Ken Ham Agrees With Atheists on Literal View of Adam and Eve?

By Eryn Sun, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, June 02, 2011

Answers in Genesis President/CEO Ken Ham is siding with the atheists for once, he says.

Disturbed by a recent cover story investigating the need to believe in a literal Adam and Eve, Ham, who endorses a literal view of Genesis, criticized several Christian theologians for rejecting both a literal interpretation of the first couple and existence of a young Earth.

The story, entitled “The Search for the Historical Adam” featured on the June issue of the Christianity Today magazine, quoted a number of Christian scholars who held an evolutionary and allegorical belief of Genesis that accorded with scientific evidence.

Academics like Francis Collins, Karl Giberson, Darrell Falk, and other theologians, found that a literal account of Adam and Eve simply “did not fit the evidence” and suggested different theories, including Adam being a “story of Israelite origins,” not the origin of all humanity.

The founder of AiG reproved the majority of those cited, stating that they were compromising “God’s Word with man’s fallible beliefs about evolution, millions of years, etc.”

Not his first time blasting Old Earth creationists and Christian scholars who believed in an evolutionary account of Genesis, Ham has long touted his six-day 24-hour creation beliefs, as well as a literal view on Adam and Eve.

He emphasized that compromise on Genesis had opened a dangerous door regarding how the culture and church view biblical authority today, and argued that Christians must preserve the Bible’s authority as 100% true through a strong teaching of the first book.

But Christian scientists like Francis Collins, founder of the BioLogos website that claimed to represent the harmony of science and faith, found no conflict in seeing Genesis as “a poetic and powerful allegory,” unlike Ham, explaining that God could have possibly used the first couple to illustrate His endowment of a spiritual and moral nature.

Collins also “reported scientific indications that anatomically modern emerged from primate ancestors perhaps 100,000 years ago-- long before the apparent Genesis time frame-- and originated with a population that numbered something like 10,000, not two individuals.”

Similarly, a BioLogos paper by Dennis Venema and Falk declared that the human population “was definitely never as small as two.”

“Our species diverged as a population. The data are absolutely clear on that,” they commented.

Peter Enns was also quoted in the feature, supporting the same view as Collins that Genesis and the Bible itself was more allegorical than literal.

Reciting the first chapters of Genesis, Enn was recorded to state, “The Bible itself [invited] a symbolic reading by using cosmic battle imagery and by drawing parallels between Adam and Israel.”

“To Enns, a literal Adam as a special creation without evolutionary forebears is ‘at odds with everything else we know about the past from the natural sciences and cultural remains,’” an excerpt from the article read.

Dr. Bruce Waltke, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society was open to the new thinking as well, expressing, “We have to go with the scientific evidence. I don’t think we can ignore it. I have full confidence in Scripture, but it does not represent what science represents.”

In contrast to the growing number of Christians who were in favor of a non-literal interpretation of the Bible, AiG affirmed in the recent publication that “God created the mature, fully functioning creation in six literal days about 6,000 years ago.”

If AiG’s claims were substantiated, Christianity Today posited, “[it] would... demolish Darwinism because such a brief chronology offers no time for evolutionary processes to occur.”

Calling it “the major theological battle in Christianity in the 21st century,” the article reinforced what Ham has been warning believers of all along-- the allowance of a fallible, inaccurate Bible.

“The emerging science could be seen to challenge not only what Genesis records about the creation of humanity but the species’ unique status as bearing the “image of God,” Christian doctrine on original sin and the Fall, the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, and, perhaps most significantly, Paul’s teaching that links the historical Adam with redemption through Christ,” the writer noted.

Even atheists understood this point “better than the majority of Christian academics,” Ham asserted.

Referencing a previous post featured on American Atheists, he shared a part of the piece on his blog, which revealed, “No Adam and Eve means no need for a savior.”

“It also means that the Bible cannot be trusted as a source of unambiguous, literal truth. It is completely unreliable, because it all begins with a myth, and builds on that as a basis. No Fall of Man means no need for atonement and no need for a redeemer. You know it.”

For the young Earth creationist, it was a sad day he shared, when the atheists understood Christianity better than so many Christians did.

“As shocking as it may seem, I agree with the atheists, not the majority of Christian academics,” Ham concluded. “So many Christian academics give in to the secular world [because] they want to be seen as academically respectable in the eyes of the world.”

“No wonder we are losing most of the next generation from the church. And no wonder we are losing the Christian base that so permeated our once Christianized Western world.”

Citing several verses from the Bible concerning Adam (Luke 3:38, Job 31:33, Jude 1:14, Romans 5:14, and etc) the Australian apologist confirmed his steadfast belief, despite “man’s word,” that the first man, Adam, was in fact a real man-- a literal Adam.

“To say otherwise is to undermine Scripture and thus attack the Word, which is an attack of the person of Jesus Christ, Who is the Word.”