.
This got to be the worst case of projection I have seen from that gang in a while. These people look at the world purely through their fundamentalist religion, and seemingly cannot conceive that an objective scientific approach can exist. And further, if such an objective approach should exists, surely it would confirm their beliefs? Since it doesn’t, it naturally cannot be objective, and thus has a faith based agenda against God. I.e. a plot instigated by the devil himself.
What they so completely fail to grasp is that science do not care for faith-based preconceptions based on ancient mythology. Science investigate the nature and build models upon what they find. If the data actually agreed with the 6000 year-old-earth view, we’d still have that view. But there is absolutely nothing in nature that supports such an age-estimate. On the contrary. It cannot be stressed enough how vast the pile of evidence against such a claim is, and how consistent our scientific theories and the data is with the old earth and old universe model. There is no doubt at all for anyone who look at it objectively. It is not just evolution. Geology, palaeontology, anthropology, cosmology and probably more fields of science, I forget, all agree on these things. Most importantly geology and cosmology who are completely unrelated fields to biology and each other. It is not a huge conspiracy involving millions of scientists and nearly 200 years of scientific progress, it is the truth. Deal with it!
Religion and the supernatural is not within range of scientific investigation as there isn’t much about it that is possible to investigate, other than perhaps secondary effects like miracles which constantly and consistently fails to be confirmed. They are basically just claims that many people agree upon and are emotionally attached to. Well, that is fine, people are free to do that, and they should be, but seriously, what do they have to gain by insisting on a version of reality, that for one is not necessary in order to believe in a god, and secondly is highly inconsistent with the real world? They are shooting themselves in the foot when trying to object to reality based on dogmatic interpretation of ancient texts. These interpretations are a legacy from pre-scientific ages, and seemed reasonable enough then. They aren’t any more. Welcome to the 21st century, the progress of the 19th and 20th century is required reading. You seem to have missed that too.
