Welcome to the For the Gospel podcast, where we're all about sound doctrine for everyday people. I'm your host, Kosti Hinn, and I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Ken Hamm. Ken is the CEO and founder of Answern Genesis, and a ministry that I believe God is using in incredible ways for this generation and beyond. They are the ones who have developed the Ark Encounter, which is right behind me, a life-size arc. Yes, and it's in Kentucky, you need to go. The Creation Museum and a plethora of resources, including a magazine, videos, and numerous other forms of media and publication, they are helping Christians from all walks of life be strengthened in a biblical worldview on creationism and a host of other issues. These are important times, and you and I need to be clear on gender, on marriage, on creation, and most of all, on the authority, the inerrancy, and the reliability of God's word, the Bible. Ken was gracious enough to let me ask him a number of questions, including questions about creation, dinosaurs, the age of the earth, and yes, he even let me ask him about aliens. You are gonna love this interview. It's gonna bless you and be something that you can share with others to encourage them. Let's jump right in to my interview with Ken Ham. Well, Ken Ham, it is a joy and a pleasure to have you at For the Gospel here. And we are really with you here at the Ark and grateful for your ministry. Would you be willing to tell us a little bit about what's been happening here, how so many people are coming, and the vision that has exploded now into reality with the Ark, the Creation Museum, all of it?
SPEAKER_02Well, maybe I should give you a little history first. Um I was a science teacher in Australia in the public schools, and I was brought up in a Christian home with parents who taught me to defend the Christian faith. You know, not a lot of people do that, give you answers to the attacks on the Bible. You know, a lot of times I think in church we're taught just Bible stories, if you know what I mean. And yet people ask all sorts of questions, and atheists attack the Bible by saying, well, you know, it can't be true, science has disproved it, and so on. So my parents had trained us to stand on God's word and to be prepared to defend the Christian faith. And when I was a science teacher, first lesson, so we heard you're a Christian, yes. Well, how can you believe the Bible? We know it's not true. How do you know it's not true? Because of what they were taught in their textbooks about evolution in millions of years. And I realized how much of a stumbling block that was to people who've been listening to the Bible. I I also started doing some speaking in churches. You know, I was invited as a teacher to come and speak, and because I knew I was a Christian, I conducted a Bible study and found out none of the people in that Bible study thought you had to believe Genesis. But Genesis 1 to 11 is foundational to everything, all doctrine, the Bible, the rest of the Bible, uh worldview, in fact, everything, ultimately. And uh so I started to realize how important it was to get the message out there. I was also taking the students from school to museums, you know, as part of their education, but they're always from an atheistic perspective. And so actually, back then in the late 70s, I became a teacher in 1975. That makes me old. Uh 1975. Wise. And yes, that's it. And uh back then I had a burden for why can't we build a creation museum? Why can't we build a place that tells the truth about God's word? And I had also researched to get lots of books and things from different parts of the world that gave me answers to, you know, the fossil record and dating methods, you know, geological dating methods, you know, uh, and to, you know, i issues of uh the days of creation and so on. And uh to cut a long story short here, in in 1977, I and another teacher ran the first creation apologetics seminar conference in Australia. And I displayed the books I had, and people came and said, How do we get those books? We need the answers. You know, it reminded me of in Hosea, My people suffer from a lack of knowledge. They didn't have the information. And so my wife and I actually started a ministry in our home to get these books in, and then I would travel all over Australia speaking, and people wanted to buy the books, and I found just hardly anybody knew how to defend the Christian faith beginning in Genesis because they've been so impacted by evolution millions of years, and most of our pastors hadn't taught Genesis as literal history. In fact, even the conservative ones didn't know how to do it, and they said we don't know the answers, and we we we we get intimidated or it creates division and so on. And so, you know, the the ministry grew and grew, and I came over here actually speaking. I was invited by the publisher of Creation Apologetics books associated with the Institute for Creation Research that was in San Diego, California. So I was invited to come over and do tours across America, and I did that, and the Lord's given me a gift of communication, I believe. I believe that's one of the major gifts he's given me as a teacher. My father's a teacher, his father's a teacher, his father's a teacher, it goes back millions of years, you know. So no, I don't believe in millions of years. So uh using that gift of communication, I developed what I call the relevance of Genesis message. And it's really the backbone of what we do here at the Ark Encounter of the Creation Museum, and our mother ministry is called Answers in Genesis. And by the way, answers in Genesis, the answers will always be in Genesis because the first 11 chapters, that's the foundation for marriage, why we wear clothes, where sin came from, why there's death in the world, the first promise of the gospel, right there in Genesis 3. It's the foundation for gender, God made male and female, uh, of humans. It's the foundation for why man has dominion over the creation and not the other way around, as the climate cultists do today. And so it goes on. And as I spoke to people about this, Christians would say, I never realized how important that was. Wow. But they didn't know how to defend their faith. And I had that burden for the Creation Museum. So I was asked to come over and help the Institute for Creation Research get this message into churches and across America, and so came over here in 1987, and it was meant to be a temporary sort of situation, and uh so uh worked with the Institute for Creation Research for seven years, but instead of returning to Australia, I had that burden to build a creation museum, and so there were three families. We moved out here to northern Kentucky. Now you might say, why northern Kentucky? Why not California? Well, they wouldn't ask why not California today. I mean, just look at California. Um no, but uh actually we're within a one-day drive of two-thirds of America's population. Wow. Think about that, and a two-hour flight flight of 80% of the population, so we're very easy to get to. You know, you got the West Coast, of course, but that's out there. Yeah, we're over there. But that's I mean, still, you you think of people in other countries. I have people in other countries tell me, you would so love to come here and so on. So you think you're far away on the West Coast from northern Kentucky? You're not really very close. Um, but we built here uh because it's a it's a tremendous place to be. We wanted destination location, we didn't want to be in competition with other tourist places or anything like that. Wanted people to come here so they can focus on what this is all about. And to me, the whole burden was look, most of our churches aren't teaching the importance of the book of Genesis. Most of our Christian leaders have compromised with evolution of millions of years and and have undermined the authority of God's word in Genesis 1 to 11. And we need to reach non-Christians as well. A lot of these people won't go to church. Uh you couldn't blow them into church with a stick of dynamite, some of these people. And how do you how do you reach others like you know, what about Sikhs and Muslims and so on? And so the burden was what if we build these attractions that uh are the quality of Disney? I I think they're higher than the quality of Disney when you look at it. I had a CBS reporter was going through the arc with me, and we got between the second and third decks, and uh he stopped me and he said, You said this was the quality of Hollywood, and I said, Yeah. He said, No, this is not the quality of Hollywood. He said, This is way beyond Hollywood. For a start, the wood's real. So and the wood is real. Yeah, there's 3.3 million board feet of timber in that big ship out there that you can see. Um and uh so if we build these attractions that give answers to the most asked questions today, answers to the attacks on God's word, and present the truth of God's word and the gospel, overtly present the gospel. We're not gonna shy away from that. Um that people would come here and we'll we want everyone to come. When we opened the ark, I had a CNN reporter say to me, So do you want are Catholics allowed to come? And I said, of course. What about Muslims?
