Poor Ken Ham: the media has been distorting his words. They claim that he said all the space aliens are damned to hell. He did not! He plainly said:
And I do believe there can’t be other intelligent beings in outer space because of the meaning of the gospel.
See? They aren’t going to hell, because they don’t exist. He continues with a beautiful example of fundagelical creologic:
You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation. One day, the whole universe will be judged by fire, and there will be a new heavens and earth. God’s Son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the “Godman,” to be our relative, and to be the perfect sacrifice for sin—the Savior of mankind.
Jesus did not become the “GodKlingon” or the “GodMartian”! Only descendants of Adam can be saved. God’s Son remains the “Godman” as our Savior. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that we see the Father through the Son (and we see the Son through His Word). To suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong.
An understanding of the gospel makes it clear that salvation through Christ is only for the Adamic race—human beings who are all descendants of Adam.
Now that’s impressive arrogance and delusions of grandeur. So there are 1011 galaxies and almost 1023 stars in the universe, and they’re all entirely empty of intelligent life, and they’re all going to be burned away and discarded when a Magic Jew comes reappears on Planet Earth. We know this because of an ancient book written by people who thought the earth was flat and the sky was held up on pillars.
Ooooookay.
Given what there is in the OP, there is nothing to say that aliens don’t exist. They may well exist, but are going to Hell, anyhow. God certainly wouldn’t give a damn about them any more than he does for the 90% of the human race that aren’t on the Jesus train.
So… was this a response to the notion that Snowden had evidence that tall white aliens were the secret to success behind such groups as Nazi Germany and B. Hussein Obama?
(I swear I wish I was making that shit up)
He says that God did not Jesusify himself into the form of alien species? Well, I say to him: prove it. If absence of evidence isn’t good enough to not believe in his God, then absence of evidence isn’t good enough to not believe in Andromeda Galaxy Squid-worm-people Jesus either.
antepro has it right. Let’s see Ham prove his bullshit. And of course he can’t.
Yay Chrisitanity! More baseless nonsense uttered by its followers.
Yahweh stays away from Klingons. The Klingons not only killed their gods, theirs stayed dead.
As long as God™ is not a Ferengi.
I’d love to know where he gets that from. Romans 5:12–21 talks of the sins of “one man” leading to death for “all men,” and the sacrifice of “one man” (Christ) so that “all men” might be redeemed.
If “men” in the first instance is read, as Ham’s implying it should be, to mean all intelligent creatures in the universe, then obviously the redemption applies to them as well. If the latter is only read to mean Adams descendants, then the former quite obviously refers to them. There’s no indication that the meaning suddenly changes between one and the other.
Biblical literalists; they never read the Bible literally.
If we use Ken Ham as an example of terrestrial life, then I say spending searching for extraterrestrial life is worth it.
How does Ken Ham know? Was he there?
What a feckin’ imbecile!
And this is why god wouldn’t need a starship: no aliens to visit. In all seriousness humanoid aliens, like klingons, that could interbreed with humans would be evidence of at least intelligent design and at bare minimum theistic evolution. This is especially with how the Klingons appear to be more closely related to species on their own planet. (In fact in universe Star Trek more or less has something more like intelligent design than evolution.)
As Eric Idle sang in the dazzling universe song of “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life”:
“Pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space ’cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.”
When you have no Evidence, all you can do is Babble.
The Bible has been translated into Klingon. I suspect they’d prefer the Old Testament, what with all the violence.
“God was not a Klingon”
…and for that he should be grateful. In Klingon religion, the original gods who created the first Klingons were slain by their own creations, because they were “more trouble than they were worth”.
Yes I’m a geek…. what of it? {grin}
Ken Ham and his little god that he keeps in a book that only he can read right blind to the stars in the universe.
markbarker
I’ve often thought that it would be interesting to import that concept into a fantasy (as opposed to space opera) setting. One where the existence of gods is a brute fact, and visitations etc are an actual thing. Except for one race, because they killed all of theirs, and no longer have to trouble themselves with worship or sacrifice.
@ Sugarfrosted
Actually, the Star Trek universe quite explicitly has intelligent design in the form of an ancient race that seeded planets with life designed to evolve along certain paths, hence the ubiquitous humanoid form.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Ancient_humanoid
Presumably Ham has to take this tack, since I think the Pope is on record saying the aliens are without Sin. Original Sin being unique to Earth due to Adam’s Fall.
