Look what we found at the blog of Ken Ham (ol’ Hambo) — the ayatollah of Appalachia, the world’s holiest man who knows more about religion and science than everyone else. It’s titled A “Forbidden” Planet Is Causing an Evolutionary Rewrite . . . Again, and it was written by Hambo himself. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]:
I recently wrote a blog [Link omitted!] about an “impossible” new ring system scientists discovered in our solar system and how this ring system is challenging evolutionary assumptions about the formation of planets. Well, two weeks later, headlines proclaimed the discovery of another evolutionary problem [Link omitted!], this time describing a “forbidden” planet that “shouldn’t exist.”
Wowie — the sinful house of science (he calls it all “evolution”) is falling apart! Then he says:
An article summarizing this new discovery states,
He quotes the article:
Scientists have discovered a huge Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a very small star, a combination described as “forbidden” by one researcher because it challenges theories about how planets form, reports a new study.
Why is Hambo all worked up over this? He explains:
Yes, yet again, the evolutionary ideas about planetary formation are being challenged because the evidence doesn’t match what they’d expect. But evolution is such a “plastic” ideology that even when the evidence doesn’t fit, it doesn’t matter — they’ll just change the story to match with the new evidence! [Gasp!] We’ve seen this time and time again. Why? Well, because these evolutionary scientists already believe everything evolved and therefore believe that if something exists, evolution must explain it somehow — so the story just changes to keep up with the evidence.
Barbaric behavior! Hambo would never revise any part of his theory of creationism. It has always predicted everything — right from the beginning. Let’s read on:
This is a good reminder for Christians. We should never start our thinking with man’s words. It’s shifting sand, changing with every new study or new phenomena. If we choose to start our thinking with man’s words, we too will be constantly changing and shifting, blown about by every new thing, and compromising and reinterpreting God’s Word along the way to “keep up” with the ever-changing secular world.
Hambo is too smart — and too holy — to behave the way scientists do. Another excerpt:
No, we must start our thinking with God’s Word in every area (including origins!). God’s Word teaches that all planets (besides earth) and other heavenly bodies were created by God on day four of creation week, just a few thousand years ago. That’s the truth, and no new study of another amazing star or planet is going to change that!
Hooray for Hambo! And now we come to the end:
While man’s word is ever changing, God’s Word is eternal and unchanging — it’s a rock-solid foundation for our thinking! [Scripture quotes omitted!]
There it is, dear reader. Astronomers are idiots, and Hambo has the proof.
Copyright © 2023. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Actually Hambone, scientists do change their explanation of the universe as they learn new information. That’s a sharp contrast to you, who apparently prefers the same tired myths about your favorite god in spite of any data.
Ken, back in the day when everyone and their aunt Betsy were writing fictional gospels but miraculously precisely four of them were not fiction, they didn’t know that creationism was allegorical–because Jesus did not tell them. They didn’t know that humanity could not yet handle the truth. Some of us still can’t handle the truth. And I don’t mean Tom Cruise. But that guy’s wacky-doodle beliefs are another thing.
“planets (beside Earth)”
And how does the Bible account for Earth being a planet?
Hambone is so dense that he likely didn’t realize that he gave a pretty concise statement of why science works!
It’s not stupidity, in Ham’s case. It is a case of compulsively acquired ignorance, certainly, but even that is not the salient characteristic of Ham’s mind and affect. No, I think that there is another cause needed to explain Ham, and it doesn’t directly relate to lack of intelligence.
It’s this: Ham cannot perceive any fact that contradicts his world view. This is not precisely denial or dismissal. It’s perceptual annihilation. We talk of “closed minds”, meaning minds that deny contrary information, but Ham’s mind is a quantum beyond that. It is not merely closed, it is hermetically sealed off from any reality that clashes with its internal structure of cause and effect. Such realities simply do not exist, for Ham.
But imperception is not all. To fill the resulting voids, he manufactures perceptions, rather as the visual cortex fills in the blank of the “blind spot” in the mammalian eye. So a deficiency in the current theory of planet formation, found by scientists, publicised by scientists, expands to be not merely a falsification of all astronomy, nor even merely a demolition of all scientific knowledge, but it eradicates the validity of all human knowledge whatsoever.
This absolute annihilation of all opposing fact creates another interesting effect: it renders completely incomprehensible an ability in others to perceive, accept and adapt to opposed fact. For Ham, the ability of science to change and adjust theory in the face of newly acquired fact is not a feature, it’s a catastrophic bug, a self-evident invalidation, complete and final. And of course, to Ham, it must be fraudulent.
Ham is not stupid. He is an entrepreneur and a successful businessman, CEO of a profitable corporation. He is far more affluent than I am, lives in a mansion, has a lavish lifestyle funded by shrewd and practical judgement of a difficult market. He’s no fool.
Rather, what we see here is an intelligence whose sole purpose is to tell itself and others elaborate lies, while utterly expunging reality. It’s fascinating to watch this play out. Sooner or later, you’d think, reality must intrude, whether Ham perceives it or not.
So you’d think. So I think. But it hasn’t happened yet. I could be wrong. Ham thinks he can’t be. Perhaps that is an advantage to him. But perhaps not.
