A Review Of Ken Ham's "Why Won't They Listen?"

Ken Ham, the well known founder and president of Answers In Genesis and the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY, is the author of numerous books.

Why Won't They Listen was originally titled Creation Evangelism, explores one of the key problems faced by Christians hoping to fulfill the Great Commission in the U.S.A. of the early 21st century, and countries with similar cultures.

What similarities, specifically? A poor understanding of the Word of God.

Mr. Ham equates many societies with the Greeks of the 1st century, with little knowledge of the Bible, little knowledge of the attributes of God, little care for moral absolutes, little history of mankind in a moral sense, and an assumption of the Bible as being little more than stories believed by a strange group of uneducated people.

In the United States, for example, there is a significant downturn in moral values, and a resulting rise in crime and other societal ills, which all seem to date back to the point in the 1960's when public schools became hostile to the Bible and prayer. Adding to this was the introduction of evolution indoctrination as the only viable explanation of why things are the way they are. In an arena where truth was supposed to be king, evolution became the truth, the Bible was relegated to the status of a kept-at-home relic.

As a result the USA adult population, raising younger generations, which have little or no confidence in the Bible as the true Word of God, and little understanding of the moral truths and consequences contained in the Bible.

Mr. Ham contends that evangelists must treat the members of such societies the way Paul did in Acts 17: First you must explain the basic truths contained in the Bible, only then can they understand the true meaning of their sin and their peril without a savior. Part of this explanation must include conveying the fact that evolution is based on faith and theory, it is not the scientific fact so many believe it to be.

The effects of evolution on society is deep and wide-spread. If evolution is true, then we are all the result of random mutations, we are all the result of prior organisms fighting for survival and doing whatever they had to get a step ahead of weaker organisms, if there is no God and no afterlife, then there are no moral absolutes. I can do whatever I can get away with, or convince you to let me get away with. If I amass power, I can do significantly more. There are no boundaries, there is only what someone can get away with.

This is exactly what we find in leaders around the world who reject the concept of God and rise to positions of power. Suddenly pragmatism and greed are king. Murder is a tool to repress opposition, or to motivate the masses.

But we do not need to look at the Hitlers and Pol-Pots around the world to see evidence of those who discount God, we see it in increased child-abuse, abortion, sex-slave rings, divorce, embryonic stem-cell harvesting, all manner of sexual perversions and combination's, and much more.

Why are there so many side effects to evolution? As Mr. Ham states, "[evolution] is a philosophy of life which teaches that man, independent of God and independent of revelation, determines truth. Thus, man’s opinions determine truth."

This is the world that modern evangelists increasingly face.

What is the answer? In the words of Martin Luther, "It was by the Word that the Church was founded and by the Word also it shall be re-established." Put simply: Christians must defend and expose the truth by enlightening people with the Word of God.

The answer espoused by Mr. Ham is not to attack issues, but to proclaim the truth.

As Christians we can reject abortion, we can stand for marriage, we should work to help those who are helpless, we should proclaim the need for civility and honor, but each should be defended and proclaimed using God's word, including Genesis 1 through 11.

When a Christian gets into a conversation about right and wrong, the way to argue for absolutes is to declare the absolute moral giver.

Legislation is not the answer, slick marketing campaigns are not the answer, even passionate arguments are not the answer: the inerrancy and trustworthyness of God's Word, combined with the peril for those who reject it, is the answer.

Mr. Ham proposes a four-step process.

1. Christians must understand and proclaim the inerrancy of Scripture, from Genesis 1:1 through Revelation 22:21, and churches must teach how to defend these truths.

2. Christians must understand that the humanistic movement is an attack on Christianity, and be prepared to give a defense to their falsehoods and propaganda.

3. Those ministries that can reach into the broad media and around the world must join in to promote these truths and pound the foundations of the evolutionists, humanists, atheists, and others.

4. When Christians fight issue battles, they must do so using the Word of God, the only way to prick the heart and achieve long-lasting change.

I agree with Mr. Ham that the earth is relatively young. A day is a day, and not billions or millions of years. I also agree with the literal reading of Genesis 1-11. There was no death until the fall of Adam and Eve, and consequently evolution is a fallacy. I also agree with his call to action: proclaim the truth and stand upon God's Word!

