Interview: Creation Museum Founder on Evolution Clash
Saturday, May. 26, 2007 Posted: 08:08:48 PM PDT
For instance, a guy like Francis Collins - who is part of the Human Genome Project and just wrote a book recently - is a theistic evolutionist. I would say that he could be a great man of God and a great scientist, but he tells people that they can believe in evolution. There is a big difference. What he can’t seem to understand – and I think part of it is academic peer pressure - is that when he studied the Human Genome Project, he was looking at genes in the present comparing genes from around the world doing what I call incredible real empirical science. But when it comes to the past and talking about the histories and origins, he can’t do that. He wasn’t there. He can’t experiment with that, so it’s very different. When he says that you can take man’s ideas of evolution, Darwin’s ideas, and add it to the Bible, he is putting a stumbling block in front of the next generation because he is really saying that the Bible is not the absolute authority. ‘God couldn’t get it right. You don’t have to read it as it’s written.’
If you look only as Genesis as an allegory, you have a major problem, because if it’s an allegory, then tell me who our ancestor was? If Abraham was real, then from Abraham if Adam isn’t real, if it’s just an allegory, it’s just a story, then what’s the real Adam who really fell in a garden and really sinned? Where did we come from? Why are we sinners? Why is Jesus called the last Adam? If the doctrine of message is built on an allegorical story, then you can reinterpret the doctrine of marriage any way you want to.
The point is that most of the New Testament writers quote from Genesis. All the New Testament doctrines have originated in Genesis 1-11, every one. Marriage - Genesis 1-11; Why is there sin? - Genesis 1-11; How did he die? - Genesis 1-11; Why is Jesus called the last Adam? - Genesis 1-11; Why do we have a seven-day week? - Genesis 1-11; Why do we wear clothes? - Genesis 1-11; Why do we need a new Heavens and a new earth? - Genesis 1-11. Genesis 1-11 is the foundation history of all doctrine of the entire Bible; so when you start to doubt that foundational history and start to rewrite it, you are undermining biblical authority.
The issue is not so much the age of the earth or evolution, the issue is reinterpreting Scripture, if you get my drift.
CP: Okay, let’s go onto a lighter question.
Ham: Actually, it’s interesting, right before we do that. I had a reporter who had just talked to Francis Collins. That was a few days ago. And she said that Francis Collins said we were putting a stumbling block in front of people to believing the Bible in telling them that they had to believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis. That’s a very interesting comment, particularly in that the atheists are out protesting the museum, because we are telling people to believe the Bible.
That upset me, because we are telling people to believe the Bible. Maybe there’s someone out there - but I haven’t met anybody yet – who because we told them to believe the six literal days and believe what the Bible has written, has left Christianity. But I sure have met many, many people, even just in the conference I was at in Washington, D.C., because of what they were taught years ago about evolution, that they learned not to trust the Bible.