‘we see the Father through the Son’. Is that through the little holes in his hands or is he just being transparent? Honestly, don’t they love to speak in riddles?
I thought this was resolved back in the 13th century when the bishop of Paris said that denying God’s power to create as many intelligent races as he wished was blasphemous. In other words, theologians have known for over 700 years that if God wants Klingons, God can have Klingons. (Now, if God wants to try creating a rock so big he can’t lift it, I’m just gonna try and stay out of the way of that one.)
“You are NOT Fek’lhr!”
Dallillama:
Check out Harry Turtledove’s “Between the Rivers.” It’s set in a Mesopotamian-style society of city-states where each state has its own physical god who walk among and occasionally eats his followers. But one god is lazy, so his followers start inventing technology and grow away from the need for him – and he is happy about this, because it means his creations are growing up.
One day, the whole universe will be judged by fire
Black hole, belike.
Gaaaaaah. Makes me wish my face was the sun and my hand Jupiter to make a facepalm big enough for this imbecility.
What is god but a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial?
There is some famous quote, I think of J.B.S. Haldane (IIRC) … a bishop asked him what we could deduce about the creator by studying his creation, and our protagonist answers “He had an inordinate fondness for beetles.” There were at the time more than a quarter-million different known species of beetles. It has occurred to me that this is evidence that if “God” exists he is probably a giant beetle.
The 10^23 stars are in the currently observable universe – there is no reason to think that it just ends there. It is probably many orders of magnitude bigger if it is finite at all. I just wanted to throw that out there in case someone says – meh, 10^23, that’s nothing…
You keep using that word…
Jennifer Burdoo
I’ve read it, yup. There’s also the Tamul empire in David Eddings’ Tamuli series; they have gods, and everyone is aware of their existence, but no one much pays them any attention (or even remembers their names), because they’re totally whimsical, not very bright, and obsessed with silly games (which their ostensible worshipers don’t really care about, since they don’t use humans as pieces the way a lot of gods do.) Neither is really the same thing as such, though, I don’t think.
If god is not a Klingon, why does he insist his followers drink blood wine? It’s right there in the Bible! Checkmate, Canned Ham.
In the observable universe. We don’t know how big the entire universe is. This proves again that you’re always twisting science to fit your dogmatic beliefs and how can you even call yourself a scientist and indoctrination something and I demand an apology and stuff and that.
So this is what Astronomers mean when they talk about the “heat-death of the universe”?
Wow! It’s almost like Ken Ham thinks having your words taken out of context to indicate you believe something you don’t is a bad thing (*cough* Dawkins Panspermia *cough*)…
Also, he’s whining about being misrepresented as saying “Aliens go to hell”, when actually he said “Aliens can’t possibly exist, because if they did then they’d have to go to hell”. It’s telling of the creationist mindset that this is a misrepresentation to him.
I wonder, if I said “God can’t possibly exist, because if he did he’d be a genocidal, megalomaniacal, capriciously malevolent bully”, and was headlined as “Atheist calls God a genocidal, megalomaniacal, capriciously malevolent bully,” would Ken Ham be campaigning on my behalf against such totally unfair and uncalled for misrepresentation of my argument?
Somewhat tangential, but reminded by MFD1946 in #11 above – the Monty Python Almost Live show I saw at the cinema this weekend had Stephen Hawking give a cameo performance of the universe song! No idea if it’ll be available online ever, but so worth looking out for! The Pythons were good, although not at their best (the goodwill from the audience carried them over the weak points), but Hawking doing a video clip of less than a minute was my highlight of the night.
Dog-whistle senses tingling….
Always amazes me that there are probably as many carbon atoms in a pencil ‘lead’ than stars in the entire observable universe.
That’s actually closer to “the universe will be judged by ICE”.
(Not much closer, but closer….)
Old hat! The currently fashionable apocalypti among physicists are the Big Rip, and the decay of the false vacuumhinted at by the masses of the Higgs boson and top quark.
Poor old Ken hasn’t realised that there were aliens on other planets in other stellar systems, in other galaxies – but they were all drowned in the universe wide flood. What he has interpreted as referring to dinosaurs actually included little blue men wherever they lived.