However, I think he overstates his case a bit with statements of how no one can understand God, including Christians, if they disagree. Mr. Ham states,

"And because the non-Christian has been indoctrinated to believe in millions of years of death, suffering, disease and bloodshed, he doesn’t understand how there can be a God of love. This person is not going to understand about a God of love until he puts on the true, uncompromised, biblical glasses, including the timeline of history: from Creation, through the Fall, the Cross and Resurrection, and the final Consummation of all these. Also, until the Christian has put on these same glasses, he will not be able to explain this seemingly contradictory world of death and life, health and disease, and joy and suffering to the non-Christian."

I must disagree with the distance Mr. Ham attempts to reach here. I was, until enlightened, just one of these non-Christians. I was, until enlightened, just such a Christian: believing in the atoning work of Christ while also believing that people in lab coats were diligently working to find truth wherever it lay. My heart ached for the lost, and in my own poor way I was attempting to share the gospel.

I now know the lengths to which scientists will go to bend the results and the interpretation to preclude a conclusion of anything divine. Take for example the declaration of Richard Lewontin, an evolutionist biologist and geneticist:

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997.

I also understand that many Christians, with a desire to understand God's handiwork displayed before us, are responsible for many scientific discoveries, and their faith is enhanced, not challenged.

Mr. Ham makes a great point, however, in that by neglecting our responsibility to defend God's Word modern Christianity has self-inflicted cracks to form in our own foundation.

Overall, Mr. Ham has produced a book that is a worthwhile read which sheds light on the difficulties a Christian will encounter in modern "civilized" society.

This book is available online, for no cost, in its entirety. It is also available in paperback from the same page.

Armor up Christian!

Another Evolution Story Proving Creation...

For many, this is the "Year of Darwin" as they celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth.

I find tremendous irony in the activities planned not only here, but around the world, to celebrate the birth of Darwin. The same people who are celebrating his birth routinely mock or persecute Christians for celebrating the birth of Jesus. But, I digress.

The point of evolution is frequently to prove the Bible is in error. After all, if evolutionists can prove that creation is just a story, then they can argue that morals, salvation, redemption, Christ, resurrection, etc., are also mere stories. If the Bible is not the authority, then each person (well, actually, the biggest person) gets to set the rules. That's why they work so hard to prove that life spontaneously generated, and that we're all nothing more than gelatin that figured out how to grow eyes, legs, and complex organs.

Such is the case with researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

According to Fox News, on January 13, 2009, this group of scientists are reporting that are witnessing self-replicating molecules in the lab-environment, that "even evolve and compete".

I am certain that evolutionists all around the world are greeting this story with glee, and are ready to confront the next Christian who dares mention the creation account given in Genesis.

They desperately (even through the power of law) try to force us to accept this evolution nonsense, but they refuse to consider the Hand of God in the wonderful design of the universe.

Consider this recent story, however, as another example of their desperation as revealed when we look closely at how they must qualify their work. To illustrate this, I've bolded some of their language as I quote portions of the article.

The title of the article contains the first clue: "Life As We Know It Nearly Created In Lab"

Nearly? Is that science? Nearly? My junior high science teacher would not have accepted a paper from me if I reported on the results of an experiment I "nearly" achieved.

The article then talks about the 'science' that pins the mystery of life "down to roughly" chemical reactions which occurred 4 billion years ago (a number which seems to change every year, and is almost certain to change again this year) to "perhaps in a primordial soup or maybe with the help of volcanoes or possibly at the bottom of the sea..."

I'm not making this up, and we're only 45 words into the article! So far the article has already identified numerous assumptions: "roughly... perhaps... maybe..." and "possibly". My science teacher called these "guesses".

Remember that this stuff is forcably taught to your children in public schools. Somehow the qualifiers are dropped and suddenly this stuff is described as fact.

But our article is just getting started. There's more we can find without being much of a detective.

The very next paragraph says that the scientists "have created something in the lab that is tantilizingly close to what might have happened" long ago.

Wait a minute! The scientists created this stuff? Um, are they arguing for the Bible now? Genesis 1 describes how God "created" the world, the universe, the stars, the planets, and everything else. Now, scientists are demonstrating that organized chemical reactions require creation. Why isn't that the story? Of course, God did not need a fancy lab, or a model to follow, or millions of dollars, or multiple researchers to make attempt after attempt until He sort of got it right.

Further, these researchers talk about materials that might be "tantalizingly close" to what "might have happened"? This is the state of modern science, and we are supposed to believe this?

