AiG ❤️ Dawkins & Coyne

Answers in Genesis is thrilled at everything Trump promises to do. You know what else makes them happy? That Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have embraced a Biblical worldview, finally realizing that sex is binary and simple, just like the Bible says. Skip ahead to about 7:30 if you don’t want to hear them fawning over Trump, don’t bother listening at all if you don’t want to hear their appreciation of Dawkins and Coyne (also some guy named Pinky or Pink…they knew there was “pink” in the name).

It doesn’t mean much. These are creationists, they always pick and choose which words they’ll hear. But isn’t it interesting that some New Atheists are converging on a dogmatic religious view?

Kent Hovind’s latest ‘wife’ says bye-bye

Kent Hovind must be a real asshole — he keeps driving women away. Here’s a brief history of his brief ‘marriages’:

He was married to his first wife Jo Hovind from 1973 and they stayed together until their divorce in March of 2016.

He then ‘married’ Mary Tocco in September 2016, though no sexual adultery had taken place in his former marriage, making him an adulterer. They did not get a marriage license and instead entered into a public, legally recognizable common-law marriage.

However, in Alabama at the time, the state did not recognize “common-law-divorces” that can be entered and exited willy-nilly, but rather in order to legally end the marriage, they would have to undergo a formal divorce process, the same as if entered into a traditional marriage. To quote Robert Baty “Legal common-law marriages cannot be dissolved except by legal process, not by hand-waiving.”

But that’s exactly what he did. While still legally married to Mary Tocco, Kent Hovind waived his hands and declared the marriage dissolved in 2017.

Feeling restless and on the prowl, he got ‘married’ again in 2018, this time to Cindy Lincoln. This was done in the same sort of private ceremony.

However, after his first common-law marriage, Alabama changed its laws, so that the state no longer recognized any new common-law marriages as legally binding.

Following this pattern, his new ‘marriage’ to Lincoln did not last long, and he cut ties with her in 2020 by ‘divorcing her’ ie another wave of his hand. Though they publically presented themselves as married up to this point and consummating the relationship, the law treated this basically as a boyfriend and girlfriend breaking up, given the ‘marriage’ was invalid in the first place.

It is this third ‘wife’ that took an order of protection against the disgraced creationist, claiming that he physically abused her by ‘body-slamming her’ and has engaged in a pattern of psychological torture, resulting in him being sentenced to 30 days in jail for domestic violence.

Then in September of 2021, he ‘married’ a 4th ‘wife’, Sandra Sawyer, in another private covenant/ common-law ceremony. Like the ‘marriage’ before, the state does not recognize this marriage, and so legally he is still married to his second wife.

The saga will have to be updated, because it seems that #4, Sandra Sawyer, has now left him.

I hope the women around him are waking up to this and that there is no #5.

What’s the opposite of chocolate and peanut butter?

I can imagine much worse, but I didn’t want to make you all sick

You know, the old “two great tastes that taste great together” slogan, only the opposite of that — two awful things that become even more awful when combined? I tried imagining something unpleasantly yucky, and then picturing a completely different yuk, and then mixed them up in my imagination, and only succeeded in making myself mildly nauseous.

Then I discovered that Answers in Genesis had done the exercise for me. They have announced that they are combining the idiocy of young earth creationism with the hype of AI, and then I felt extremely nauseous.

We’ve been talking about doing this project for some time now, and I’m excited to finally announce a brand-new tool to help you find answers to your questions: AI Genesis. This chat tool, an extension of our website, has been under development and testing for months, and we’ve now rolled out a beta (test) version for anyone who has an account on our website.

You can ask our AI a wide variety of questions, such as:

• What was the shape of Noah’s ark?
• What’s the best evidence for a young earth?
• Is Genesis derived from ancient myths?
• What happened to the dinosaurs?
• Are the Gospels trustworthy?
• How can I share the gospel with someone who is trans?

I don’t have an account on their website — I haven’t even tried, but Ken Ham has gone all fatwah on my butt so I doubt I’d succeed — but I’m confident that they’ve implemented a glorified chatbot to deliver highly filtered creationist messages to their audience. One thing I have to commend AiG for is that they’ve hired some competent people to manage their internet presence. Have you looked at their SEO? Try to use Google to find specific details about AiG, and instead you get page after page of fluff written by AiG proponents. It’s amazingly useless.

But then, Google pretty much sucks nowadays.

Man tracks!

Dan Olson has been soaking in the history of creationism, and has come out with an excellent YouTube documentary. It starts with the Paluxy dinosaur tracks, and leads to Clifford Burdick, The Genesis Flood, and frauds like Kent Hovind. And then Carl Baugh shows up, a true charlatan.

