Pat Robertson to Ken Ham: 'Let's Be Real, Let's Not Make a Joke of Ourselves'
Controversial televangelist Pat Robertson chimed in on Tuesday's debate between creationist Ken Ham and evolutionist Bill Nye "The Science Guy" by asking the Answers in Genesis founding president and CEO to stop making a mockery of Christians.
"Let's be real, let's not make a joke of ourselves," Robertson said on his show, "The 700 Club."
Robertson said that Ham was using faulty data from Bishop Ussher, an Irish Christian, who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries. To make his claims, Ussher calculated the date of creation, based on his knowledge of the Bible, the ancient Persian, Greek and Roman civilizations, astronomy, ancient calendars and chronology.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The televangelist said that science had since refuted Ussher's claims.
"The dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn't comport with anything that is found in science and you can't just totally deny the geological formations that are out there," said Robertson.
"Anyone who is in the oil business knows he's drilling down, 2 miles, 3 miles underground, you're coming into all these layers that were laid down by the dinosaurs," said Robertson. "And we have skeletons of dinosaurs that go back like 65 million years. And to say that it all came around 6 thousand years ago is nonsense."
Robertson said that evolution did not undermine his faith or prevent him from believing in God.
"So there was a big bang. So? That doesn't mean it came spontaneously. Nobody knows what caused it, the Big Bang. But I say God did it. God caused all of this. He is the author of all life," he continued.
In fact, Robertson said he was able to find his faith in the evolutionary process itself.
"I don't believe in so-called evolution as non-theistic. I believe that God started it all and he's in charge of all of it. The fact that you have progressive evolution under his control. That doesn't hurt my faith at all," he said.
"I think it's time we come off of that stuff and say this isn't possible," he said.
Ham and Nye's creation v. evolution debate sold out last month within two minutes of tickets going on sale. Of those unable to attend, a press release stated that 750,000 computers logged on to the live stream of the debate.
More than half of the trending topics on Twitter and the top trending topic on Facebook on Tuesday pertained to the debate.
This is not the first time that Robertson has criticized Ham's interpretation of creationism.
"I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this," Robertson said in 2012. "You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things, and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas," they're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth, and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible. And so if you fight revealed science you're going to lose your children, and I believe in telling them the way it was."