Cuttlefish
“So… was this a response to the notion that Snowden had evidence that tall white aliens were the secret to success behind such groups as Nazi Germany and B. Hussein Obama?”
At least they were white!
It wasn’t inmoral enough for their god to condemn every descendant of Adam and Eve for something they had fuck all to do with, now even life forms in entirely different galaxies are to be blamed for a mistake commited by people they don’t even know or are related to in any way who fell for a dirty trick, that same god that is condemning them all, orquestrated?
I’m glad Ken’s god is just bad fiction, can you imagine having to endure such a fucking arsehole?
10^23? Now I’m wondering whether the number of stars in the universe is exactly equal to Avogadro’s number. Dude, what if each star is, like, just an atom in a giant mole? Whoa.
I’m often still amazed at just how completely stupid Ken Ham is. His belief in that one old book of myths makes his position on so many things just plain comical. What a bizarre little man.
As long as God™ is not a Ferengi.
I suspect some libertarians might not like to hear that.
So can we use his same logic to prove that buffalos don’t exists? After all, Adam’s sin affected the whole universe, including these supposed “buffalo”. But buffalo are not descendents of Adam, so they can have no salvation. Therefore… * buffalo don’t exist?
* Yes, there is a step of logic missing here, but I’m using “Ham logic” and it is a perfectly valid conclusion to make in his view.
I always pictured the Ferengi government like the Mafia. Tribute goes up, bestowing favors down.
“Actually, the Star Trek universe quite explicitly has intelligent design in the form of an ancient race that seeded planets with life designed to evolve along certain paths, hence the ubiquitous humanoid form.”
That doesn’t stand up any better than Ham’s buffoonery; there’s no assurance the hominid form would arise any more frequently than the Flying Spaghetti Monster or prescient squids. And having an “ancient race that…” merely begs the question into infinite regress.
Ken Ham – one of the all-time great comedians.
Hey, if the fundies can’t have the center of the universe, or the center of the Solar system… they gotta have Earth be important SOME way.
You guys have all been blinded by science. There are no other worlds except heaven. Them stars is just lights on the dome of the firmament above a flat earth. Ham is a heretic:
The earth was created on the first day, and it was “without form and void” (Genesis 1:2). On the second day a vault—the “firmament” of the King James Bible—was created to divide the waters, some above, and some being below the vault….
Other passages complete the picture. God “sits throned on the vaulted roof of earth, whose inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40:21-22). He also “walks to and fro on the vault of heaven” (Job 22: 14), which vault is “hard as a mirror of cast metal” (Job 37:18). The roof of the sky has “windows” (Genesis 7:12) that God can open to let the waters above fall to the surface as rain. The topography…isn’t specified, but Daniel “saw a tree of great height at the centre of the earth…reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth’s farthest bounds” (Daniel 4:10-11). Such visibility would not be possible on a spherical earth, but might be expected if the earth were flat (1983, p. 290, emp. added).
(borrowed from https://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=11&article=1164 )
I disagree. Believing stupid shit like this out of stubborn ignorance isn’t comedy, it’s tragedy.
The level of absurdity is just mind-boggling, and it does make me fear for the future of humanity. How are we to grow as a society and solve all the problems facing us at any given time when we can’t even agree on the nature of reality?
Dalillama, Schmott Guy
Glen Cook’s book series (Instrumentalitiesd of the Night) is both an alternative history, and a narrative where humans control the gods by trapping them in statues etc thus making them harmless and irrelevant. When the older gods begin to make a comeback, the protagonist invents a way to kill them off permanently.
Much recommended, but you have to spend a lot of time figuring out wich place-names in the book corresponds to which names in (our) medieval history -I have added an online review at Amazon where I list the relevant names, to make it easier for other readers.
But Ham, I know that the alienJesus was written down in the alienBible. The aliens guard their Bibles religiously and don’t even dare to let us humans see one. So, I know that you are wrong about the salvation of all the aliens in the universe. The manBible was not delivered to us as a finished book, written by God Himself. He telephoned it in to his stenographer, through divine inspiration. He did the same for each kind of alien. Aliens are not mentioned in our Bible cuz God wanted to keep the story short enough for our limited resource of paper and ink, and the time to write it down. So the human Bible is the story of the human salvation, every alien has their own bible telling them how to achieve salvation, and how their own Jesus sacrificed himself to give them the opportunity to self-salvate.