It’s familiar stuff, but really well presented. Well worth an hour and a half.

Confidently ridiculous

Oh boy. There are places on the internet that are still full of arrogant ignorance. A creationist charged into a subreddit with some, ummm, assertions.

Athiesm is a religion that insidiously postures itself as science, indoctrinating the youth with made up stories about the origins of life, and history of the universe.
Example of atheist beliefs in science that are not proven or factual and simply a belief yet are taught as factual science.

Why is it that these guys who hate atheism so much don’t know how to spell atheism? That’s especially ironic given that nothing he complains about are actually tenets of atheism. His gripe is with science, not atheism — a great many religious people are entirely comfortable with accepting every idea on his list. It’s just that most (not all) atheists don’t have any problem with the authority of science, it takes a dedication to religious dogma to so readily accept counterfactuals.

Let’s look at his claims one by one.

1. We are stardust

This is not an atheist idea.

The base material of the universe is hydrogen — it’s mostly hydrogen. So the question is, where did the heavier elements come from? The religious belief is that a god simply poofed them all into existence. A better, non-miraculous explanation is that the process of nucleosynthesis, a fusion reaction that takes place in stars, built up the carbon and iron and oxygen etc. over time, and that these elements were scattered throughout the universe and used as building blocks for planets and people etc. We have evidence for nucleosynthesis. We lack evidence of divine poofing.

2. Human beings are apes

This is not an atheist idea.

Humans definitely belong in the ape clade — the morphological, genetic, and molecular evidence link us. If an alien were to classify and categorize life on Earth, they would group us with the other primates. There is no evidence to suggest that humans are discretely unique in a way that makes them non-apes. This is an old, failed argument by creationists that there is something in the human brain that isn’t shared with other apes.

3. The earth is 5 billion years old

This is not an atheist idea.

Go argue with the physicists and geologists. We know for sure that the Earth is older than 6000 years old, the usual number trotted out by creationists.

4. Human beings share a common ancestor with apes that we evolved from in Africa millions of years ago

This is not an atheist idea.

Geneticists and anthropologists have the details. We can, for example, measure the differences between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees, measure the rates of mutation and fixation, and estimate how long the two species have diverged. It’s millions of years. The anthropologists can tell us our ancestors were African. Where is the creationist evidence for, for example, the Garden of Eden or Adam & Eve?

5. Everything evolved from a single cell organism

This is not an atheist idea.

Likewise, we have evidence of all the shared commonalities between us and all other organisms. We have evidence of the processes that generate the differences. Common origin is the most parsimonious explanation. Meanwhile, the Christian Bible doesn’t even contain the concept of cells, or single-celled organisms. Would he like to argue with the evidence for cell theory?

6. Fish evolved into amphibians, and then into reptiles, and then birds, and then mammals?

This is not an atheist idea. It’s also not a scientific idea. It’s a creationist bogosity.

For someone trying to argue with evolution, he sure doesn’t seem to understand the theory. He presents a linear caricature of evolution, and claims that’s what we teach? Mammals didn’t evolve from birds, or from modern reptiles, or from modern amphibians, or modern fish. Come on, do better.

All of these claims are not proven. Yet, they are taught as fact. The definition of fact is a thing that is known or proven to be TRUE. Again, none of these claims are nor can they ever be proven to be true. Therefore they are not factual and should not be treated as factual. That is Where the indoctrination accusation claims stand because these beliefs are treated as proven factual science when they are an indoctrination of athiest beliefs being taught as factual science about the origins of life which is religious.

Allow me to quote one of the slides I present in my introductory biology class.

There is no such thing as “truth” or “proof” in science! All knowledge is provisional and subject to revision.

Scientists do use the word “fact”, but only in the sense that Stephen J. Gould defines:

In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

This class has nothing to do with atheism; it’s not a subject we discuss at any point in the semester.

Another thing I teach:

Science is not a catalog of facts to be memorized.

Science is a process for acquiring and evaluating new knowledge.

Religion does the opposite of that; it’s an interpretation of a few old myths presented as inviolate dogma. There’s no way you can regard science as a religion.

And why is a religious dogmatist using “religious” as a pejorative?

He throws in a few references, but they’re all from Answers in Genesis, and therefore can be dismissed out of hand.

I’m in trouble with AiG and its lawyers

I have been informed that I must take down a blog post, this one. Apparently, Answers in Genesis does not own a whole jet, they lease 25% of one, and how dare I quote an investor site that says “The Cayman Islands are considered a tax haven” or that AiG has been grasping at tax breaks.

