Ken Ham is furious that a reporter didn't pretend Creationism is science

The Ark Encounter founder says journalists are biased when they accurately describe Young Earth Creationism as a fringe belief

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It’s been a while since we’ve talked about how the Creationists at Ark Encounter are still desperately trying to convince people they do real “science.” (Usually, the conversations revolve around their low attendance.) But Ken Ham still hasn’t changed his rhetoric; he’s still mad that reality contradicts his mythology. That’s why he’s now lashing out at local newspapers for saying as much.

To make sense of it, we can just look to his latest video, where he makes a series of mistakes, purposely or not, to convince his gullible followers that the mainstream media is against them.

He wants to argue that good journalists should be objective, which, in his view, means not taking a position on what counts as science. So he brings up an example of a newspaper that got it right and one that got it wrong.

The one that did it right? The Northern Kentucky Tribune, which posted a brief article about how Ark Encounter was “celebrating its 10th anniversary.” Except it’s not an article at all. It’s literally a press release that Ken Ham’s team sent the paper, which they republished with only a handful of small changes and a straightforward headline.

Ham even admits that… while trying to imply the exact opposite:

For instance, the Northern Kentucky Tribune simply reported the news. They published our press release announcing the Ark Encounter’s 10th anniversary celebration with the headline “Ark Encounter to mark 10 year anniversary with guest speakers, concerts, and more beginning July 9.”

That’s what journalists used to call reporting the news.

That’s not reporting the news. There’s no “reporting” involved whatsoever. It’s an age-old trick of sending a newspaper exactly what you want them to say and then pretending you’ve earned the coverage if they go through with it.

This isn’t new for Answers in Genesis. They literally pay Fox News to run segments about them, then suggest to their followers that Fox is covering them only because they’re doing something incredible.

They’re liars. It’s how they roll.

If that’s the good example, what’s the bad example?

That, he says, was the article published in the Cincinnati Enquirer. He sent them the same press release but the bastards there didn’t just copy and paste it like he wanted! Reporter Jolene Almendarez actually provided readers with context and understanding. You know, like good journalists do.

It seems like she felt the most newsworthy aspect of that press release was that astronauts were going to be part of the anniversary festivities. And not just any astronauts. We’re talking about two men who spent significant time in outer space and another man who walked on the moon!

Why would astronauts, typically thought of as pro-science, come to a place that’s widely seen as anti-science? That was the real story. So she ran with it.

She even explained her logic in a video she posted on X/Twitter:

One thing you take away from that delightful video is that she’s clearly not an activist. There’s a story here worth telling and she’s excited to tell it. She’s not taking a position on Young Earth Creationism. She’s just highlighting why astronauts appearing at the Ark may sound contradictory. To stress that point, she even pointed out that an intern at the newspaper reached out to Bill Nye for comment, and Nye (correctly) stated that the Ark was “anti-science.”

It led to this headline for her story:

Ken Ham is naturally furious about that because he hates actual journalism.

First, he insisted, “That’s not reporting the news. That’s framing the story with a conclusion before readers even begin reading.” He’s wrong. That’s why “anti-science” is in quotes. The story is the apparent contradiction and that’s what the headline highlights.

(The answer, by the way, is that those three astronauts are also Young Earth Creationists. Sounds ridiculous but it’s true. If Ham wasn’t primed to be so damn angry all the time, he could easily pretend that this story was pro-Creationism because it shows how science and the Bible don’t have to be in opposition!)

He wasn’t done whining. Later in the video, he got mad that she reached out to Nye at all as a stand-in for the scientific community. Because who truly represents that group? The overwhelming majority of professional scientists who accept evolution, or the handful of reactionary cranks who don’t?

The reporter repeatedly appeals to what credible scientists or mainstream science supposedly believes. But who decides which scientists are credible? Is a scientist no longer credible simply because he or she believes Genesis?

Yeah, man. If you believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, then you’re ignoring scientific realities, and you become no longer credible. That’s how credibility works.

More to the point: You can be an accomplished person with batshit crazy beliefs. You can have a Ph.D. in science while still rejecting basic science. You can be a well-known “historian” whose biography gets pulled from the shelves because it contains way too many lies. And you can be an astronaut who thinks the universe is approximately 6,000 years old.

There’s nothing weird about educated people with massive blind spots. The question is whether their controversial beliefs are backed up by any evidence—and in the case of Creationists, the answer is a very obvious no.

