Answers in Genesis goes to a Darwin exhibition

The irony is raining men. Someone with Answers in Genesis (Ken Ham, Kentucky creation museum) went to a Darwin exhibition in London, and predictably found it to be a clever form of mind-control.

In fact, before Darwin came along, people were breeding different sorts of dogs, cats, pigeons, and so on. Even in the Darwin exhibit, it is stated that “he [Darwin] was aware that people often bred animals with desirable traits and that over time such breeding exaggerated small differences. . . . Dogs were dogs but a tiny lap dog and a large lean greyhound look nothing alike.” I just wonder how many visitors noticed this gross inconsistency.

There is no inconsistency. The small differences that are exaggerated accumulate to create very large differences, as in the dog example, and this is precisely what many creationist will say they do not believe. They can accept microevolution, but not macroevolution. As for the case of dogs, which everyone unanimously continue to call one species no matter how great the differences, I beg to differ. Why continue to call them one species? There are so many breeds that differ enormously, and in some cases so much that for example two birds differing that much are routinely named different species. Would we continue to do so with dogs if we only knew of chihuahuas and great danes? Surely not. And who knows, perhaps there really is a reproductive barrier between those two breeds, designating them different species by the most pervasive definition (the Biological Species Concept). Not that I adhere strongly to that definition. I regard it as a proxy that can be used successfully in some situations, but far from all (asexual organisms is an obvious area where it clearly doesn't work).

The writer then lists the ways in which the Darwin exhibition performs mind-control:

1) Setting up straw-men arguments that totally misrepresent what Bible-believing Christians accept.

2) Showing how wrong Christians are for believing the things they supposedly believe (which they don’t believe in the first place!).

3) Convincing visitors that Darwinian evolution is true, and that one is a fool to believe otherwise (and certainly foolish to believe the Bible).

Actually, this kind of mind control is already being used constantly on America’s children through the public education system, the secular media, and science museums (even in many Christian schools and colleges, sadly).

This is the stuff of crazies. The alleged straw-man is that Christians believe in an unchanging world, but that that is clearly not the case, because just look at Genesis: the entrance of sin, the event of Noah’s Flood, and its account of the Tower of Babel. So there, things change, Christians all know it, and the Darwin exhibition thus attempts to control minds. Trying to convince visitors of the fact of evolution is the business of such a museum. Explain the science, show the evidence. By this standard any education can be labeled mind-control. And the point is that if ample evidence leads to evolution being true, then it is foolish to believe otherwise.

I wonder how this person sees AiG's Creation Museum in Kentucty. Totally free of straw-men? Are they not trying to convince visitors that evolution is a lie, and it is foolish to believe in it? Reality is that both scientists and creationists attempt to educate children, but that the scientists are the only ones with actual evidence to support their beliefs. You may consider this my attempt at mind-controlling readers of this blog, if you like.

On a related note, a long lost 400,000 year old axe has just been recovered at a museum, after having been lost for 150 years. The axe's old age shatters Ussher's calculation that the Earth is 6,000 years old. I realize that AiG won't accept this age, thereby denying the science not only of biology, but also of physics.