RE: False and Defamatory Statements

Dear Dr. Myers:

We represent Answers in Genesis, Inc. (“AiG”). We are writing to demand you and your blog, FreeThoughtBlogs, cease and desist further publication of your article Why are creationists so pasty pale at Answers in Genesis? posted at https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ 2024/10/17/why-are-creationists-so-pasty-pale-at-answers-in-genesis/ with a October 17, 2024 publication date (the “Article”). The Article contains several false statements and distortions of fact intended to defame our client.

The Article begins with the following statement: “AiG owns a private jet,” which is false. AiG has a lease for the fractional use of a private jet. In other words, AiG does not own a jet. It owns a percentage of an aircraft’s flight hours each year, approximately 25% of the allocated usage. The ministry has no oversight or involvement regarding the other 75% of use. The reasoning for the fractional use of a private plane is not about luxury but practicality, allowing the ministry to reach more people over a shorter period of time.

With that being said, it could very well be true that this jet “frequently darts down to the Cayman Islands for one-day visits.” However, that does not mean that those trips are taken by AiG. In fact, they are not. No AiG personnel have used the jet (or any other aircraft) for trips to the Cayman Islands.

Of particular concern are the following false statements on your blog:

“What are they doing down there? Why do they frequently fly there and then come straight back?” followed by “Wild guess: The Cayman Islands are considered a tax haven
… making it an ideal place for multinational corporations to base subsidiary entities to shield some or all of their incomes from taxation.”
“AiG has been working so hard to get all kinds of tax breaks here in America, why would they need to evade taxes even more than that?”
These veiled claims have no basis in fact.As you know and intended, when such allegations are directed towards a nonprofit ministry, they discredit and impeach the ministry. The intended implication in your false statements is not only that AiG aims to profit from its mission and that it violates laws for purposes of enriching itself, but it also partakes in additional illicit activity. Since there is no basis in fact, your blog’s publication of the Article (and your authorship of it) constitutes the tort of defamation. Under the laws of Kentucky, where the damage of your misconduct was directed and felt, your malicious defamation exposes you personally to liability, to include for punitive damages.

To our knowledge, you made no effort to contact AiG to verify or corroborate the story’s allegations. It further appears that no effort was made to independently verify the allegations via publicly available sources. Even a minimal effort in that regard would have revealed the falsity of these allegations. Indeed, had you bothered to look at the aircraft registration of the plane, which can conveniently be found on the same website your Article links to, you would have discovered that AiG does not in fact own the plane.

You and your blog acted with actual malice in that you knew your statements were false or, at best, you acted in reckless disregard to the veracity of the statements. This is not the first time you have been reckless in your allegations regarding the ministry. The insinuations your “expose” propagates are presented as truths, when in fact they are lies. Your statements have been circulated to the public, to include the media, which increases the scope and corresponding liability for your misconduct.

Implications that AiG has engaged in illegal or criminal activity is unacceptable, as are the enumerated claims above. Your statements damage AiG’s reputation and were done with intent to cause harm, i.e. maliciously. Your followers have circulated your false claims, including to the media.

We demand that you immediately and permanently remove the Article and release a statement retracting the article and enumerated claims above. Please confirm that you have done so within five days of the date of this letter.

In the meanwhile, since you are on notice of legal claims made against you, you have a duty to preserve all communications and documents concerning the Article, to include all communications and investigations relevant to the same. All electronic records, to include all forms of electronic communications, should be preserved. This demand is not a waiver of any other claims my clients may have against you. Do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions or desire to discuss this matter.

OK, I’ll admit that they have a solid alibi, and I am removing the post.

I am not at all surprised that Ken Ham is extremely touchy about their money, but have never sicced a lawyer on me for all my posts refuting their creationist bullshit.

He’s only missing a creationist crypto currency now

Daniel Phelps reports:

Ken Ham wants $20 million more! More! More!

Ken Ham is begging for $20 million from his followers in order to 1) provide new space at the Creation Museum, 2) turn the 4th deck/floor of the Ark into a virtual reality moneymaker with a view, 3) create a Young Earth Creationist AI program to give Biblical competition to abominations such as ChatGPT, AND 3a) create an AI operated holographic Noah! Wow gee whiz! I can hear you opening your checkbook at this very moment!

