This Is a Callout Post

On July 20 the Monroe Evening News posted a letter to the editor by a woman whose last name rhymes (rather unfortunately) with Trump. She was angry about critics of Ken Ham’s Ark, who called the structure “unscientific.” She was angry that evolution was being “taught as fact” in schools, and was very vocal about the impossibility of hummingbirds evolving from a single cell, citing facts “according to the Internet,” which made my composition teacher heart hurl.

If you’re sourcing Wikipedia, please, please be honest with me. We can figure this out together. You don’t have to live life like this.

This article’s thesis is that evolution is unreal, that God is the engineer of the universe, and also (sort of?) that Ken Ham’s Ark is so totally scientific, prompted me to write a letter to the editor in response. Before my article was published (and my father said they wouldn’t publish it! I’m two for three now, dad) the Monroe Evening News published another anti-evolution article. (That one I didn’t save to quote from.)

350 words and the need to be politically correct mean that I’m writing a callout post.

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Ken Ham is an Australian emigrant who now lives and works in Kentucky, where he founded the Creationist Museum and also Answers in Genesis. He has a bachelor’s in applied science and a certificate in education, both of which were granted by Australian universities.

The Creationist Museum is, I will admit, a thing of beauty, a place that children of all ages and one young lady of twenty-three can enjoy because we can pose  for selfies with 90’s-style dinosaurs. I haven’t been yet, so I can’t verify how accurate anything in the museum is, but I can confirm its basic premise (that evolution is a lie) is loony tunes.

A few years ago, when I was still at Madonna, Ken Ham pestered Bill Nye (the Science Guy) into debating him at the Creationist Museum about evolution. Bill Nye accepted. Two very important things followed this debate. No, wait, three. First, it snowed so badly in Kentucky that I am surprised nobody brought up global warming. Second, Bill Nye wrote a beautiful book called Undeniable which is probably one of the books I’d take with me if Fermi melted down and I had to pick ten books in ten seconds before attempting to flee the state. And third, it gave Ken Ham so much money that he was able to build a replica of Noah’s Ark.

Bill Nye toured the Ark, and Ken Ham seemed extraordinarily pleased. He asked Bill Nye if he (Ham) could pray for him. Nye basically responded, “It is a free country and I can’t stop you,” which I suppose is a victory.*

*This is not in any way meant to be taken as a quote. Ham has supplied a half-quote, and I riffed it. 

If people want to build Arks with their hard-earned money, that is their prerogative and may God bless and keep them. I, personally, am a wizened old hag and I can remember claims of people from my middle school days who combed parts of these mountains in the Middle East to find physical evidence of the real Noah’s Ark. I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they realized that Noah built this Ark out of wood, and wood decomposes. Maybe stuff in the Middle East got too real and they bailed. What I am saying with this anecdote is, Noah’s Ark pops up every few years and it is always a semi-big deal. That’s fine. Whatever. You do you, Ken Ham.

No. What bothered me is that there were dinosaurs in this Ark.

And I guess it’s one (wrong) thing to say, Adam and Eve totally lived with dinosaurs, now here, kiddos, pose next to this friendly brontosaurus. I mean, it’s wrong. I don’t need The Urantia Book to tell me that. But dinosaurs with Noah on his Ark. Did the T-Rex somehow not eat everyone? Can this massive Ark actually not buckle and sink under the weight of two brontosauruses?

A few weeks ago I went to a barbecue with my friends and ranted about Ken Ham for a while. Because my friends are polite, well-behaved young women, they let me go on and on and on and kept their faces neutrally passive. “What does Ken Ham even think happened to the dinosaurs?” I finally cried. “Let’s imagine, for a second, that dinosaurs did chill out on the Ark. What does Ken Ham think happened that killed each and every dinosaur after the flood?”

My friends tactfully changed the subject, and I went on my phone to search for answers.

Ken Ham thinks that dinosaurs died after the flood mysteriously.

That is so not an answer. That’s not even a guess at an answer. The Greeks did better with their stories of gods. At least they tried. What does Ken Ham think, a mysterious virus that only killed the dinosaurs swept through the world? I’m positive Job would have noticed this and included this in his Bible.

(Especially since, Mr. Ham, the writing of the Book of Job precedes Moses’ testimony in Genesis. But I am sure you know this, yes?)

This is not even including the flora and fauna that were destroyed during the last extinction.

And, my God, I can’t forget: There have been five massive extinctions. And the one that took out the dinosaurs—the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction—was not even the worst one. Scientists have nicknamed the Permian extinction as “The Great Dying” because 96% of all life on Earth died. The 4% of creatures that survive gave birth to us.

But please, Ken Ham, I honestly want to know. I am not being jocular or passive-aggressive. Please tell me. If human beings were around at this time, we ought to have a good guess.

What happened to the dinosaurs after the flood?

They all mysteriously died.

What a cop out.

Paleontologists don’t stop at one answer, or give up when answers are hard to find. They gather many. When I was young nobody thought dinosaurs could have feathers; now, many scientists think it is a fact. We debate whether dinosaurs roared, or hissed, were warm-blooded or cold. The dinosaurs that existed look nothing like the dinosaurs that reside in Ken Ham’s Ark, or Ken Ham’s Creationist Museum.

Is he looking at fossil evidence, or what?

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Why does Creationism bother me so much?

Part of it must be that I did used to go to a Creationist church. I was shown maps with the location of Eden on them, and told about how evolution is a lie. And because I am Rebekah, I didn’t just say, “Okay, Pastor John, humans and dinosaurs lived together!”

I went to the library and I got books.

Let me tell you: I have read a ton of books attempting to prove that the Biblical timeline is correct. I spent a lot of head-space during my high school career puzzling out the line of Egyptian pharaohs with what the Hebrews wrote down.

@Moses, thanks for never naming your foster brother.

The more I researched, the more I read, the more I realized that the version of events provided by evolutionists was more detailed, more meticulously researched, more fascinating, than the flat version provided by Biblical archeologists. I spoke to my high school biology teacher, who very helpfully put evolution into context for me by asking me why, if evolution does not exist, I take antibiotics for the full thirty days and not give up when I start to feel better.

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And here’s the thing. The initial letter to the editor that started this rampage claims that evolution was taught in school. But I was never taught evolution. I learned it from television and from books. Even now, I am forbidden to teach evolution in public schools on pain of being fired.

“Our kids are being fed a humongous bowl of hogwash in our schools,” the letter says. But I was not taught evolution in school. And I do not teach evolution in school.

And the humongous bowl of hogwash I learned was that dinosaurs and man lived together from a church down the road.

When you look really closely at the fine details—if you’re really looking—there are all sorts of miracles in this world. Like that the gas we put into our cars comes from the decaying bodies of dinosaurs that died. That the stone olivine is pushed up from the core of the earth and is the closest I will ever come to touching the center of Earth.

All of this may be an accident, as militant atheist Richard Dawkins would claim. But I believe that there is no such thing as coincidence. The little details matter. And I believe that when God planned the world, he did it was I would a well-organized book. He knew to put hints about the dinosaurs early on, so that man could drive cars later. He knew to put glaciers over the state of Michigan so that one day we would have the most beautiful lakes in the world. 

It is more beautiful to me to imagine a God that carefully crafted us than to imagine a God that snapped his fingers and then got mad at us because we ate some forbidden fruit. 

The Bible is one story of our origins. But this planet that we have been honored to live on—it is another. And it is just as beautiful, and just as complex, and deserves to be honored. 

Thanks to Margaret Klump of Ottawa Lake for writing to the Monroe Evening News and inspiring this rant, and congratulations on the newspaper spelling your name correctly.