SPEAKER_03I said, Yes.
SPEAKER_02Gays?
SPEAKER_03I said, of course.
SPEAKER_02Do you know who we want to come? Eight billion people, that's about how many are on earth right now. We want them to come in here, and they do. I mean, I was here one day and I saw some Sikhs, a group of Muslims from Baghdad, a group of Orthodox Jews, uh some Roman Catholic nuns, the uh Amish come in droves, Mennonites, there's even Baptists that come, and Presbyterians. Even them, even them. And to bring them in, and they have a fun time, because these are fun places. Oh yeah, and yet they learn. We're not hitting them on the head. Now we have a big conference center at the Ark, 2,500 seat auditorium, and we have a thousand seat auditorium at the Creation Museum. We do daily programming, and people can come to that. Just before we did this interview, I just spoke to a full auditorium at the Creation Museum. And so people come in there and listen. And it's a different way of presenting God's word and the gospel to a whole range of people that you would never get into a church. And there are a lot of people come here whose churches would never have me in anyway. Yeah, but we get the message to them and they go back and impact their churches. And so we have two attractions, the Ark Encounter, the Creation Museum, the two leading Christian-themed attractions in the world. And then the Ministry of Answers in Genesis, we have websites, we do social media, the magazine as well. We have a magazine for families, uh for children, our kids are the 32-page magazine for kids. We have our own streaming platform, Answers.tv. We also do a lot of domestic outreach conferences, we have speakers, we have researchers, uh, we also uh have um workshops for kids and for adults. We do all sorts of different programming. We have a science lab here, fully equipped in a science lab at the Creation Museum. So we bring students in, they come in, register for these, and we teach them their science from a biblical perspective. Uh so parents, we have parents that fly kids from California come out here for the summer when we do whole week-long lab intensives and you know, get all their chemistry labs in a week, all their biology labs in a week, but all from a biblical world view. And we do a lot of uh international outreach, we have a massive outreach to Latin America, and we have a big, big ministry in translations, and Spanish is our biggest. Also do a lot of Arabic, but we do a lot of other translations too. And so this ministry does so many different things. I do a daily radio program as well, and uh you know, we do the conferences at the Ark and the Creation Museum, our women's conference, which is going on right while we're talking. Two thousand women here. It actually was booked out, and so we stream it online, and there's thousands of watching online. Uh so we we are reaching out, pumping information out. Look on us as an information-rich ministry that is pumping this information out around the world.
SPEAKER_04Amazing. I have to say that even just being here today and I get to stay all the way through till tomorrow, we got in yesterday. I did the new virtual reality, the VR. Yeah, right. And it was amazing. And then what I loved, and you know, I'm a preacher and I tend to be evangelistic, and I love trying to reach people with the gospel, and our ministry is called for the gospel. You come up at the end and you shared the gospel with me, and you're a hologram. It's very fun. And you you talk about the door and salvation, you then beeline to Christ, saying, I am the door, and him being the way to eternal life. And that was one of the most exciting moments. I knew that this would be a very gospel-rich place, and I know there's lots of other so-called or type of Christian archaeological or or research places in the nation and different things that deal with the Bible and from various worldviews, even. But it is a gospel-centered place, and I think that God is using it. I know you hear that all the time, and I'm sure you're aware of it, but just take it from another pastor saying, Thank you for what you're doing here, because the gospel is saturating beyond.
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, Kosti, um with the Ark and the Museum, uh, as a ministry, you know, I've always said there is no point just doing something just to convert people to be creationists. We want them to be Christians. Amen. And there's no point in building these places if we're not on about the gospel. I mean, what is the solution to all the world's problems? What's the solution to gay marriage and and to gender and all these issues? They're they're all the same problem, actually. The problem is they start from man's word instead of God's word. But the solution's always the same. It's the truth of God's word and the saving gospel. This is a different way of presenting the truth. And you know, in the second deck, when you go inside, the big door we have on the ark, at night time we we light the ark up with all sorts of colours, but there's a cross on the door. Now inside, there's a cross on the door, and that's the photo spot inside the ark. I love to see families all getting their photograph there, you see the cross uh on the door lit up there. It shows up more on your smartphone than it does in real life because it's light, right? And we have all the teaching that goes with that, and to see parents reminding their children, as no one's family went through a door to be saved, we need to go through a door, and that door is the Lord Jesus. He said, I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he'll be saved. So really the ark is a picture of salvation. And a door is is is a picture of Jesus. He's the door, and we need to go through that door to be saved. So that's what it's all about. I love it.
SPEAKER_04Love what you guys are doing. Well, I have uh a family at home that will not allow me to come home without asking you a series of questions. You are my children's hero at this stage.
