Creation Museum founder Ken Ham has responded to criticism that his tactics of arguing against evolution is driving young people away from the faith. Ham, who advocates for a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account, has been in the news lately after announcing that he will host Bill Nye “the Science Guy” in February, for a highly-publicized debate about the viability of creationism as a “model of origins in today’s modern scientific world.” In the recent Facebook post, Ham wrote,
Apparently they call this sort of thing ‘Progressive Christianity.’ I guess that means ‘evolving Christianity’—whatever the secular world believes about where they came from, you accept that as infallible and then change their assumed fallible Word of God to fit! So sad. In many ways these sort of people are more dangerous to Christianity than the atheists.
The post was a response to a sort of open letter on the “Unfundamentalist Christians” blog, which disputed Ham’s assertion that “many young people are dismissing the Bible because of evolution, and even many young people who had grown up in the church decided to leave the church because they saw evolution as showing the Bible could not be trusted.” Blog-writer Dan Wilkinson wrote, “Mr. Ham, the young people you strive to influence are dismissing the Bible because you’re telling them what it says and means, rather than letting them seek that out for themselves … They’re leaving the church because your version of Christianity has nothing whatsoever to do with right practice, and everything to do with right belief.” Ham called the blog a “personal attack”, saying it was “just this person’s fallible opinions to justify holding man’s word as infallible and God’s Word as fallible.” Perhaps a more interesting debate than the one with Nye would be Ham against a “progressive Christian” about the viability of debating at all …
