Creation Museum – Homeschoolers Anonymous

How Answers in Genesis Shattered My Faith in Creationism

February 23, 2016May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team17 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Tim Evanson.

Editorial note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog, Love, Joy, Feminism. It was originally published on February 17, 2016.

Earlier today, Answers in Genesis posted an article titled There Is Hope for Atheists! In this article, Ken Ham writes about witnessing to atheists. He explains that when he reads the “blasphemous and vitriolic” comments of atheists he understands that most of them have never heard sound apologetics arguments.

At Answers in Genesis, through our resources, conferences, and other outreaches, we do our best to defend the Christian faith using apologetics against the secular attacks of our day. But in doing so, we need to also point people to the truth of God’s Word and challenge them concerning the saving gospel. We use apologetics to answer questions and direct people to God’s Word and its message of salvation.

There’s no greater thrill in this ministry than to hear how God has used what has been taught by AiG to touch someone’s life—for eternity. Last week, I was introduced to one of our new volunteers, Donna, who is helping sew some of the costumes for the figures that will be placed inside our full-size Ark. She had responded to my Facebook post asking for seamstresses.

I discovered that she became a Christian in 1993 after attending one of my seminars (called “Back to Genesis” with the Institute for Creation Research ministry) at Cedarville University in Ohio. The Bible-upholding seminar was such an eye-opener to her about the reliability of the Bible that she became a Christian.

We asked if she would share her testimony.

Donna begins her testimony as follows:

The Lord opened up this atheistic evolutionist’s eyes decades ago, through exposure to Ken’s ministry.

I was a die-hard evolutionist, completely convinced that the fossil finds in Olduvai Gorge supported the “evidence” that we evolved from less-complicated, early hominid creatures, like the so-called “Lucy”.

To keep a long story short: I attended a Creation Seminar at Cedarville College [now Cedarville University], sat in rapt attention as Ken Ham told me “the rest of the story,” and I realized that all of the fossil finds I believed supported evolution were, in all cases, misinterpreted. I was blown away! So, learning the truth about evolution preceded my realizing that God was real (after all!) and that the Bible was His Word. I became a creationist before I became a believer in Christ.

Ken Ham goes on to write that atheists are “walking dead people” and that he likes to remember, when witnessing to atheists, that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and that even so God’s Word can convert atheists. He finishes with this:

If the Lord has used AiG, including our Creation Museum, in your life to bring you to salvation, would you please let me know? Thank you.

So, here’s the problem. I actually credit an Answers in Genesis conference with letting the air out of the last of my young earth creationism. Yes, that’s right, in a sense you could argue that an Answers in Genesis conference led me to give up my creationism.

I was in college. It was there that I first truly came into contact with individuals who accepted evolution. The only time before this that I’d engaged a defender of evolution in debate was the time I was stuck in a car with my aunt for ten straight hours, and I’m pretty sure she was humoring me. I grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family. I read creationist literature from my church library starting when I was very young. I attended Answers in Genesis conferences as a teen and bought Answers in Genesis literature at homeschool conventions with my own money. I knew my stuff.

The problem was that when I was in college I came in contact with individuals who deconstructed my arguments without any trouble.

It was uncanny. I returned time and again to my creationist literature—the Answers in Genesis website received a lot of traffic from me during those months—and came back with new arguments and information to throw at my opponents, only to have those arguments soundly deconstructed as well.

There was one young man in particular—Sean. I later married him, as my regular readers will know. Sean and I spent hours debating the fine points of creationism and evolution. Sean had been a creationist himself some years before, but high school—and arguing on the internet—had changed his mind. But even as he pointed out flaws in every argument I could come up with, I had hope. I had an incredible amount of respect for Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, and I was sure that if I could just get Sean to an Answers in Genesis conference that would do the trick. You may imagine my excitement when I learned that an Answers in Genesis conference was coming to a church in our area! Sean agreed to come, and I was sure our arguments were coming to an end.

That conference was an utter failure for me on more fronts than I’d realized going in. For one thing, Sean was unconvinced—and it wasn’t because he wasn’t listening, he was. But the real problem was that I was unconvinced. I hadn’t realized that hours of listening to Sean deconstruct creationist arguments would change the way those same arguments sounded to me when I heard going forward, but it did. I sat there in that church sanctuary with an instant rebuttal springing to mind for each point the speaker made, and I knew some of what he said was simply factually false.

I spent some time perusing the creationist literature they had for sale at the conference and kept running into the same problem—I knew rebuttals to everything I saw printed there.

I realized with growing horror that much of the material there was either flat-out lying or skillfully misleading people.