SPEAKER_02Well, just to one year, you only asked me one question before, and we went for half an hour.
SPEAKER_04I know now so now I've got a series of questions in the case. Um these are some of them are from our team, and actually a couple of them are things I've discussed with my own eight-year-old, and so you know where these are coming from. But the the first one is we would believe in a six-day literal creation. And a lot of people will argue against the creation account. They'll say the days could have been spaced out. They'll say that, you know, the the Bible is more allegorical in that sense. And, you know, these are just what why do we hold to a six-day literal creation? What is a concise and clear argument for why the earth is and was created in six literal days? And then I want to ask you a little bit about the age of the earth.
SPEAKER_02Sure. Um, and before I even answer that, let me just say one of the reasons we exist is to be a source of information. So our answersandgenesis.org website has thousands of articles. We have a research journal website as well that's free. And we have lots of books. In fact, we have a whole series of books called the Answers Books. They're the biggest selling creation apologetics books in the world. So, but to answer that particular question, first of all, why do we take Genesis chapter one as God created in six literal days? Because we take God at his word. That's the first thing. In other words, we are understanding that the Bible is the absolute authority of the Word of God. And I would also say that the reason people question the days, have you ever thought about this? You know, do you ever hear people questioning what the word day means anywhere else in the Old Testament? I I don't. But why is it always Genesis 1? It's because they've been impacted by the world's teaching of millions of years. But first of all, let's just look at it from a biblical perspective, right? When we read the Bible, God is speaking to us um uh through people that He has inspired to write words for us, and those words are written in a language. And so in the Old Testament we have Hebrew, uh primarily Hebrew, and New Testament primarily Greek. So we need to understand the Hebrew language, and we have Hebrew dictionaries to enable us to do that. So as we're reading Genesis 1, it says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and so on, and then it says there was evening and there was morning one day. Actually, it says one day, then it says second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth. So it's defining the word day the first time it's actually used. Well, the Hebrew word for day is the word yom, and the word yom, whenever it's used with a number, or the word evening, or the word morning, or the word night, it always means an ordinary day. And whenever you have the phrase evening and morning, it means an ordinary day. So when you look at Genesis chapter one, you find the first day has night, evening, morning, number. It's almost as if God is saying, just to make sure you get it right, I'm gonna qualify it over and over and over and over again, and yet people are still too thick to get it. Um and so the other days have evening, morning, and number. Even if it just had number, it would mean an ordinary day. See if you take it as written in the context, it means ordinary days. People sometimes point to Genesis 2, Genesis 2, 4. It says, in the day that the Lord created, and they say, But that doesn't mean an ordinary day. No, but it's not qualified by evening or morning or number or night. There it's talking about time. Because I have people who say to me, But the word day can mean something other than an ordinary day, and I'll say, Yes, it can, but it can also mean an ordinary day. And they'll say, But it can mean something other than an ordinary day. I'll say, Yeah, but it can also mean an ordinary day. And the point is, when does it mean an ordinary day? When it's qualified by evening, morning, number, or night. And that's how it is in the first six days. And if you jump over to Exodus 20, verse 11, which is the basis of the seven-day week, it says, in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, which includes verse one, um, and rest on the Sabbath day. But that's where our seven-day week comes from. It's based on the literal six days and one day rest. So we take it as six days because the Hebrew language means six days, ordinary days, approximately twenty-four hours each. And if you look at any Hebrew lexington, like uh briver driver uh Brown uh Briggs, uh Colonel Baumgarten is a modern one, the example they give of when the word day means an ordinary day is Genesis chapter one for each of the days of creation. Now it can mean time and it can mean other things, but the point is what does it mean in context here? So that's what I would challenge.
SPEAKER_04Well said. So we would hold to a young earth, the ballpark numbers that people typically throw out in a young earth view is the earth is about six to ten thousand years old, let's say. I want you to speak to that for sure. What would you say if someone said, well, first of all, it doesn't matter. Who cares how old the earth is? Number two, why would you say the young earth position is the most accurate or the most biblical, and then maybe tag onto that? Would you go as far to say that an older position is unbiblical, that it's actually wrong to believe that?
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, I'd say it's unbiblical, and I'd say it's wrong to believe that. Now let me qualify and say this, because I get accused all the time uh of people who say, you're saying if you don't believe in a young earth, you can't be saved. We never said that. Salvation is not conditioned upon what you believe at the age of the earth or or evolution or anything. It's conditioned upon faith in Christ. You know, if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, believe in your heart, God has raised him from the dead, and believe in a young earth, you'll be saved. No, it doesn't have that bit in it. So salvation is conditioned upon faith in Christ. So I want to say that right from the start. So people don't get the wrong idea. Um so when it comes to the age of the earth, number one, I would not say six to ten, I would say about six. The reason I say that, the reason some people extend it from Six to ten thousand is because they believe there could be gaps in the genealogies. But in the Old Testament, we would say there are no gaps in those genealogies because you have uh so-and-so begat so-and-so, and he died, and then he begats and tells you what age they had children, and you can go through and add them up. Actually, Archbishop Usher, who wrote the Annals of World History, a very famous history book, now he is very malign, but he he took uh the scripture at their face value and then added up the dates, you know, and then you get to Abraham, then you go from Abraham to Christ, then from Christ to the present, and you get uh about 6,000 years. If you take the days of creation as ordinary days, Adam was made on day six. And then it tells you when Adam had a son, Seth. I think it was what, 130 years, I think when he had sons at all from there. And he died when he was 930 years old, Adam did. But then it tells you when Seth had a son and so on. And so if those days are ordinary days, and I I would say adamantly they are, but if they are, then you can't get millions of years. Yeah. You only get a few thousand years. Now, where did the millions of years come from? This may surprise people. Millions of years come out of atheism. Back in the 1800s, there were atheists and deists who are sort of almost like atheists in a way, but atheists who um didn't believe the Bible, and they want to explain everything by natural processes. See, naturalism is atheism. You know, the public schools, they've thrown out God, the Bible prayer, and now they explain everything by natural processes. Naturalism is a religion. It's the religion of atheism. And so they said, well, these layers with all the fossils, they had to be laid down slowly over millions of years. That's where the idea of millions of years first came from in our modern world. It came out of atheism, and sadly, what happened? I mean, back in the early 1800s, a man called Thomas Chalmers, the founder of the Free Church of Scotland, said, Well, we take the millions of years and put them in a gap between Genesis 1.1 and 1.2, and you've heard of the gap theory. A lot of people have heard of that. That's where it came from.