Of course, Ham might be apprehensive at expanding his enterprises because attendance at the Ark is way down from this time last year; but is only other people’s money. Perhaps he could sell AiG’s corporate jet to help raise the money… Nah!!! That might mean traveling coach with smelly evil heathens. Also, if the jet were sold, there would be no more flying off to the Cayman Islands by AiG’s executives to do whatever it is they do down there.

https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2024/10/15/new-developments-planned-museum-ark/

I am most intrigued that Ham believes he can replicate all the work behind OpenAI for a few million, and using only creationist text sources. I wonder who on his staff is trying to convince him that they have enough in-house talent to whip that one out? I guess he felt like he was missing out on a new grift.

I am unsurprised that what got him most excited was the fantasy that he could hear donors opening their checkbooks. That’s a sound that fills his dreams at night.

I look forward to interrogating AI Noah about his drunkenness.

Incest is a touchy subject for Ken Ham

Ken Ham was motivated to respond to YouTuber because, apparently, her message was inconsistent.

Our social media team recently asked me to respond to a young lady who has a YouTube channel that featured a video criticizing young-earth creationists and our (in her view) ridiculous beliefs. Now, we see many (many) such videos (there are whole channels dedicated to mocking us!) and don’t always respond, but I decided to respond to this one to point out the inconsistency in her thinking.

See if you can catch her inconsistency in the clip at the beginning of my response:

What horrible, outrageous thing did Gutsick Gibbon say? Ham pulls out a very short excerpt, about 20 seconds long, that is the basis for his 4½ minute complaint. Here’s all she is given a chance to say.

Young earth creationists are religious folk who typically come from evangelical backgrounds…basically anyone who believes that the Earth was created in more or less present state by god…approximately 6000 years ago.
If you never heard of this before, you might be saying “oh my god, what about the inbreeding?”

That’s it. That’s all Answers in Genesis can tolerate putting on their website. That first bit is totally accurate; Ken Ham might have been literally quoted saying something similar, that he is an evangelical Christian who believes that the world was created 6000 years ago by his god.

But then she says “oh my god,” which he bleeps out. He’s going to repeat that even shorter clip multiple times.

There is no inconsistency. She correctly defines Ham’s own religious belief, and happens to use a common English phrase. Ham’s objection is that, he claims, evolution and materialism are religious beliefs, too, which is irrelevant. If I were to point out that a PB&J sandwich that he is holding is a sandwich, it doesn’t refute my statement to say that my taco is also a sandwich — because Gutsick Gibbon isn’t making a case here that science is not a religion (it isn’t, but again, she’s not saying that.)

What really irks Ken Ham is that mention of the inbreeding problem. This has long been a point of irritation for him; in both the creation “museum” and fake boat gift shops, he sells stuff bragging about the fact that Adam & Eve’s kids had sex with each other, and that it wasn’t a problem because they were perfect genetic beings. He doesn’t like incest mentioned because he thinks he has an irrefutable answer to it. Never mind that he also likes to claim that they were heterozygous at every locus and that Noah’s family carried every possible allelic variant, or that what he’s arguing for is a kind of moral relativism, where sex with your brother or sister is OK if you’re not going to propagate defective children (I’ve always wanted to ask him if it’s fine to have sex with a sibling if you use contraceptives, then?)

What is inconsistent is that he then uses this offense against his faith to rant about how atheists don’t have any morality and they believe they’re just animals and animals can do anything they want. She’s ridiculous, says the man who thinks that having a silly theme park makes him qualified to judge other’s lives.

He also doesn’t link to Gutsick Gibbon’s YouTube channel, where his followers might be able to discover that she had more to say than the only 20 seconds Ken Ham was brave enough to include.

“Iles” is an anagram for “lies”

Martyn Iles, the heir to the pile of dishonest shit that is Answers in Genesis, has posted a tirade about the sin of lying.

One of the biggest changes | have seen over the course of my not-that- long life is the normalisation of lying.
Yes, at the level of worldview and culture . .. “woke” is effectively an “objective truth is evil” belief system. Politics is a festival of lies to the point of being a depressing joke. The media lied so much they’re dying. But also at the level of relationships. People actively deceive each other, deny their behaviour, say whatever is expedient to the moment, or hide their true agenda, simply as a way of life.
And when you catch them out, they kick you out of their life.
It’s become shockingly normal.
Effortless, brazen, easy liars, and deceivers are multiplying. People who have become so calloused in their own self-interest and self-serving that they say whatever it takes.
I have sat in rooms where apparently reputable people tell outright lies to get what they want or avoid scrutiny. It’s so shocking that your first assumption is to imagine that you must be mistaken.
Are you a Christian? Then you tell the truth. Ruthlessly. Consistently. Without fail. Without fear. Every time. Because truth is good, no matter what. .. even when we feel like it will cost us. The cost will ultimately be for good.
The closest you will ever come to a lie is remaining silent in those exceptional situations where wisdom demands it.
And if your goals cannot be achieved with honesty, then your goals are simply wrong, and you are on a wrong path, no matter how self- righteous you may feel about it.
Remember, the Holy Spirit is called “the Spirit of truth™—and Satan is called “the father of lies.” Your denials, misrepresentations, masked agendas, and self-serving deceptions only serve one of those two. Really, this issue is a barometer for measuring how active Satanism is in a given place or situation. If there is a pattern or system of deception, you know what’s up.
Stay true.