Creationism is actually one of the least things Jesus ever worried about. It’s right down there at the bottom of the worries list alongside of praying outside of closets and abolishing slavery.
@Dave Kuckett, spot on.
There was an article that Answers in Genesis, not by Ham himselfbut by a woman explaining what a logical argument was, whose very first criteria was that if the conclusion of an argument contradicts Scripture, meaning of course the AiG version of Scripture, then it must be wrong.
I would be very grateful if anyone can help me track this down.
@Paul Braterman
The early 19th century “Princeton theology” based itself on the “scientific method” from Francis Bacon and the Scottish “Common Sense” philosophy.
The scientific method applied to theology worked like this: induction from the data supplied from Scripture. (The way that Bacon said that science used induction from facts.)
@Paul Braterman
Better, I think, would be the “Presuppositional Apologetics”. As I understand it, they start with the presupposition of the reality of God, who provides the basis for the utility of logic and other reasoning.
@TomS, I was thinking of a very specific article in Answers in Genesis by some woman who writes for them about what is or is not a logical argument, where she starts off as rule one being is it compatible with Scripture, if not it’s wrong, followed by a fairly accurate discussion of elementary logic and implication. This combination illustrated Dave’s point very nicely
@richard, depending on when you choose to date it, the four gospels became biblical canon at or relatively shortly before Augustine of Hippo saying that if our observations contradict our interpretation of the Bible, then it’s our interpretation that is wrong, and argued that God made all of creation simultaneously, and the Genesis account is a metaphorical framework.
He also talks about how trying to intepret the story of Creation is difficult and contentious, and that one should not hold an individual’s interpretation of Creation against them, in matters of faith.
So, the horse was already leaving the barn even as the four gospels were chosen.
(As someone who’s read a considerable number of the non-canonical gospels … they made the right call, honestly.)
@dweller42
Augustine 354-430 is, of course, a major figure in Western Christianity
Even earlier is Origen c. 184-c. 253. He is a controversial figure, though, and was not recognized with sainthood. But he did defend Christianity and suffered persecution for it. Origen is famous for his scholarship on the Bible, and his defense of non-literal reading. For those who are interested in this sort of thing, he is worth reading. O
Can Ham read? The planet is a mere 8% more massive than Jupiter and there are many exoplanets which are many times more massive than Jupiter. Jupiter is 0.1% of the mass of the sun. The star has only 40% of the sun’s mass so the mass of the planet ends up being “almost 0.3%” of the mass of its star. That hardly sounds like an impossible stretch, one worthy of proving the existence of God.
Plus anyone who knows any science understands that scientists love to proclaim that the “standard models” don’t work because they hope to become the authors of new, better models. That is why, in my own field of particle physics, theorists continually invent new models to explain the latest “paradigm busting” experimental results, experiments which are soon shown to be wrong. Experimentalist are much more skeptical.
And let’s not forget that journalists have every incentive to hype the importance of their stories. If a new discovery “overthrows everything we thought we knew:” Wow! that’s really important!
Standard science, like a comic book villain, gets defeated in every issue, but somehow comes back in the next issue, strong as ever.
@dweller42 I’m sorry that Augustine worried so much about baloney, and I’m glad that they made a great choice of baloney over the other baloney.
Hambone meant to say ; My Sunday school coloring book claims that all planets (other than OUR planet) and other celestial bodies were created by Zeus on day four of creation week, which occurs on the campus of Liberty University right after all the students get back from spring break in Miami Beach. Honest to god, cross my heart, and no new study of another amazing frat party toga dance is going to keep us from going back next year.
@Douglas E
“Hambone is so dense that he likely didn’t realize that he gave a pretty concise statement of why science works!”
It’s like that one show where Leonard Bernstein tried proving he wasn’t a snob and said he liked rock music and then proved he was a snob by saying 95% of it was garbage.
richard, to echo Theodore Sturgeon, 95% 0f everything is garbage.
🙂
@Dave Lucket
See the Wikipedia article “Sturgeon’s Law”
@ Dave L – as per usual, I agree with pretty much everything in your comment. One point, although many use “stupid” as a synonym for “dense”, that is not how I grew up using the term 🙂 My definition if stated quite well in the Urban Dictionary:
“If dense is used as figurative (of a person), then dense means that it’s difficult to explain anything to that person because they can’t make sense of complex ideas (because their head is too “dense” or “thick” to get anything through)
It does not mean stupid although it is often used to describe people who are also stupid. For example, a lawyer who argues what the word “is” means could be described as dense. Stupid is lacking in intelligence whereas dense infers that a person’s head is too thick to teach anything to him/her.
A dense person is the opposite of an airhead, although about as useful.”
I think that a person’s dense-ness is innate, pathological and/or willful. Ham’s is likely a combo, and I would throw in disingenuous as well.
There is an old story about the Irish servant maid to the Archbishop of Canterbury. She thought that he treated her well, and she liked him. When someone pointed out to her that that he was doomed because he was not Catholic, she replied that he was excused because he was invincibly ignorant.
See the Wikipedia article on Invincible and Vincible Ignorance.