SPEAKER_04It's one of the more popular views.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and because those compromise views have permeated churches. Then others said, we'll put them into days of creation. So the day-age theory. So this is where it all really arose. And by the way, that unlocked the door, so along comes Darwin, and he says, given the millions of years in geology, a God in biology, one kind changes and another. And then there were Christian leaders that said, we'll say God used evolution. And then along comes the idea of the Big Bang. We'll say God used the Big Bang. But you see what's happening? They're starting outside of Scripture and going to Scripture instead of starting from Scripture to build out thinking. God knows everything. We don't. And those secularists weren't there to see the layers being laid down. They weren't see there to see those fossil layers formed. And you don't dig them up and they have a little label saying, hi, I'm millions of years old.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So then, when we understand where that came from, now there's a big issue for Christians. If you believe in millions of years, then here's what you have to come to grips with. You believe those fossil layers were laid down millions of years before man. Right? Now, if you put that into the Bible, you got all these millions of years before man, then after God created man, he said everything he made, everything, was very good. Fossil records full of death. Not just death. You have bones that show evidence of cancer and abscesses and arthritis, all sorts of diseases in the bones. So if you believe in millions of years, you are really saying God says cancer is very good. God says all these diseases are very good. That is an attack on the character of God. Because goodness is defined as God. Remember in the New Testament? Good, good, good master, um, you know, and Jesus said, Why do you call me good? There's no good, one good with God. He is all good. The attributes of God define that goodness, right? And so when you're saying God's responsible for death and suffering, then I see it as an attack on the character of God. But think of the problems it's created in in our churches. Because one of the big questions people have, and let's be honest, we all struggle with this one, the issue of death and suffering. Where's a loving God with all the death and suffering? If you've been taught millions of years, if you've taught all these young people millions of years, then all the death and suffering you see today has gone on for millions of years, right? And it's God's fault. But the Bible says it's our fault. We sinned against God. God placed upon this world the curse of death, the judgment of death. Everything's running down, right? Before sin, the animals were vegetarian, everything was very good, it was perfect. One day, death is going to be thrown to the lake of fire. The Bible calls death an enemy. There's going to be a restoration one day. Are we going to be restored to millions of years of death and suffering and diseases? And see, for a lot of young people, they struggle, and the atheists use this all the time. You you believe in a God of love. Your parents told you there was a God of love. Look at all the horrible things, look at all the evil things in the world. Look at that horrible shooting in in Nashville and and the death of those people. Where's your God and all this? You know, for a start, atheists have no basis to make moral judgments anyway. They're atheists. Right? They can't accuse someone of being unjust or God of being evil or anything like that. They're totally inconsistent. But the problem is a lot of these young people have been told by their pastors you can believe in millions of years, therefore, how can there be a loving God? What a difference when we've taught them the true history in Genesis that our sin caused this. And then we realize that we have sinned against a holy God. We don't even deserve to exist. But he loves us so much that he had a plan of salvation. And he promised it right back there in Genesis, in Genesis 3.15. And then in Genesis 3.21, when he killed animals and and uh clothed Adam and Eve, the first blood sacrifice, they're coming for their sin, looking to the ultimate sacrifice. So you see, this whole issue of millions of years is important because you have to deal with the issue of death. Death, suffering, and disease in this world. And I have found many pastors who say to me, I've never thought about that. See, you believe in the gap theory. They they they look on the gap theory as, well, that's one way of getting rid of the millions of years, now we don't have to deal with it. Well, but now you've allowed death because the gap theory has all these fossils formed millions of years before a supposed recreation. You know, and you've still got all that death and disease, and and and the funny thing is, for the gap theorists, they say, okay, we'll accept the millions of years. Now the millions of years came from the idea that fossils were laid down slowly over millions of years. We'll accept the millions of years, put them in a gap between Genesis 1, 1, and 2, and explain the fossil record with a flood called Lucifer's flood, which the Bible doesn't talk about, it only talks about Noah's flood. But if you try to explain the fossil record with the flood, you've just done away with why you wanted the millions of years. So why not explain the fossils with the flood? Oh, you mean the flood of Noah's Day? So most of your fossil record is from the flood of Noah's Day, it's not the graveyard of the millions of years. So good.
SPEAKER_04Was that one of the ways that if you were to talk to somebody who said, well, Ken, the the way that these things look is millions of years old, or the late these things appear so old. And you have carbon dating and all of these things that the world and different worldviews press in. How do you respond to people who say, well, there's layers in the Grand Canyon and fossils? Bill Nye in the famous debate between you and him used that example as well. What are some of the ways that you could help Christians refute those ideas?