Ham uses this as proof that the media has an “anti-God agenda.” Which is another lie. The media isn’t anti-God. On its best days, it’s anti-bullshit. And bullshit is the only thing Ark Encounter has to offer people. Or, in reporter-speak, there’s no proof, much less widely accepted scientific evidence, for the claims made by Creationists.

You don’t need to be a trained scientist to say that. You don’t need to be a theologian to say that. You just need to be a reporter who understands how to lay out a story and speak to people who know what they’re talking about.

Not that Ham understands that.

Does this reporter have expertise in science? Does she have training in theology? Not what I’ve been able to research. She has qualifications in journalism education. Yet throughout the article, she in essence confidently makes pronouncements about both science and theology while presenting only one side of the story.

This, again, is Journalism 101. To paraphrase a famous line, if there’s a thunderstorm outside and some idiot insists it’s not raining, your job is not to pretend there are two equal sides to the story. Your job is to go outside and check, and then tell us it’s raining.

Ken Ham seems to think that he and his merry band of crackpots deserve to have their beliefs taken seriously by the very nature of their existence. But there aren’t two sides to this story. There’s one that’s backed by everyone who knows what they’re talking about—who get published in peer-reviewed journals, and understand the science in depth in a way that Ham doesn’t, and can explain it to others with a style he doesn’t possess—and there’s the view backed by fundamentalist Christians and the people they’ve duped.

Ham goes on to criticize the reporter:

This reporter needs to go to a good journalism school, in my opinion, one that teaches proper journalism.

I assure you that every journalism school would tell this reporter to keep doing what she’s doing, because she’s killing it. Meanwhile, Ken Ham needs to go back to elementary school since he apparently slept through every science class.

At the end of his video, he insists there’s something to his beliefs because “hundreds of thousands of people visit the Ark Encounter, and many come skeptical” and “Our research indicates about 80,000 [people] a year become Christians as a result of visiting the Ark.”

Somehow, that “research” is nowhere to be found. But you can see Ark Encounter attendance numbers meticulously laid out right here.

Early in the video, Ham accuses the reporter of publishing an “opinion piece” rather than a news piece. But I read the article and it’s more than fair to Ham’s perspective. It accurately describes what they believe while correctly framing that as a fringe view among scientists who study this stuff.

At the Ark Encounter, placards claim the Earth is only a few thousand years old instead of 4.5 billion years, as the vast majority of scientists agree. And displays show dinosaurs, like velociraptors, in bamboo cages, alive at the same time as humans, which mainstream science also debunks.

That’s… accurate! Ham can’t have it both ways. He can’t pretend to fight against mainstream science and then demand to be included among mainstream scientists.

As for how the reporter resolves the apparent contradiction of the astronauts who believe this nonsense, she simply quotes them:

During [Jeff] Williams’ time at NASA, he spent 534 days in space throughout four missions. In an interview with the Institute of Creation Research, he said he doesn’t find a conflict between science and scripture. “If you have a presupposition that excludes the possibility of a God, that excludes the possibility of supernatural acts, and that everything has to be explained just with natural processes, then you’ve basically limited what you can let the objective observation of science tell you,” he said.

That’s it. She doesn’t say that’s right or wrong. She just lets him do the talking.

Same with Charlie Duke, who actually stepped foot on the moon:

Duke was the 10th person to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 16 mission in 1972, according to the NASA website. During his time on the moon, he collected moon rocks estimated to be more than 4 billion years old. But after his time at NASA, he became a born-again Christian and believes in the literal interpretation of Genesis — that God created the earth in six days, The Washington Post reported.

This is what Ham is mad about. It’s the same thing Trump is mad about when newspaper say his election denial conspiracy theories have never been proven in court and that there’s no evidence to back them up. These people live in denial and they can’t handle when people call them out on it because they surround themselves with sycophants who believe every lie they’re told.

I reached out to Almendarez, the reporter, to see if she had any response to Ham’s video, but she didn’t comment any further. She doesn’t need to. The article speaks for itself.

On a side note, I have no clue who designed the thumbnail for Ham’s video, but someone went to the trouble of writing an actual parody article where squiggles would have sufficed. It quotes “Cincinnati Expirer editor-in-chief, Mr. I.B. Tolerant” as saying “We’ve been trying to take down the Ark Encounter since it opened.”

They put more work into that thumbnail than they’ve ever spent trying to prove Young Earth Creationism is true.

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