As we drove away from the church, I was quiet—shaken. I had seen this conference as a way of finally convincing Sean that I’d been right while at the same time reinvigorating my own beliefs, and it had failed on both accounts. Not only did this conference not give me new arguments and rebuttals, it shattered my trust in Answers in Genesis in particular and creationist literature more widely.

I spent a few weeks reading and researching, looking beyond Answers in Genesis’ materials to wider scientific resources. Answers in Genesis may have shattered my faith in creationism, but I still had a few questions about evolution that needed answering. After several weeks of study, I was satisfied. I left aside young earth creationism for good and became a theistic evolutionist. It was difficult, at first, because I was afraid my entire faith would fall apart after accepting evolution. After all, I’d heard Ken Ham repeat time and again that Genesis was the foundation of the Bible, and that without Genesis, the gospel story would collapse.

I’m no longer a Christian today, but evolution isn’t to blame there, strictly speaking. I spent some years as a progressive Christian, and even converted to Catholicism. I loved Catholicism’s embrace of the natural world and science, and its willingness to accept historical scholarship on the Bible. It was ultimately the fallout from a near-cult experience that led my faith to collapse. but in a sense, it was the collapse of my faith in young earth creationism that made me willing to see the beliefs I’d been taught as fallible, and open to asking questions.

I can’t speak for Donna, whose testimony is quite above—her journey is her own. Still, I find Ken Ham’s request to hear from his readers about the way “the Lord has used AiG . . . in your life to bring you salvation” highly ironic given my own experience.

The Racism In Our Science Books

November 11, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team2 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on January 22, 2013.

I grew up reading copious amounts of literature from Answers in Genesis and attending conferences where Ken Ham and other leading creationists were speakers. I’ve been to the Creation Museum, and I’ve been reading Answers in Genesis’ Answers Magazine for close to a decade now. And one thing that was drilled into me over and over again is that racism is rooted in the theory of evolution and that creationism, which teaches that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, is the antidote to evolution.

One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism is Ken Ham’s contribution to efforts to mend racial prejudice, and I do think Ham is genuine in his efforts. He believes that the understanding that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, and ultimately from Noah’s three sons, is what is needed to curb racism. He also believes that the roots of racism are found in the theory of evolution, and that it was this theory of the races that inspired such atrocities as the Holocaust. Ham’s ideas – that racism stems from evolution and that creationism is the antidote – are echoed by other prominent creationists, including creationist heavyweight Henry Morris.

I grew up reading this literature and firmly rejecting both (overt) racism and the theory of evolution.

Here is an image from the Creation Museum, an image which describes a theory of human origins that I accepted as gospel truth until college:

I was taught, and Answers in Genesis teaches, that Africans are the descendants of Ham, that Europeans are the descendants of Japheth, and that Asians and Middle Easterners are the descendants of Shem. I’m not surprised, then, to learn that some public school classrooms in Texas are using creationist textbooks that contain the following image:

Growing up in a Christian homeschool family, the textbooks we used for subjects like history and science were suffused with religion, and this theory of racial origins is exactly what I was taught – and what Answers in Genesis teaches. What I didn’t realize, and what Answers in Genesis seems weirdly oblivious to, is this:

This theory of racial origins is actually, well, racist.

Somehow this flew over my head growing up – which is weird, given my familiarity with the Bible – but the story of Noah’s three sons is not somehow equal or without preference or value judgment.

Genesis 9: 18-27

The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth.

Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father’s nakedness.

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

“Cursed be Canaan!

The lowest of slaves

will he be to his brothers.”

He also said,

“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem!

May Canaan be the slave of Shem.

May God extend the territory of Japheth;

may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,

and may Canaan be his slave.”

“The curse of Ham” was used by antebellum Americans as a justification for slavery.

Africans, after all, were descended from Ham, and Ham was cursed by God and ordered to serve his brothers Shem and Japheth. (For more background, I highly recommend Sylvester Johnson’s The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God.) In other words, in spite of what Answers in Genesis maintains, racism both long predates the theory of evolution and has frequently sprung from the Bible and from the creation account itself.

Am I saying that the theory of evolution has never been used to justify racism? Of course not. Am I saying that modern creationists are of necessity racist? Not at all. What I am saying is that Answers in Genesis’ insistence that racism stems from the theory of evolution and that creationism is automatically anti-racist is both overly simplistic and factually incorrect. While I am very glad Ham wants to combat racism, I don’t think he completely understands that he is working to do so by promoting a theory of origins – that all men descend from Shem, Ham, and Japheth – that has long been seeped in racism. While this idea may hold no racist implications for him, it does for many others, especially in the American South.