SPEAKER_02First of all, fossil A's do not look millions of years old. Right? See, we've been indoctrinated to believe they are. And I know the secularists will use certain dating methods, you know, uh rubinium, strontium, uh uranium, lead, potassium, argon, and so on. You mentioned carbon dating. We'll come back to carbon dating because it's interesting when when most people bring up carbon dating to me, you know, they're saying, you know, but the secularists, you know, the scientists are all saying millions of years, and they've got carbon dating. Actually, carbon dating has nothing to do with millions of years. Now it's not me as a creationist saying it just doesn't. It has nothing to do with millions of years. Most people think it does. I don't know where this misconception came from. Even most non-Christians think carbon dating first millions of years. I don't know what it is, but but carbon dating can't be a method for millions of years. Now I can tell you why in a moment, um, but it's not. But they do get millions of years from other dating methods. Would you believe 90% of all the age dating methods you can use, there's hundreds of them, 90% of them contradict the millions and billions of years that they have, but you don't hear about them. You only hear about the others. And all dating methods are based on all sorts of assumptions. To put it very simply, um, okay, imagine an hourglass. You turn the hourglass up, the sand is full at the top. Right? And it starts to go through. Okay. Now let's just say you come in and just interrupt it for a moment. Just put it turned up for a moment, okay? Uh, and then you leave it like that for an hour. And then then you twit turn it back again, and somebody comes in the room, and they look at the bottom there and they say, Oh, uh, how much sand was in there? How fast it was going through? Oh, you've been doing this for so long, but they didn't know that you interrupted it for an hour. My point is, every dating method, every age dating method involves a process that changes with time. Now, when something changes with time, you've got to know what was there to start with, you've got to know the rate at which it's changed, you've got to know whether anything was taken out or anything was brought in to change it. All those assumptions are are fallible. And there's all sorts of issues with these with these dating methods. So nothing looks old. We've just been told it's old. Right? I mean, people say to me, but that fossil looks old. Well, we can make a young one and show you that it looks exactly the same as the old one, but it's a young one. And you can, you can make fossils real quickly. You know you we can make oil quickly in a laboratory. Uh we we can do that. Uh I met a man the other day who said he goes around Christian schools and places and he makes fossils for them. And and it looks like something that's supposedly millions of years old. No, it's young, he just made it, you know. So that's the point. Things do not look old. People say, but the universe looks old. Well, have you seen a young universe? How do you know it looks old? You've been told it's old. See, that's that's the thing we've we've got to understand. All those dating methods have assumptions. And, you know, when it comes to carbon dating, uh, carbon dating, see, radiometric dating like uranium, lead and potassium argon uh involves a radioactive element that changes over time. You know, they have a half-life, how long it takes for half of it to decay because it's radioactive. And uh, to give you an example, uh, in uh, for instance, uh Hawaii and also New Zealand, uh, there's been lava come up out of the ground, solidifies into a rock, so it's zero years old. They use car they use uh potassium-argon dating on it, it dates to millions of years old. Because, see, potassium changes into argon over time, when the rock is zero years old, they assume there's no argon in there. But when you measure it, you find there is argon there. It was brought up from the mantle. So it dates as old when it's not old. Wow. When it's when it's young. Now it's interesting, when they know why the dating method doesn't work, you know, when they know that, oh, it's because the argon came up there, um, then then they know that it doesn't work. But when you don't know, uh you know, when you know when a rock formed, I is probably what I should say. Like the lava, we know when it formed, the dating method uh doesn't work, right? And they can figure out why. But when we don't know when a rock formed, because we didn't see it happen, the dating method works. They just accept it. And that's the point. Now with carbon dating, the half-life of carbon dating is 5,730 years. That's yeah, when you have carbon-14, radioactive carbon-14, which is formed in the atmosphere from cosmic rays that that excite neutrons that hit hit nitrogen-14, changes it into carbon-14, and then carbon-14 decays back into nitrogen. So when um when you got carbon-14, the time it takes for half of it to decay is 5,730 years. So after about nearly 60,000 years, it'd be almost not detectable. After 100,000 years, basically, not detectable at all. So with carbon dating, that can only be used on things that basically were once living. They got carbon, carbon in them. So you could try carbon dating on coal and oil and mammoth bones, that they're not millions of years, they're thousands. Um, but um you know, in the evolutionist scheme of things. But um here's the interesting thing. Something that's millions of years old, if you use carbon dating on it, it has to be something that was alive, that used to be living. Like a dinosaur bone. If you use carbon dating on a dinosaur bone that is said to be millions of years old, then you should not get a carbon date. Because after a hundred thousand years that we it's not detectable, right? But they get carbon dates on diamonds that are used that are supposedly millions of years old, and coal that's supposed to be millions of years old, on oil, in fact, on lots of different things, and fossils of all sorts, they use carbon dating, they get carbon dates, yet they're supposed to be millions of years old. Means there's something dreadfully wrong. Because nothing should get a carbon date if it's.
SPEAKER_04What are they getting the numbers from?
SPEAKER_02What what's creating well because they make all sorts of um assumptions and again so so those the dinosaur bones, they the way they date dinosaur bones, they use those radiometric dating methods that give the supposed millions of years on the rock that they're in. So or a rock associated with them, or because they can't date sedimentary rock like that. So it's something like an igneous rock or something that's that's there with it, or something like that. So um most people don't realize that uh these dating methods are all all fallible. There's only one infallible dating method. Do you want to guess what it is?
SPEAKER_01The Bible.
SPEAKER_02The Bible, yeah. That's the point. God was there, he created everything in six days, you can add up all those dates. And by the way, there's nothing, zero, in observational science that contradicts that. Wow. Nothing.
SPEAKER_04Do you think that on the side of spiritual warfare that one of Satan's great strategies is to assault the Christian worldview through secularism and through all of these avenues, which then pollute the well, really, before people can even come to a conclusion, other than, well, I've been, it's millions of years old, it just is. Is that one of the great strategies?
