Of Ham and AiG
A brief history of Answers in Genesis
*Ahem.* Mi mi mi mi mi…
In what feels like another age, the Great Debate that was all over the internet was the Theory of Evolution versus young-Earth creationism (YEC). It would appear that this has been forgotten, and sometimes I feel like I’m the only one with a memory long enough to be able to write about this topic without having to brush up on it, though I did admittedly have to look up a couple of things for this article. In any case, it looks like this debate is coming back, as I predicted it eventually would, and
specifically requested an article on this very topic. Let’s see if this twenty-year-old roller coaster is as fun as I remember it, shall we? I’m kidding, I’d like to get off of Mister Bones’ Wild Ride.Despite the tendency for Europeans to dunk on Americans specifically for believing some weird things, Evangelical Christianity is a phenomenon throughout the Anglosphere, not just North America. Those of you already familiar with Answers in Genesis know that it was founded by an Aussie named Ken Ham, but what you might not be aware of is that Ham is no lone nutter who had to move to the “Bible Belt” of the United States in order to find kindred spirits. In 1980, Ham founded the Creation Science Foundation in Australia, and changed the name to Answers in Genesis only after moving to Kentucky in 1994, lest the organisation be confused with Creation Science Evangelism. Keep that last name lodged deep in the grey matter, because it will be important later. At the time, AiG was not a particularly well-known creationist organisation, and wouldn’t draw significant attention until 2007, when their Creation Museum opened. In the grand scheme of things, other creationist organisations were in the spotlight between 1980 and 2007, as I have previously written about. What sets AiG apart from them is that the others are considerably more deceitful about their goals and in their methods, whereas AiG is very openly in favour of promoting “a biblical world view in opposition to secular pseudoscience.” In a movement full of shameless frauds, AiG came out looking like a shining beacon of true believers as far as most evangelicals were concerned… at the time.
The Creation Museum was AiG’s only attraction for the next nine years, and in those early days of YouTube, most of the videos uploaded of it were of prominent atheists going there for a laugh, sharing photos of things like anatomically-correct (minus feathers on the raptors) life-size models of dinosaurs with saddles on their backs and other things straight out of The Flintstones.
Atheists and Christians who don’t take the Bible literally1 saw it mostly as harmless fun, and it seemed that more sceptics were attending the Creation Museum for the LOLs than evangelical Christian homeschoolers (who, I would remind you, are a minority among homeschoolers) who took it seriously. After all, where oh where would children in Kentucky go to learn about Jesus if it weren’t for Ken Ham’s murals and animatronics? Now, admittedly, the early exhibits at the Creation Museum, especially the animatronics, were quite impressive, and one could still appreciate the technical skill and artistry of these things while mocking the message that they were meant to propagate, kind of like how it is possible to appreciate the craftsmanship on a Tiger tank while still condemning the evils of the NSDAP.2 Back then, the militant atheists were generally much nicer than they are today, and were at least capable of giving credit where credit was due. It was, rather ironically, the scoffers keeping Ham’s ministry afloat, instead of the faithful… or so it seemed.
In 2014 (I think, it may have been even earlier3), the year that he famously lost a debate to Bill Nye, Ken Ham announced what was his most ambitious project yet: a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark, to be built at a new location called the Ark Encounter. This was hardly a unique project, as several full-scale replicas of Noah’s Ark already existed at the time, but you wouldn’t have known this from the way that Ham hyped it up. Again, “where will the children of Kentucky go to learn about Jesus?” That was an actual line from a speaker at the annual protest of the Ark Encounter. Yeah, I should mention that every year, American Atheists4 gather to protest the existence of this site, and have been doing so even before it was open to the public. This is unusual, because as I just mentioned, there are many such sites across the United States, a fact which was brought up by the same speaker who made the joke that I’ve repeated twice now. So, why protest this specific Ark every year? Because AiG wasn’t just being a harmless fundamentalist lolcow anymore.