(After writing the above I read this excerpt from One Blood, and I suddenly wonder if I am giving Ham too much of the benefit of the doubt. I clearly need to reread the book. Ham argues that “the curse of Ham” was actually only meant to be a curse on Canaan, but he somehow does that without making things much better at all.)

The Skeleton in Doug Phillips’s Closet Is Now in the Creation Museum. Literally.

July 17, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Andrew Snelling, Ken Ham and Michael Peroutka (L-R) stand in front of Ebenezer the Allosaurus. (Photo: Answers in Genesis) — Andrew Snelling, Ken Ham and Michael Peroutka (L-R) stand in front of Ebenezer the Allosaurus.
(Photo: Answers in Genesis)

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

In case you missed the news, the Creation Museum — labor of love par excellence of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis — acquired some dinosaur bones. Those bones, belonging to 30-foot-long, 10-foot-high Ebenezer the Allosaurus, are valued at $1 million. According to Ham, Ebenezer is named after the “stone of help” that the Hebrew prophet Samuel set up to honor his God. Ebenezer was unveiled to the public on May 23 of this year.

There has been a healthy debate over the significance of Ebenezer when it comes to the Creationism vs. Evolutionism debate. Ham believes Ebenezer will “expose the scientific problems with evolution” and “help us defend the book of Genesis.” In contrast some have argued that, depending on how much or little data was collected during its excavation, Ebenezer might be “useless scientifically.”

But there are other — and maybe more significant — debates buried underneath the surface. Just this last week there’s been widespread discussion over whether the Creation Museum should have accepted the gift of the bones in the first place. The bones were donated by the Elizabeth Streb Peroutka Foundation, a foundation that focuses primarily on “putting an end to the catastrophe of abortion.” The catch is that Michael Peroutka, the man who runs the foundation (along with his brother, Stephen Peroutka), appears to be a white supremacist sympathizer.

Michael Peroutka is currently a debt collection lawyer and a Republican candidate in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. He is more known, though, as the presidential candidate for the Constitution Party in 2004. (The Constitution Party was started in 1992 by Howard Phillips, the father of Doug Phillips — disgraced former HSLDA attorney, president of Vision Forum, and homeschool celebrity, now being sued by his nanny on charges of molestation.) During Peroutka’s 2004 presidential campaign, he ran as “the home-school candidate.” This image wasn’t helped, however, by revelations that he “had disowned two teenage stepdaughters who accused him of abuse.” (One of his daughters claimed he sexually abused her, though she later retracted that claim.)

Also during his 2004 campaign, Peroutka was endorsed by the League of the South — a white supremacist and nationalist organization and Neo-Confederate hate group. The League’s founder, Michael Hill, has expressed his organization’s white supremacy quite blatantly, describing American slavery as “God-ordained” and calling for a hierarchal society composed of “superiors, equals and inferiors.” In 2013, Peroutka joined the Board of Directors of the League of the South. (You can see Peroutka’s name on the League’s website in this December 2013 archived screen capture.)

But even more curious that Peroutka’s disturbing connections with white supremacy is the actual history of Ebenezer the Allosaurus. The Creation Museum, Ken Ham, and Answers in Genesis have all conveniently neglected to mention this history. And I say “convenient” because they are all entirely aware of that history.

See, Ebenezer the Allosaurus is the dinosaur that Doug Phillips lied about and stole.

You won’t find this in many of the news articles about Ebenezer. (Except for Right Wing Watch and io9. Props to them for connecting the dots.) Somehow this origin story has been forgotten. So let’s review:

Answers in Genesis geologist Andrew Snelling says that Ebenezer was “found in the Morrison Formation of North America (specifically in northwestern Colorado).” And in their October 2013 press release first announcing the dinosaur donation, Answers in Genesis said the following:

One blessing in getting the allosaur was that the Creation Museum did not seek it out. Ten years ago, the Elizabeth Streb Peroutka Foundation bought the specimen and housed it. Thousands of hours later, the bones of this magnificent fossil are almost completely cleaned and restored thanks to the DeRosa family of Creation Expeditions.

Ah, yes. The DeRosa family of Creation Expeditions. That rings a bell.

And here is how Michael Peroutka explains the situation, as quoted in the Capitol-Gazette:

Peroutka said his foundation is a small family charity he and his brother, Stephen, established and named after their mother. It was meant to give financial aid to groups “dedicated to ending the holocaust of abortion,” he said.

But the organization’s mission took a “slight detour,” Peroutka said, after a meeting with the DeRosa family of Crystal River, Fla., during a home-schooling excursion.

He said the family told him they were part of a group that discovered a dinosaur specimen in Colorado and that there were competing claims over its ownership.

Peroutka said his foundation purchased the fossils “to settle those claims.” It’s unclear how much the charity originally paid for them.

