Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Jimmy Carter Visits Ark Encounter, Rains on Ken Ham's Parade

Ex-president Jimmy Carter visited the not-yet-open Ark Encounter site in Petersburg, Kentucky, on June 10, at the invitation of LeRoy Troyer, head of construction.  Unfortunately, he did not sign on to Ken Ham's, shall we say, compressed, understanding of time:
“I don’t have any doubt in my own mind about God who created the entire universe,” said Carter, who holds a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Naval Academy, in a 2012 interview with the Huffington Post. “But I don’t adhere to passages that so-and-so was created 4,000 years before Christ, and things of that kind. Today we have shown that the earth and the stars were created millions, even billions, of years before. We are exploring space and sub-atomic particles and learning new facts every day, facts that the Creator has known since the beginning of time.”

This stated belief does not align with the stance of Answers in Genesis.

“Christians need to trust God's Word as their final authority. The Scriptures never change," says one Creation Museum exhibit description. "One does not build their faith upon models and reconstructions, which may change as we learn more.”
Interestingly, in their own press release on the visit, Answers in Genesis made no mention of Carter's contrasting views, only that he “praised the quality of the work and shared his impressions of the project that his architect friend Mr. Troyer has designed and built for Answers in Genesis.”

3 comments:

  1. https://theologyarchaeology.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/sad-to-hear/
    This YEC blogger, who calls himself David Tee, has been critical of the Ark Encounter venture. But he also writes: "Since the Bible is the only book written by God and which gives us his revelation to us about himself and what he has done, there is no other source of information to turn to in order to declare that the Bible got it wrong." And even by YEC denialist standards this blogger denies huge swathes of - and appears to have little understanding of - even observed science. For instance he denies the reality or existence of natural selection (upon which I believe the Bible is silent):
    http://forums.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3735&p=50704&hilit=selection#p50704
    And of course Tee has little respect for President Carter.

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  2. "Since the Bible is the only book written by God and which gives us his revelation to us about himself and what he has done, there is no other source of information to turn to in order to declare that the Bible got it wrong."

    This is a very bad reasoning :) Then they should not even exist Christian books and even churches and everybody read the Bible at home. 100% Nonsense, These things are only the means to learn more about the Bible to the ignorant people and with little discernment who still believe the old earth and the evolution.

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  3. No, it is not bad reasoning. The reason that we have the writings of the church fathers is so we can see how the early church understood the scriptures. One of the problems with the modern evangelical movement is that they have completely divorced themselves from the history of the church. The early church fathers understood that one could not simply rely solely on one's interpretation of scripture, it would be very easy to go off the rails, as the gnostics of the second and third centuries did. It is also true for the modern young earth creation movement, in that there is little of no historical support for their interpretation of the scriptures, especially those of Genesis 1-11.

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