Unlike every other replica of Noah’s Ark, which seem to have been some kind of passion project built by a single individual or a completely voluntary affair run by a local church, Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter was funded by taxpayers’ money… $18 million of it, out of a $100 million budget. This was rightly seen as blatant corruption (and the now Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was involved somehow, so there’s that rabbit hole to go down), and while the excuse was made at the time that it would bring jobs to the area, no such jobs ever materialised, according to locals who were interviewed. Not only was AiG extremely selective about whom they would hire to even build the Ark in the first place, making everyone who volunteered on the project sign a statement of faith which also included restrictions on behaviour when not even working on the project, but the Ark Encounter did not bring in the number of visitors that Ham had claimed it would. When it opened to the public in the summer of 2016, it saw its highest numbers of visitors ever, and even then, as drone footage has revealed, the parking lot was never more than half-full. Queues to enter the Ark itself were frequently empty, not packed as Ham claimed they would be. Still, all the atheist YouTubers, and I do mean all of them who were active at the time, visited the Ark, took lots of pictures and video footage, and provided mocking commentary just as they had done with the Creation Museum in previous years. I’ve seen a few of these videos, I found them tremendously entertaining, but I have one thing to say about the Ark that, as far as I know, no-one else has ever brought up: its rather distinctive appearance…
…and my first reaction when I saw Ham’s hundred-million-dollar paperweight, as Seth Andrews called it, was “why does it have a fucking ram?!”
Right, time for a lesson on the history of naval architecture, so bear with me as I unleash my inner nautical nerd on you. A naval ram, as its name suggests, was originally a weapon. The first known use of one was circa 500 BC, but depictions go as far back as 800 BC, which is still over a thousand years after most YECs think the Noachian deluge took place and two thousand years after the actual flood that inspired the biblical tale.5 This was also about three hundred years after the Mycenean Period of Greek history ended, so if the Argo were a real ship6, it wouldn’t have had a ram either, but depictions of Ancient Greek tales usually use the visual motifs of Classical Greece, which looked very different. Blame Hollyweird all you want, but the Greeks themselves did this in their own artwork.
Anyway, rams. Early rams were made of bronze, and while they were occasionally used to break a ship’s hull and sink it, they were more commonly used to break off the oars and render an enemy ship immobile so that it could be boarded and captured. For most of history, naval engagements were decided by boarding actions. Only in the last four centuries did that really change, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I could prattle on for ages about the development of war galleys and polyremes (ships with multiple rows of oars, the most famous of which were triremes) in the Ancient Mediterranean world, but since this article isn’t supposed to focus on the history of naval architecture, I’ll make this quick. The arms race between the various naval powers of the day, such as Rome, Carthage, Egypt, and Macedon, ended when the Romans controlled the entire Mediterranean coastline, and with no further need to wage war at sea, the construction of those impressively large wooden ships with rams, towers, catapults, and stupid numbers of oars, simply ceased. Roman ships from the middle and late Imperial Period were much smaller than those of the Republican and early Imperial Periods. Rams and ram-shaped bows were still occasionally put on ships, but fell out of fashion entirely by the 7th century AD, only to be brought back in the latter half of the 19th century.
The reason that rams made a comeback in the 19th century was because of the inability of contemporary gunnery to do any damage whatsoever to ironclads. However, a ram would make short work of an ironclad or even iron-hulled ship, as was demonstrated when HMS Camperdown accidentally rammed HMS Victoria in 1893 during a training exercise and the latter then proceeded to lawn-dart itself into the floor of the Mediterranean, distinguishing itself as one of only two known vertical shipwrecks. Apparently, it’s been a fairly popular diving site since it was discovered in 2004. Anyway, within the next decade afterward, guns that were capable of reliably defeating ship armour finally appeared, but the rams stayed because of an interesting discovery: ships with rams were more hydrodynamic, and therefore more efficient, than ships without them. Today, almost all large vessels have them, even if they aren’t warships. They are called bulbous bows, and when properly shaped using computer-aided design tools such as finite element analysis, can increase a motor vessel’s fuel efficiency by up to 15%. Credit where credit is due, the team at AiG designed a very nicely-shaped hull… for a modern, screw-driven, steel ship. Without a propulsion system of any kind, or even a rudder to help orient the ship in relation to oncoming waves, that ram-shaped bow would be completely useless. Not only is Ham’s Ark ahistorical, it’s also unbiblical, as nowhere in any version of Genesis that I know of, much less the King James Version (KJV) that I own and many YECs insist on using, is Noah’s Ark described as being anything other than a box. Not even a barge (which never have rams on them), a box.
The Ark Encounter continued to be the target of mockery and derision online, and what was once Ham’s most ambitious project quickly became his greatest failure. No-one was visiting it, the outside was damaged due to heavy rains (oh, irony!), and after about a year, it was sold for ten dollars. No, not ten million, not ten thousand, ten, a single portrait of Alexander Hamilton. Others have more obsessively covered the weird, albeit perfectly legal, financial shenanigans that AiG has engaged in using various shell companies, so if that sort of thing interests you, let me know, and I will see if I can find an article or video that answers whatever questions you might have. My go-to source for the longest time was Canadian YouTuber Paul Ens, which is also where I got the idea for this article’s title.