The skeleton was excavated about 10 years ago on private property owned by a Christian woman near the town of Dinosaur, Colo., museum representatives said.

So we have several indicators of what allosaurus this is:

1) Northwestern Colorado

2) The DeRosa family

3) A home-schooling excursion that ended with “competing claims” over ownership

Well, there’s only one allosaurus that fits that description. And we’ll let WorldNetDaily circa 2002 handle this one:

A dinosaur fossil expedition for home educators has excavated a large, rare, intact allosaurus, a discovery that organizers say helps debunk the theory of evolution… Under the leadership of Doug Phillips, president of Vision Forum and an adjunct professor of apologetics with the Institute for Creation Research, and Peter DeRosa, a veteran archaeologist and paleontologist with Creation Expeditions, the team of 30 home schoolers spent a week earlier this month hunting for and excavating fossils in a privately owned location in the Skullcreek Basin of northwest Colorado.

Yes, the allosaurus that Peroutka’s foundation bought — which has now been donated to Ken Ham’s Creation Museum — is the very same one “discovered” by Doug Phillips and his homeschooling paleontologist stars over a decade ago. This was the subject of Phillip’s so-called “documentary” Raising the Allosaur.

Except that, you know, Doug Phillips lied about all of it.

In 2004, Terry Beh (former writer for Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family) and Mary Gavin (home-school parents of five children and nine grandchildren) wrote a blog post titled, “Villainy Behind the Mask of Virtue: Vision Forum Unmasked.” In that post, Beh and Gavin call Doug Phillips and his documentary out for “grossly violating” Christian ethics, in particular ethics against stealing and lying. Basically, a group of individuals discovered Ebenezer and did the hard work of extracting the bones, and then Doug Phillips swooped in and completely rewrote the history about what happened — and then sued the original people involved in order to claim full credit. Here’s an excerpt from Beh and Gavin’s post:

The controversy surrounds the excavation of an allosaurus discovered in northwest Colorado by landowner, Dana Forbes. Forbes, who originally found the allosaur in October 2000 and is featured in the beginning of Phillips’ film, was not given credit for the discovery. The Forbes abandoned both their land and their dream of blessing the creation community through tours and scientific studies on the land through the deceitful actions of Doug Phillips.

Vision Forum deceived and bullied many parties involved in order to profit from the exciting discovery. Chief among them is Joe Taylor, who owns perhaps the largest creation fossil museum in the world which is located in Crosbyton, Texas. Taylor, the lead site manager for the allosaur excavation [and part owner of the allosaur], is not featured in Phillips film at all.

Tom DeRosa, president of Creation Studies Institute and Mike Zovath, field representative for Answers In Genesis [presently vice-president of AiG] were part of the original dig. When the Vision Forum group came to the Forbes property in May of 2002 to film “Raising the Allosaur” over three partial days of digging, all that was left of the allosaur was the end of the tail, which had been plaster cast the year before to protect it from erosion.

By the time the Vision Forum group (composed primarily of homeschool families that paid $999.00 per person) had departed, the skull had not yet been found. This is why there is no footage of it being excavated in the film….

Legal demands and threats were made against Taylor to surrender the bones. Under threat of a lawsuit, and believing it wrong to sue a brother, Taylor reluctantly let them have it. The bones were taken to a makeshift “lab” owned by Doug Phillips. Consequently, Taylor suffered devastating financial losses and has had to shut his museum down several times as well as sell his museum displays just to survive.

Another account about Doug Phillips’s unethical and bullying behavior regarding Ebenezer the Allosaur can be found on Under Much Grace. Joe Taylor was also sued by the DeRosa family for speaking out against Doug Phillips’s film. (The DeRosa family were the stars of the film.)

Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis are well-aware of this history. Their field representative, after all, was present during the original dig. However, neither Ham nor his organization have ever called out Phillips’ attempts at deception and theft, despite being asked to in 2007. Instead, Ham eagerly accepted Vision Forum’s “George Washington Award Man of the Year” from Doug Phillips, saying Phillips was a “ministry friend” and he was “honored” to accept the award. Ham and Phillips continued to speak together over the following decade at homeschool convention after convention, all the way through last year, when both were the keynote speakers at the 30th Annual CHEA Homeschool Convention in California, along with HSLDA’s Elizabeth Smith. (This was mere months before Phillips resigned due to his sexual abuse of Lourdes Torres-Mantufuel being discovered.) Then again, Ham’s silence in this case proved to benefit him: he was the one who ended up with Ebenezer, a $1 million boon to Ham’s creationist empire — an empire built by Ham’s own history of him bullying others, much like Doug Phillips.