{slap}
Where does Ham get this sh_t? Even the “fun chemicals” of my college days never got me Hamlike loony. Doesn’t look temptingly fun at all. Please Ham, stay where you are so I know how to avoid you. Thanks.
Dalillama:
You should read Max Gladstone’s series, starting with Three Parts Dead.
@peterh
Not only an hominid form – Humans, Klingons, Vulcans and Romulans are all genetically compatible. I hate to say it, but it’s Prometheus level wrong.
Star Trek biology is a nightmare, as a long time fan, understanding evolution has more or less spoiled it for me completely. The physics one can more or less simply assume to be based on something cool that will be discovered. But evolution is already understood, and the ST universe is impossible.
re 52:
html fail. I tried to only bold that first use of the word “know”, but I think I dropped the / to close the html tag for BOLD. I did not want that whole screed to be embolded. Try to read it as “plain text” without the feature of BOLD. Sorry for the blunder, I blame HAM on the brain. Trying to “correct” Ham-ster made me screw up the trivial stuff. ah well… tra la.
“To suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong.”
Sure, aliens could respond to the gospels. With hysterical laughter (or the equivalent), and then stay as far from us as possible.
(Imagines Bumpy Head Jesus hanging from a cross, thundering, “Today is a good day to die!”)
There was a race in one of my games (Starfire) that based their entire civilization on some human religious broadcasting that they received in their system.
Needless to say, when that race went to the stars and discovered humankind, the coming home to roost thing didn’t work out so well.
Made for a good storyline though.
No-one mentioned the obvious classic A Case of Conscience, by James Blish?
I was also reminded of this (less famous) story:
#52 twas brillig idea should be credible to Ham, et al.
1) The bible is about God’s chosen people and any people (species) that does not interact with the chosen people has no need of mention, e.g. those in Japan, South America, Australia, Lh’owon, etc.
2) The Jews were becoming uppity about this so the NT shows that salvation is available to all people not just the chosen people.
3) Now the Hams come along and say the same about alien species. Refer to point 1.
4) Another idea would be that of all the species throughout the universe, we are the only one which screwed up. All the others are living lives of ease and luxury in their private Edens and have no desire to associate with us. An idea which also solves the Fermi paradox.
I’m surprised a discussion of fictional worlds where gods are known to exist went this long without mentioning the Discworld books, especially Small Gods and The Last Hero. Another one that sprang to mind for me was Asura’s Wrath, in which the equivalent of God simply hadn’t gotten around to “saving” the other inhabited worlds in the universe because he was focusing on Gaea.
Earlier this evening, before seeing this blog post, I sent a detailed email to AiG and others which has been reproduced here:
http://forums.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2967&start=1575
How is that “news”?
@epikt #57:
But Bumpy Head Jesus would never qualify for Sto’vo’kor. He’d be stuck on the Barge of the Dead, heading for an eternity in Gre’thor.
@Daz #7:
If they did they’d realise that half of them can’t possibly ever go to heaven — but on the other hand, they might never die.
Since Jeebus rised from his tomb, he is a zombie, not a Klingon. Case closed.
(Waitin’ for the zombie apocalypse with me shutgun at hand; Aim at their brain. Aim at their brain.)
tbtabby
The discussion was specifically about worlds where gods were known to exist, and some group of mortals had intentionally killed the ones they previously worshiped, and no longer practiced worship. The Last Hero features an attempt at this, but they stop when they realize it would also destroy the world (although the Bard does do for his god, people keep worshiping him anyway). Small Gods has an almost dead god, but people are still going through all the motions of religion.
epikt #57
I will never be able to look at a crucifix again, without giggling.
Also, coffee in the sinuses really hurts. Wish there could be warning signs, “really funny ahead, stop drinking that coffee”, or such.
Dalillama: Maybe check out “The Age of Five” trilogy by Trudi Canavan. The gods are alive at first, so adding it to a list of books where people kill off their gods is a bit of a spoiler, though. It was an interesting take on the notion of gods, too.