The most brazen, easy liars I’ve ever met have all been creationists. I am reeling at the level of projection and the lack of self-awareness in his post.

If this is an admission that Satanism is active at Answers in Genesis, I might agree with some of it.

Rocket science is in the Bible?

An engineer named Rob Webb has been inspired by Ken Ham to write a book about space and the Bible. It doesn’t seem to have been written yet — he keeps posting articles on AiG to tease the book, and he uses the future tense, that the book ‘will include’ stuff that he doesn’t actually explain yet.

He promises that his book will be unique.

No doubt, there have been many books written on rocket science—with just about all of them from a secular view. But how many of them are written from a biblical view? As of writing this, there likely aren’t many (in fact, none that I know of) that address the field of rocket science through a truly biblical worldview (i.e., through the “lens” of Scripture).

The Bible says nothing about rockets. The authors did not have any concept of space, or of vacuums, or of Newton’s laws. To them, the stars and planets were small bright lights in the sky. Webb has literally nothing to spin a story from, but that doesn’t stop him from dumping multiple long articles telling us what he’s going to say in this astounding book on the AiG website.

The faint glimmerings of an argument that emerge in his ongoing promissory notes are not encouraging.

And yet, one of the leading pioneers of rocket technology, Werner von Braun, was a creationist! But I pray that trend changes soon . . . starting with this book! That said, the purpose of this book is to give you a starting point in understanding rocket science from a biblical perspective and how to defend your faith in a currently secular space industry—standing on the authority of God’s Word.

I don’t give a hypergolic-fueled flying fuck what Werner von Braun thought of evolution — he was not a biologist. He was an old Nazi who used slave labor to build flying bombs to rain down on civilian populations — is that Biblically OK?

I would hope the rocket industry was secular. They’re supposed to be building machines using reliable engineering principles, not some imaginary nonsense that some guy dreams are in the Bible.

His latest chapter is a lengthy discussion of how he came to Christ. It does not tell us where rocketry is discussed in the Bible, but it does tell us how he came to resign from engineering and embark on a new career as a Christian apologist. You won’t be shocked at his motivations, unless you think you have to be smart to be a rocket scientist.

But then, in 2020, everything changed. Not only was the world hit hard by the COVID pandemic, but also by the popular rise of social-justice (Marxist) ideologies, such as critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality, especially in the US. In particular, the space industry, in general, had gone completely “woke” by embracing—and even promoting—Marxist-led organizations and aggressively pushing the latest LGBT agenda.

I had no idea Marxism was synonymous with social justice! But then again, I should trust that a guy who can pull rocketry out of the Bible would be able to extract any old bug-a-boo he doesn’t like out of Karl Marx’s corpse. It’s a skill.

Many agencies were pushing these religious viewpoints—regardless of an individual’s convictions. There was a widespread concerted effort to make sure everyone had the same religious beliefs that were being promoted by the government and the culture at large.

Obviously, this was an attack against my Christian faith! Inevitably, this turn of events led me to start looking for other employment. At one point, someone even said, “You don’t have to actually agree with it, but at least pretend that you do.”

His Christian faith is being attacked by the idea that one should treat your neighbor as yourself! I guess his faith imagines Jesus as a white capitalist overlord. That’s no weirder than thinking that it prophesies satellites and escape velocities and moon landings, I guess.

He was also pissed off about NASA being unbiblical.

The main challenge I faced was NASA’s unbiblical motivation for each of its missions. Once you get past all the “fluff” from the media, the primary goals of every mission that I’ve worked on are based on evolutionary beliefs, which normally included the constant search for “evidence” of life in outer space and the attempt to explain the origin/evolution of our universe (without God). Of course, the reason is that the people I worked with, in general, follow a view of origins based on naturalism (meaning “nature is all that exists,” governed by natural laws, and thus no need for God).

Evolution, like wokeness, has taken over all the sciences. I think he confuses materialism and naturalism with being antithetical to Christianity…or does he? Maybe his version of Christianity is anti-science, but I don’t think that’s true of all versions of Christianity.

If ever he gets around to writing the damned thing, Rob Webb’s book will be a blast.