When I toured the Creation Museum, I was reminded of the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye at the Creation Museum in 2014, which was the subject of a post. I was also reminded that I had once debated Ham in 2009--not in person but on the online website of Forbes magazine. February 12, 2009, was the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. An editor at Forbes invited a number of people to write essays for the occasion. I wrote an essay entitled "We Are the Moral Animals," in which I argued that Darwin had explained the natural grounding of morality in evolved human nature. Ham wrote an essay entitled "Darwinian Dangers," in which he argued, on the contrary, that Darwin had destroyed the grounding of morality in Christianity by denying the moral uniqueness of human beings as created in God's image. This shows the true motivation for Ham and other creationist scientists. Their primary concern is not the truth or falsity of the science but its moral consequences: we should accept Biblical science because it supports morality, and we should reject Darwinian science because it corrupts morality.
At the Creation Museum, Ham begins his attack on evolution's moral dangers in the "Starting Points" exhibit. Are Human "Races" Equal? is the question for one display (CMS, 15). For the "Naturalistic Evolutionist Worldview," the answer is: "While most evolutionists reject racism, their philosophy is inherently racist." To support this, the display quotes Stephen Jay Gould saying that "biological arguments for racism" have been common. The same quotation appears in Ham's Forbes.com essay.
For the "Biblical Creationist Worldview," the answer is: "All human beings are made in God's image and are descendants of Adam, so there is no basis for racism from a biblical perspective."
Although there have been "biological arguments for racism," they have never been properly rooted in Darwinian evolutionary science and evolutionary moral psychology. As I have pointed out, Darwin was a vehement opponent of slavery who wrote The Descent of Man to show that all human beings were equally human as members of the human species. Ham and the Creation Museum are silent about this.
They are also silent about the fact that wherever the Bible speaks about slavery, it endorses it. The Ark Encounter does have one display with the question, Was the Bible Used to Promote Racism? The answer is: "Sadly, some professing Christians have misused passages of the Bible to spread racist ideas, such as slavery based on a person's skin tone or the notion that 'interracial' marriage is sinful" (AE, 101). "But what does the Bible really teach on these matters?" They answer with four verses about all of us being created in God's image, all one race, and all loved by God.
But they cannot cite any Biblical passage that directly condemns slavery. And they are silent about the many passages that endorse it. As I have indicated, those who defended the Biblical basis of slavery (like Fred Ross) wrote meticulous studies of the Bible to show that it consistently supported slavery. To the claim that God's creating men in His image makes all men equal, Ross responded by pointing out that the "image of God" teaching is compatible with a divinely ordained hierarchy among human beings.
For example: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Gen. 1:27). Far from creating all men equal, Ross observed, God here created humanity as "male and female," so that they are not equal in body and mind. God made the woman "out of the man" (Genesis 2:23); and He made "the man the image and glory of God, but the woman for the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man" (1 Corinthians 11:7-9); and he made the woman to be the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7). Moreover, just as wives are to obey their husbands, and children to obey their parents, slaves are to obey their masters (Ephesians 5:22-24, 6:1-5). Insofar as slaves are inferior in body and mind to their masters, the slaves are naturally better off being ruled by their masters.
Ham and the Creation Museum make no attempt to refute this scriptural argument for slavery. Instead, they have silently corrected the Bible by reading it through the lens of their natural moral sense, which Darwin explains as a product of human evolution. Their knowledge that slavery is wrong comes from that natural moral sense not from their reading of the Bible.
They also silently correct the Bible's moral mistakes by refusing to even mention those many places where the Bible endorses immoral violence. For example, in a display on "God's Promise to the Nations," they reproduce Rembrandt's painting of Abraham preparing to kill his son Isaac; but they do not explain that this murder of a child was commanded by God (Gen. 22).
Similarly, while they refer to the Israelites being commanded by God to fight against the Canaanites (CMS, 55), they are silent about God ordering a "curse of destruction," in which the Israelites would slaughter everyone, including women and children, but keep alive the young virgins so that the Israelite men could rape them (Deu. 20:10-18; Numbers 31:7-20). Previously, I have written about how Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have condemned this religious violence in the Bible as immoral. Ham and the Creation Museum do not do this, because in doing so, they would have to admit that the Bible's moral mistakes need to be corrected by our natural moral sense.
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