In addition to largely abandoning the Ark Encounter, AiG neglected the Creation Museum, gutting the building entirely and getting rid of all the static displays, animatronics, and colourful murals lining every single wall in favour of plain white walls with screens. It now looks like what I imagine a library would be in some kind of dystopian science fiction setting. At some point, and I can’t be bothered to scroll through all the videos made on the subject to find what year this was, Ham announced his next big project, which was a Tower of Babel theme park. So… he’s going to build a replica of the Marduk Ziggurat? That’s something even I would pay to see (ziggurats are really cool)! No, seriously, that’s the real building that inspired the story. Construction was begun by Hammurabi, but after his death, the project stopped, schools that taught Cuneiform closed, within a few generations, no-one could read Cuneiform at all, and the knowledge necessary to complete the project was lost, such that even if someone wanted to complete the ziggurat, they would have a hard time of it. Nebuchadnezzar II tried roughly a thousand years later, but he didn’t get very far, and the whole thing eventually collapsed into a pile of rubble. Well, it appears that Ham’s hugely ambitious project never went anywhere, and maybe that’s because Ham decided he didn’t want much attention for a while. There are good reasons for that, hence my conjecture.
I mentioned that Ham didn’t want his organisation confused with Creation Science Evangelism, and that’s because he wants nothing to do with its founder, Kent Hovind. I have repeatedly promised to “never bring up Hovind’s name again,” but I keep having to break that promise for one reason or another. To quote Mark Twain, few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. There is an entire page on AiG’s website titled Arguments to Avoid, most of which are the spurious claims that Hovind has made plagiarised over the years, which, in AiG’s own words, “do the creationist cause no good.” Remember my 8000-word hit-piece against the military reformist movement? Michaela does, and it was also the last thing I published. Let’s just say there’s a good reason that I call my former history professor “The Doctor Dino of Reformists,” but the whole point of that article was that the reformists are a collective Doctor Dino to the anti-war movement. Hovind, the OG Doctor Dino, is someone that Ham and a lot of other creationists wish would just go away already, and even atheist YouTubers are aware of this. One person who has worked with AiG rather extensively is Eric Hovind, Kent’s son, but that’s because Kent has managed to alienate his own family. This is where the real troubles come in, and might be connected to the massive schism within AiG, with the Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and South African branches splitting from the US/UK branch in 2006, with the latter still being under Ham’s control.
Kent Hovind became infamous in evangelical circles when he was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for tax fraud in 2007. The funniest thing about that, at least to me, is that, as a minister, Hovind could have gotten away with tax evasion legally, but no, he plays by no-one’s rules but God’s his own. That wasn’t the first time Hovind had a run-in with the law, and it wouldn’t be the last. As such, AiG insisted on having everything financial be completely transparent and above board, lest they end up in the same situation and potentially discrediting themselves to their own supporters. That did not last, and once again, the deceit that is a hallmark of creationist organisations came to light. The source was not atheist YouTubers, criminal investigators, or even armchair attorneys, but former AiG insiders, mostly volunteers. One theme that was consistent across their various testimonies, many of which are on their own YouTube channels or were picked up by atheist YouTubers, was that AiG is concerned with money first, and the message second. In other words, contrary to its image of being a bastion of honesty in a sea of lies, AiG is just another financial hustle hiding behind religion. Even AiG’s own YouTube channel reflects this7, as more and more, the organisation is concerned with the “culture war” on a surface level, and not even so much with creationism. They will still put out a video on the topic every now and then, and for some reason they pop up in my feed even though atheist YouTubers no longer do, which is one reason I suspect algorithmic manipulation in their favour in order to present the casual netizen with a false dichotomy of radical evangelical Christianity on one side and woke statist atheism on the other. In fact, I’m glad I received the request to write this article, because it ties in quite nicely with the topic of political alchemy in my next article, which I already have written, and will publish in a week after some minor changes.
The Ark finally got some attention again after Ken Ham decided to give Mike Johnson a private tour of it in 2022. At the time, Johnson was the Vice Chair of the House Republican Conference. When Johnson became Speaker of the House in 2023, the legacy media focused almost entirely on him being an evangelical Christian, and immediately the comparisons to George W Bush began, despite most Republicans supporting Johnson for the simple reason that he voted against sending money to Ukraine… only to flip-flop on foreign aid after becoming House Speaker. Jacob Tothe, the Anarchist Librarian and a Quaker, had some choice words about Johnson at the time. There is a broader point here which will be covered in my next article, so I won’t waste any more words on it here.