SPEAKER_02And the strategy, yes. But you know it's summed up in one verse in the Bible? In 2 Corinthians 11 3, beware lest by any means as the serpent be called Eve through his subtlety, so your mind shall be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. In other words, God says, I want to warn you the devil's strategy, his methodology, he's going to use the same method that he used on Eve to get you to a position of not believing the things of God. Go back and say, okay, what was the method he used on Eve? And by the way, obviously the Apostle Paul believed in a real Eve. Absolutely. So he believed Genesis. Just like Jesus in Matthew 19 when asked about marriage. Have you read? He made the male and female and said, For this reason a man shall have his father and mother and be one flesh. He's quoting from Genesis 127, 224, the text of that. And uh, so go back to Genesis 3. Genesis 3, verse 1. The devil in the form of a serpent came to Eve. Did God actually say? In other words, the tactic of the devil is notice the first attack was on the authority of the Word of God. It was to get Adam and Eve to doubt the Word of God, and that doubt would lead to unbelief. So his tactic is going to be to use something to attack the Word of God. I call that the Genesis III attack. But here's something else we need to understand, right? The devil is very clever. The Genesis III attack manifests itself in different ways. If you went back to the first century and talked to Peter and Paul preaching on the resurrection and said to them, that's all very well and good, but what about carbon dating? They wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about, because it's a it's that's a 20th century invention, right? When Martin Luther was nailing those theses on the door of the church in the 16th century, do you think anyone would ask him about dinosaurs? And the answer is no, because the word dinosaur wasn't invented until 1841. But down through the ages, they've had to deal with, you know, uh attacks on the deity of Christ, attacks on the resurrection, attacks on salvation uh by faith alone, and so on. What's the attack today? And we actually talked about it. You see, what is interesting, as I've traveled around the world for the past 40 plus years, in this era, this era that began in the 1800s, remember we talked about the popularization of millions of years, that actually laid the foundation for Darwin. If you've got millions of years in geology, I can take it in biology. And I see animals changing, and they do, animals change, dogs change into dogs, and cats change into cats, and but given enough time, they'll change into something else, right? So as I've traveled around the world, I and I say this to big audiences, I'll say, these are the questions I I get. When people know you're on about the Bible, Christianity, it doesn't matter what country you're in. This is globally the case today. And they'll say, but how but we live in a scientific age. Science has just proved the Bible. And how do you know the Bible's true anyway? And you believe in Adam and Eve, where do all the races of people come from? And what about dinosaurs? And they lived millions of years ago. And we got all these ape men, and what about the millions of years? And what about the dating methods? And you notice all these questions really pertain to the history in Genesis, and because we live in a so-called scientific age, you know they all have to, um most of them have have to do with the millions of years and so on. You see, that's the Genesis three attack of our age. And unfortunately, many of our Christian leaders have helped to undermine the authority of the Word of God by allowing the millions of years and evolutionary ideas, and they tell tell people, just trust in Jesus. But wait a minute. The devil has already undermined the account of Genesis and caused doubt, and these young people start to have unbelief and walk away from the church. And that's what's really going on. So that is the devil's method and his strategy, and what we should be saying is how is it manifesting itself today in the teaching of millions of years, evolution, of the attacks on the Bible, of all these questions? That's why we built the Ark. That's why we built the Creation Museum. Because much of the church isn't answering these questions. We answer them for them to help them uh understand how to defend the Christian faith, and it challenges non-Christians. The Bible's true. Because if you ask me how do you sum up the message of the Ark and the Creation Museum, the history in the Bible is true. That's why the gospel based in that history is true.
SPEAKER_04Amen. A few more questions that that was phenomenal, and it's been such a blessing. I want to get into dinosaurs briefly. I love some of your videos and some of the work you've already done on this. But could you explain the history of dinosaurs and then do this in kind of three particular aspects? First, when were the dinosaurs created? And second, were the dinosaurs on the ark? If so, how did they fit? And third, how did they go extinct? In fact, even last night I called my daughter when I landed and she said, Are you at the ark yet? And I told her, and she said, Daddy, how did the dinosaurs die? And I said, I've already explained it to you a thousand times and we've watched your material. But she said, Make sure to ask Mr. Ham, can you give us a brief synopsis of dinosaurs?
SPEAKER_02Um well, one of the things I'd like to do first is to say that most people don't have a true creature. A true Christian worldview is you start from the Bible, build your way of thinking. Often I get people asking the question, how do you fit dinosaurs with the Bible? Wrong question. You don't start outside and try to go to the Bible. What we need to do is say, okay, starting with the Bible, so we've got the right way of thinking, how do we understand dinosaurs? Right? Now the word dinosaur was first invented in 1841. So I've had people say to me the word dinosaur is not in the Bible. Well, neither is the word email, right? Because it's a modern word. So the word dinosaur was invented in 1841 when they found fossils of land animals. They were land animals, they had some unique features, and so the name uh dinosaur was invented from two Greek words, um Dinios and Soros, which means you know, basically terrible monster, terrible lizard. Uh and yet we we have now found that um the average size of dinosaur is quite small, and some are as small as chickens. Yeah. You know, some grew very large. But the word dinosaur applies to about 80 different groups of land animals, 80 different kinds of land animals. There can be variation within each kind. All right. So here's how we should work. When were dinosaurs created? Well, God didn't create dinosaurs, he created land animals. And he created all these kinds of land animals, and in the kinds he created, there's 80 that today we call dinosaurs. Right? So people need to understand it's it's not a matter of God creating dinosaurs, he created the animal kinds we have made up a name for, called dinosaurs. So then what did they eat? They're vegetarian. Genesis chapter 1, verse 30. All the animals were vegetarian. So was Adam and Eve. Okay? Then we come to the time of the flood. It says two of each kind, seven pairs of some, oh, seven pairs of the clean, two of the unclean, but um, two of each kind of the land dwelling, air-breathing animal. So all the different kinds of land animals went on the ark, which would have included a group that we call dinosaurs, right? So then the ark lands in the Middle East, and the animals come out of the Ark, including the groups we call dinosaurs, and they spread out over the earth, and because of the flood, the flood generated, well, you hear this, climate change. And then it generated an ice age that caused climate change. So there's been climate change ever since the flood. And you know, the climate change they talk about today is actually a religion. It's actually it's actually man thinking he can save himself and save the planet. It's a worship of the of the creation. Yeah, it's Romans 1 worshiping that creation. But over time, because climate's changed, and you know, there was an ice age, and then people killing them, and diseases and catastrophes and killing each other, and that a lot of different animals have become extinct, not just the dinosaurs. People often say to me, Why are the dinosaurs become extinct? What about the dodo bird? It's become extinct. You're not worried about the dodo bird, you're only worried about dinosaurs. I think it's because some of them were gr were very large, and so they capture our imagination, so we're all worried about the dinosaurs. Uh, and I think many of your dragon legends, when you look at the descriptions, fit some of those dinosaurs. So some of those dragon legends could actually be people encountering creatures that we made up a name for in 1841 called dinosaurs. So, you see, when you start from the Bible, you just go through and look at when God made land animals, day six. Uh, two of each kind got aboard Noah's Ark. So the dinosaurs, what we call dinosaurs, would have been of Noah's Ark, got off Noah's Ark. They've died out as far as we know.
