On Wednesday Chris Beneke posted a review on this blog of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, a book I coauthored with Karl Giberson. I especially liked Beneke's response to a populist, misguided review that appeared on the Creationist Answers in Genesis site. (The reviewers whipped up readers by claiming
that Giberson and I are snoots who look down our noses on salt-of-the earthers who don't have PhDs.) "Credentials aren't irrelevant," Beneke writes, "but they aren't the real issue here (see: Herberg, Will). Rather, it's the misuse or wholesale neglect of critical facts that distinguishes rigorous, honest scholarship from the work of self-anointed experts such as Ham."One of the things that struck me most about the Answers in Genesis review was a short paragraph in which the two reviewers claim we misrepresented Ham and his organization's mission.
They write:
The authors also asserted that ICR [Institute for Creation Research] and AiG argue that evolution is “responsible for much of what’s wrong with the world” (p. 36). Answers in Genesis has never stated or implied this. We have both—in countless articles and even in the 2008 online debate between Ham and Dr. Giberson—declared instead that the teaching of evolution has caused many to doubt or disbelieve the Bible.*
It made me wonder if they've spent much time reading what's on their own website. Ham and company do repeatedly "imply" that evolution leads to all sorts of horrors. That's plastered all over the Answers in Genesis site. (See here, here, here, here, here . . . I could go on.) How could these Answers in Genesis reps write that "Answers in Genesis has never stated or implied this." Are their pants on fire?
But my favorite example of Answers in Genesis and Ken Ham's view of evolution being “responsible for much of what’s wrong with the world" is this wonderful, ubiquitous cartoon that is still up on the AiG website. This picture has been teaching children about the real issues that are at stake for over a decade now.