Why are Christians afraid of any of this evolution nonsense? The best science can come up with is demonstrating that you need a modern lab environment, meticulous design, carefully planned out conditions, to maybe demonstrate something that might have happened?

Ah, but the article continues. The scientists then say that what they created is, "not life..." But they did manage to build molecules that self-replicate. Some accomplishment! They studied God's creation, then designed some simple replica that is not life. This is a scientific breakthrough? It seems like proof of God's design to me.

What they did was try to re-create simple RNA. But, the article admits, "RNA can't run a life form on it's own" but it "might have been" involved billions of years ago. It just needed some "chemical fix" to make the leap. I suppose that in the beginning the RNA phoned up the local chemical fix-it shop to request assistance?

Finally, the article talks about the known roles of RNA and DNA (the real building block of life), and reveals that "In today's world, RNA is dependent on DNA for performing its roles..."

So, DNA is needed for RNA to have any function. But, the scientists think that RNA somehow might lead to DNA. This means that their experiment is working in reverse! DNA is needed for RNA to have any function, but they are working to prove that RNA can lead to DNA? I think they should consult their textbooks. The experiment is in direct conflict with what is known by scientists today.

Come on, Christian, stand firm in your faith (1 Cor 15:58). The evolutionists have no certain knowledge, only a bunch of theories, money, and political clout to force feed their world-view upon others.

It's ironic that they are proving creation with their experiments, yet they work fiecely to force our silence regarding the magnificent design and creation recorded in the Bible.

Evolution: The Numbers Don't Add Up

One reason many people refuse to respond to God is evolution.

They think that over millions of years, anything is possible.

Anything but God, of course.

On the surface this doesn't make sense. Think about it, if "anything is possible" then the universe would be chaos, not order. Anything happening, including random mutations, would lead to shortened lifespans and life-forms that die out due to useless mutations. It certainly would not lead to order and stable life forms.

Oh, and there's that little problem of where did all the stuff come from, and how did life begin?

Yet, people still put blind faith into the billions of years = life theory.

Of course, they also believe in Shakespearean Monkeys.

You've heard the theory... if you put enough monkeys into a room full of typewriters, eventually they would reproduce Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

SIDEBAR: These days the monkeys would use computers, not typewriters. No monkey worth his salt would be caught dead with an out of date Selectric.

Interestingly, the British National Council of the Arts decided to waste taxpayer money to test this theory. They placed a computer into a cage with six monkeys, then waited to see what they produced.

They waited for a month. The monkeys produced 50 pages of typed characters.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 contains only 114 words (488 letters).

Guess how many words the monkeys typed?

Have an answer? Don't look ahead until you do. Go ahead, get an answer in your head.

Don't cheat.

Ready?

None. Nada. Zero. Zilch. The monkeys typed no words. Not even the shortest words in the English language: A and I. (To be the word 'a' or 'I', a space is required before and after. They failed to do this.)

When probability theory is applied to this problem, you'll find that the chance of the monkeys randomly typing Sonnet 18 is: 26 raised to the 488th power (26 letters in the English language, 488 letters in the Sonnet). That's the same as 10 raised to the 690th power.

That's a big number.

How big?

Many of you realize that it's the number 10, followed by 690 zeroes. But, people have no grasp of how big that is.

Here's one way to think of it. The number of particles in the entire universe (protons, electrons, and neutrons) is a mere 10 raised to the 80th power. So, if you tried to track the progress of the monkeys, and you kept count by marking particles in the universe, you'd run out of particles eight times before they produced the Sonnet.

Here's another way to think of it. Suppose you turned each particle in the universe into a computer chip, and you programmed that computer chip to spit out random letters at the rate of one million per second. Suppose also that you were able to send them back to the beginning of time itself (as science calculates it). As of today, you still would not have produced the Sonnet! Enough time hasn't elapsed.

And that's to produce one Sonnet containing 488 letters.

Do you have any idea how many parts there are to DNA?

Three Billion.

That's six million, one-hundred forty-seven, five-hundred forty Sonnets (6,147,540).

Without those three billion individual parts, all arranged in exactly the right order, life would not exist.

There is absolutely no chance that monkeys can produce a Shakespearean Sonnet with only 488 letters.

What's the chance that the universe came into existence, then organized itself, then formed planets and suns, and all the stuff out there, followed by that life organizing itself, later branching out into new life forms by random mutation?

Not a chance.