SPEAKER_04Fantastic. And it's so simple. I think that's what I love when you explain these things. It's not this grandiose exaggeration.
SPEAKER_02Uh and by the way, biblical and clear. In recent times, scientists have been amazed and astonished and stunned to find dinosaur bones that still have soft tissue in the fossil record, have blood cells. There's no way they can be millions of years old. And not just dinosaur bones, they found a lot of other bones now. Because the fossil record is not millions of years old. Most of your fossils are about 4,300 years old, because that's when the flood occurred.
SPEAKER_04Amazing. Question for you now on the adaptation of animals. So you talked already about Darwinism and various aspects of evolution. Did God create, you know, grizzly bears as grizzly bears and polar bears as polar bears and panda bears and all the different types and kinds? Can you speak to where we get adaptations from and how God created in such a way that these animals are the same species in a sense? Or so we think, but different types or different kinds.
SPEAKER_02Um, by the way, it's it's raining outside right now. These special effects we put on here.
SPEAKER_01I'm waiting for are we gonna have to get in the ark soon? We don't have to worry, you know why? No, the rainbow.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, God said there'll never be another global fire.
SPEAKER_04Well, we'll just get rainy days at the ark and it makes for special effects.
SPEAKER_02Uh so how many children do you have? Five.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02Do they all look exactly the same?
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_02They're all a little different to each other? Yes. Okay. Why is that? Because they get information from your DNA, information from their mother's DNA that builds them, and so they've got different combinations of information. And do you know that just with two people, because of the information God already put in our DNA just from two people, do you know that you could uh have um well, how many children without two looking the same? It's it's a lot more it's many times more than the number of atoms in the universe, actually. And you can never get two looking the same because there's other reasons as to why no one will ever have the same combination totally. So it'll all look different. Eight billion people on Earth. They all look different to each other. Yet we go back to Adam and Eve, right? So um, and the Bible tells us about men called the Tower of Babel, God gave different languages, people move out uh from each other, away from each other, and depends on who marries who and which combinations of genes are there and which survive, and you'll you'll see certain characteristics dominant in those groups depending on you know who survives who marries who, which is why you can actually see some distinguishing characteristics, right? Now, when God created all the animal kinds and the human kind, he put incredible genetic diversity, variability in our DNA to enable zillions of combinations. Zillions. So two dogs get on the ark. See if you look at dogs, let's let's use dogs. I don't want to use cats because I don't like cats. We'll use dogs. So two dogs get on Noah's Ark. Now, all the dog species we have today, dingos, coyotes, um, uh jackal, fennet, foxes, your domestic varieties, and so on, we would call them all the same kind because they can all interbreed. One way or another, it's been documented, they can interbreed. If animals can interbreed, I mean you might have this dog species bred with this one, this one with this one, this one with this one, this one with this one, that one never bred with that one, but they're connected genetically.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02When you do that with animals and you do all the all the research on it, you find in most instances they're connected at the family level of classification, you know, following class order, family, genus species. So we would say when God made the the kinds of animals, land animals after their kind, we would say he made the dog family, the cat family. Right? Now, when he made the cat family, the dog family, he gave them such incredible variability in their DNA. So by the time of the flood, it says two of each kind went on the ark. So you'd only have two dogs going on the ark. They come off the ark. They uh have offspring. Who have offspring, and the number of dogs builds up. But over time, they're not going to stay together. And the flood also caused a lot of diverse environments, different environments after the flood. So these dogs go this way and they move towards a cold climate. In a cold climate, when dogs are born with a combination of genes that makes their hair longer, they survive better in a cold climate. The shorter haired dogs died out. Right? The opposite in a hot climate, the shorter ones survive better. The long-haired ones get too hot and they they die out. And so uh, you know, you over time you end up with all these different species of dogs because they separated from each other and depends on which combinations survive best and which is called adaptation, and which ones mate with which, which die out, and over time you form a different species. To help you help people understand it, that's what Secarus called natural selection, which is not evolution, because the dogs are still dogs. Right? So we do it and we call it artificial selection. We say, oh, look, there's a dog with a short nose. Oh, here's another dog that's got a combination of genes for short nose. Let's start breeding them together and then select their offspring until we get rid of the genes in the DNA for long noses, so they can never have long noses. They can only ever have short noses. We're reducing the amount of information in the DNA that God put there. And then we do that for all sorts of characteristics, and you end up with poodles and chihuahuas and St. Bernard's and Great Danes and Chihuahuas, but they're all dogs. And we know we've bred them ourselves in the last few hundred years. Well, stand back and think. When it happens out in the environment, right, instead of we choosing which one, it's whichever one survived best and mate with this over here and are isolated from these others and so on. And so God didn't make a grizzly bear and a brown bear and a polar bear. He made the bear kind, and those species have formed since the flood. But that's not evolution, because they're still bears.
SPEAKER_04Well said. Okay, last question, and probably one that is really hot now these days, but aliens. Are there alien are there aliens, and what would be a biblical worldview on aliens?
