Jackson Wheat

December 30, 2014

The Separation of Church and Science
As an aspiring evolutionary biologist, Mr. Ken Ham, your work concerns me more and
more everyday. Evolutionary biology and cosmology are two of the most important lines of
research in todays world, and, you no doubt know, your website attempts to discredit both lines
of research by claiming that they are untestable and anti-biblical. Your website, as far as I can
see, does not want anyone to contact you unless for a childhood indoctrination lecture about how
evolution is false, a person wants to buy a book, or someone wants to send you money. Not that
I am surprised by any of those things. If you do in fact read this paper and want to speak to me, I
am available on Twitter. This paper does not primarily attack the existence of your god; it only
concerns two topics: the separation of science into two parts and using science to prove the
Bible.
You and your creation scientists, I put it in quotes because what they do is
contradictory to regular scientist work, attempt to cut science down by chopping it into two parts:
historical and observational science. No real scientist does that, so why would you and your
scientists do it? I recognize that you want to discredit historical science by making it seem
as though no one can test it. You want to make the public think that evolution and the Big Bang
are untestable assumptions about the past and not science. In doing so, you violate your own
rule about not making assumptions; you assume that evolution cannot be tested. Dr. Richard
Lenski of Michigan State University would disagree with you: he put a colony of E. coli bacteria
in a primarily citric environment, and after about 35,000 generations, the bacteria evolved the
ability to metabolize the citrate. Scientists can also perform DNA tests on the genetic lineage of
organisms, and is it a coincidence that the genetic differences are arithmetically dissimilar?
Humans are close to chimpanzees, followed by rodents, followed by reptiles, followed by
amphibians, followed by fish, and finally followed by invertebrates. If your god does exist, why
would He make all organisms look as though they have evolved? A simple online search would
yield hundreds of vestigial organs, evolution tests and proofs, and would disprove most, if not
all, of what you put on your website. Just read a high school biology textbook, and you will
discover that most of the ideas presented on your website are fallacious.
So evolution has the fossil record, where none of the organisms from different time
periods overlap; DNA lineage; biogeographic distribution, which is where organisms are located
in the world; embryology, which shows how many organisms have vestigial traits or look exactly
the same; and of course laboratory tests. How is evolution not observational? Secondly, you
claim that the Big Bang is not observational. I do not know as much about the Big Bang as I do
about evolution, but I can provide a few proofs for the Big Bang: light traveling for billions of
years, I read your article about light and will provide a commentary momentarily; the existence
of the last scatter surface, which proves that we cannot see back into the Big Bang because afterradiation forms an opaque wall when it mixes with telescope light; the abundance of hydrogen,
which shows that more of it was created in the universe over a longer period of time than any
other element; and the second law of thermodynamics, which proves that entropy (not
disorder) always evolves toward absolute zero. I would like to return to your assumptions
about light and the second law of thermodynamics before moving on.

The page on Answers in Genesis titled Does Distant Starlight Prove the Universe Is
Old? makes a lot of assumptions even though you and your scientists claim to be the
champions of objective reasoning, a very laughable claim. Dr. Jason Lisles paper begins, well
after the introductory paragraphs, by discrediting universal age estimates because he says, The
distant starlight argument involves several assumptions that are questionableany one of which
makes the argument unsound. Already Dr. Lisle asserts that because what scientists claim is
imperfect, it must, therefore, be wrong. If I were to turn this question around on you and ask,
How do you know that the Earth is exactly six thousand years old? you would probably
respond that it is described in the Bible, which it is not. The Bible only says that the world was
created in six days; it makes no mention as to the exact age of the world. James Ussher was the
first person to claim that the universe is six thousand years old, and he is human. Since he is
human, could he not be wrong? I am happy to see that the paragraph titled The Constancy of
the Speed of Light was fairly honest and said what scientists often say about something: We do
not know yet. The paper says later, though, Many secular astronomers assume that the universe
is infinitely big and has an infinite number of galaxies. I do not know of any modern secular
astronomers who believe that the universe is infinitely big and has an infinite number of galaxies.
The vast majority of astronomers, physicists, cosmologists, and astrophysicists agree that the
universe is neither infinitely old nor has an infinite number of galaxies. I wonder if this is
another attempt to make the scientific community seemed divided, which it is not.
Dr. Lisles paper continually points out assumptions made by scientists, but he needs
to know that scientists are not making assumptions. They are working off of the data that they
have and will change their views according to the data, not before. You cannot know that the
scientists are assuming because evidence to prove otherwise has not appeared. If evidence that
scientists assume variables were to appear then you would have the right to grill them on it, but
again, not before. Dr. Lisle uses the word assumption over and over again and even labels
uniformitarianism and naturalism as assumptions! The horizon problem that Dr. Lisle talks
about is not even a problem; he seems to forget that light-years are uniform and travel at about
9.4067x105 meters per second. Light would have plenty of time to not only travel between the
points but far beyond the points. Of course, I recognize that this research and all other
research on your website is aimed at people who do not want to actually understand science,
but who want it spoon-fed to them.
Before I move to the second topic described in the introductory paragraph, I need to
explain the second law of thermodynamics. Creationists often cite the second law of
thermodynamics, the third law out of four, as a way to disprove evolution. They, and you no
doubt know, say that because entropy, or disorder, increases in an organism, the organism
should not be able to gain complexity. Entropy is the number of ways that a thermodynamic
system can be arranged, and thermodynamic systems always evolve toward thermodynamic
equilibrium (heat is always lost). The idea that the second law of thermodynamics defeats
evolution is, of course, incorrect because our Earth is constantly bathed in heat from the Sun and
from our geothermal core. The second law of thermodynamics no more defeats evolution than a
childs birth defeats the fact that the Sun produces energy.
Now for using science to prove the Bible: how can you use doctors to start with a
conclusion, the Bible, and try to find evidence to support it? That is in fact the very opposite of
what science is. No scientist woke up one and said, Let us today cast off God and think of some
way to make the universe look older than six thousand years. That did not happen. What
happened was scientists evaluated the evidence of the universe and collectively realized that the

universe must be older than six thousand years. They continued looking at the evidence and
found that methods such as radioisotope dating and the Hubble diagram showed that the universe
is not correct as described by the Bible, Quran, or any other holy book. Why is that? Maybe
because ancient books written by goat herders in the desert are not to be trusted. I feel ashamed,
and I hope that those doctors you employ are ashamed, to know that they use evidence to prove a
specific book. I am not only shocked but disheartened. I do, however, recognize that the doctors
you employ make up less than 99% of the scientific community.
In closing, your idea of trying to discredit science by chopping it into parts is foolish.
Your creation scientists make far more assumptions than any real scientist ever would, and
your scientists work off of their assumptions to do what no true scientist ever would:
following the conclusion to evidence. What makes you so sure that your holy book is correct?
There are thousands of other religions that have stories just as sane as the biblical account, and
that is not very sane by the way. When there is even the slightest shred of proof to prove that
your god and your religion, that you so conveniently possess, are correct, then I will change my
position, not before. Harkening back to your debate with Bill Nye, when asked what would
change your mind, Bill Nye said, Evidence. You essentially replied, Nothing. That is the
problem with your position: if evidence is never going to change your mind, why do you try to
use evidence to persuade others?