Also in 2023, Martyn Iles, the founder of a Christian law firm in Australia, was brought in to AiG as “Executive CEO,” a redundant title if I’ve ever heard one, though Ken Ham remains “Founding CEO,” and will probably remain the head of the organisation, both de jure and de facto, until he retires. Iles is much younger than Ham, so by having this position, he is named as Ham’s heir. By this point, AiG had fully and openly transitioned from prioritising creationism to prioritising Christian Nationalism, which was its ultimate goal all along. In fact, since YEC is not a popular position among people on the political right of the culture war, AiG seems to be actively downplaying the creationist aspect in order to hoodwink large numbers of people into supporting it. Not everyone on the so-called right is fooled, however. Matt Walsh, for example, generally holds the same positions as Ken Ham when it comes to culture and politics, but vehemently disagrees on theology. I should probably note that a lot of dissident rightists, not just evangelical Christians, do not like Matt Walsh because they see him as controlled opposition. However, a lot of evangelicals don’t like AiG either, seeing it as “too liberal” or “too political.” The latter is definitely a valid criticism, and is the very reason that
is such a widely-detested lolcow as well; the only difference is the political party heThe future is not history, but I’d like to conclude by making some predictions. Considering the sheer amount of money behind Answers in Genesis, it will still be around for a while. One specific prediction that I’ve already made, in case you didn’t read the article I linked at the beginning, is that there will soon be another high-profile court case involving creationism, and since AiG is the biggest name going in creationism at the moment, it is the most likely to be involved. However, I have one other prediction to make: if any article of mine were to go viral, it would probably be this one, and my reasoning is fairly simple. AiG is a huge organisation and creationists are notoriously confrontational, so it is well within the realm of possibility that someone at AiG reads this article, and should that happen, it will probably get mentioned in an episode of Answers News. For the longest time, and this may still be the case, Paul Ens had a rule that anyone that AiG decided to take pot shots at was welcome as a guest on his channel. However, since this article wouldn’t exist were it not for Michaela McKuen, I’d insist on bringing her with me. While scheduling such a recording session with Michaela and Paul might be a wee bit difficult considering all the other things I’m up to, I would frankly relish the opportunity. After all, I’m an occultist, I am literally the living creationist strawman of “evolutionists are alchemists.” So, if my prediction is correct and you, dear reader, happen to work for AiG, first of all, hi! Second, you have my permission to suggest to your viewers, both gullible and sceptical, that I have lots of wild sex parties and then abort my own babies just to use the blood of the innocent as a component for all the philosophers’ stones that I’ve been using to keep myself alive for over a millennium and also have a steady supply of gold so that I don’t have to get a real job. Or, you know, you could make your position clear as to whether or not you actually believe any of that, because even though you say on your website not to strawman the evolutionist position, y’all can’t help but perpetuate some really bizarre ideas about us non-Christians, I’ve noticed. Nonetheless, despite its overall success, Answers in Genesis has shot itself in the foot many times, and it will do so many more. Making me famous would be nothing more than another such shot fired. We shall see where this goes.
As any biblical scholar will point out, YECs can call themselves “biblical literalists” all they want, but their interpretation of scripture is not remotely literal. Age of the Earth aside, everyone and their dog knows that Behemoth was an elephant and Leviathan was a crocodile because biblical scholars have explained this ad nauseam, but YECs insist these animals were dinosaurs.
Or in my case, being the owner of a Kalashnikov rifle and a fan of the Stalin tank but having a seething hatred of Communism.
According to the speaker I linked, Ham announced his intention to build the park in 2011, when the Dollywood t-shirt controversy took place, but construction did not begin on the Ark Encounter until 2014.
Capitalised because that is the actual name of an organisation
The flood of the city of Shuruppak in 2900 BC +/- 50 years. This story was re-told and continuously exaggerated over generations to eventually become the global flood in Genesis. YECs BTFO’d, because even their stories evolve!
While we’re on this subject, the reason we know that the Argonautica takes place in the Mycenean Period, specifically circa 1500 BC (just as the Trojan War did), is because Heracles, one of the Argonauts, was a contemporary of Eurystheus, grandson of Perseus, the founder of Mycenae in Greek Mythology.
A quick glance on Socialblade shows that AiG’s YouTube channel is still steadily growing, but contrasting that with the quality of the content they put out shows that they are just hopping on whatever bandwagon necessary to stay relevant.