SPEAKER_02I do not believe in aliens. Right? Except when I look in Washington, D.C., I start to wonder. Now I agree. I I wrote an article a few years ago. You can actually look this up on the internet. Actually, if people do this, they'll smile. They'll really smile. I'll tell you why. I wrote an article on why I don't believe in aliens. And I gave a number of reasons why I don't believe in aliens, such as, you know, God made the earth first, and he made the earth for man to put man on the earth. Uh man has his special uh creation. Um the Bible talks about the heavens of the Lord. The earth is for the sons of men. We're also told that the heavens were made um to declare God's glory and how great he is. Think think about day four when the stars were made. You know, God had made the earth covered with water day one, and day four um he made the greater light, which is the sun, and the lesser light, the moon. And just a little throwaway phrase. Oh, he made the stars also. Oh I just thought it just thought I'd a little bit of power there. Millions, billions, trillions of galaxies and stars, and just you know the heavens declare the glory of God. That's why we from Earth look at the heavens and say, Wow, that's just a touch of God's power.
SPEAKER_00A little afterthought of Dayfall uh made some stars.
SPEAKER_02Um so you know, I I say the earth is a focus for the sons of men. Right? And so we can look at a number of arguments like that. But another one I I I looked at, I said, Look, um I don't believe there could be other races or beings on other planets because Adam's sin affects the whole universe, the whole creation grows. One day God's gonna roll it all up and he's gonna judge it with fire and make a new heavens and new earth. But only Adam's descendants can be saved, only Adam's family can be saved because God's son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the God man. And he remains the God man, he remains our Savior. He's not the God Clonon. Right? He can't go out and be a God clinon or God something else, he's the God man. And so I said it wouldn't make sense that there's other races of beings out there that suffer from Adam's sin and die and so on, but it's only Adam's descendants that can be saved. There are headlines that uh some of the atheists read that, then it got in the secular newspapers, and you can look it up on the internet, you just type type in because the headings are things like this. Ken Ham says aliens are going to hell. Um you wouldn't be really upset. Oh, you look at the number of headlines. Ken Ham says, don't look for aliens because God doesn't love them, they're going to hell. Oh, you know, and and things like that. I mean, it's just ridiculous. That reminds you of what the newspaper headlines do today. Absolutely. You can't you can't believe what you read. But and and I and I said to people, I don't believe aliens are going to hell, I don't believe in aliens. I mean, the article, the article actually said, I don't believe in aliens. I was giving an example from the aspect of the gospel. The gospel is for the humankind, it's for the human family, for Adam's family. So uh, no, I don't believe in aliens. God, God made man for this earth, and this is the focus of his attention. We have a wonderful program in our planetarium at the Creation Museum, where we start where the Earth is, and then we take you out into outer space and you sit there and we go back and you see all these galaxies, and we apply you to basically the edge of the universe as as as as as far as you know we've been able to ascertain. And and and you sort of see a representation of all these galaxies and stars and everything. And and and then you realize how small this earth is. And then we bring people back from the edge of the universe all the way back, and you come back to the earth, and you realize you realize how special we are God to step into history onto this little planet here to save us for eternity to be with him.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_02Makes you want to fall down on your knees and thank him for what he's done for us and to think that he loves us so much.
SPEAKER_04Amazing. And such a great way to close. Ken, thank you for your effort. I know you don't do it for man's gratitude, but I believe strongly that as you continue to be faithful, your reward will be great in glory for your effort on the behalf of not only our generation, but our children and many to come. I would encourage everybody watching and listening to this to make a date and get out here to you have the Ark Encounter, the Creation Museum. What are there any other things coming or any other massive dining- Do we have Jurassic Park coming? Like what else can we look forward to?
SPEAKER_02Because you're keep adding things at the arc. You went through the virtual reality ride. Yeah. And we have a carousel here. We have a zoo here because we want people to understand things from political. We can go through and walk through the kangaroos, and we're opening a children's zoo actually in a couple of weeks here, which is part of our zoo. And camel rides. And we have an animal experience at the Creation Museum. We do live animal presentations every day. We have great presenters. We have a stage uh down at the zoo behind the arc. And we have a playground for kids here. We have a playground at the Creation Museum. We have all these waterfalls and gardens and rainforest area at the at the Creation Museum. We're building a conservatory with greenhouses to raise the plants and the Bible there as well. Incredible. So these are amazing places. Nothing else like them in the way.
SPEAKER_04How many days should people like I'm gonna bring my kids next year? I've got five. How many days should a family like mine book off? You know, three, four days to get the creation museum, two days at the ark, three days, how many days should we eat?
SPEAKER_02Well, we would say a minimum of three. And so we have what's called a bouncer ticket. Uh, you know, Disney has their park opera. Absolutely. Well, we have a bouncer. You know why we call it bouncer? Why? Because I'm Australian and we have kangaroos. So you can be like a kangaroo and bounce from a so we have a three-day bouncer ticket where people can come. And what I'm finding, I mean I meet people who say, that's such a great idea because I'll come go to the ark, go to the museum, and then the third day they say, No, we want to go back to the museum and see such and such that we missed out on, and then we want to go back to the ark and see such and such. But I'd say three days minimum, definitely. And you know what? You can make this your tourist, you know, vacation destination. Absolutely. Because uh not far from here is the biggest Air Force museum in the world, and it's free with the Dayton Air Force Base, and lots of things to do in northern Kentucky. See, people think Northern Kentucky? Who would go to Kentucky?
SPEAKER_01You put it in the best place there is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Fantastic. It is a beautiful area. It's a rural area here. Yeah, it's a good thing. It's quite nice. People come here and say, we didn't realize Kentucky was so beautiful. All the rolling hills. Except maybe in January, February, it's a little cold.
SPEAKER_04A little cold, but still worth it to come here. Thank you for all you do, and we're grateful for your ministry. Keep up the great work. Thank you.
unknownThank you.
SPEAKER_04Thanks for listening and watching for loads of free resources or to learn more about our ministry here at For the Gospel and to partner with us with either a one-time or a reoccurring gift. You can go to forthegospel.org and all of the information about our ministry is there. As well, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel where all of our resources are available for free. And be sure to follow us on all social media channels. I will be back next Monday with another episode. For now, keep on living for the gospel.