Caitlin Montgomery Hubler

May 28, 2007 was a day many Christians across America had eagerly anticipated. Four thousand visitors flocked from all over the country to Petersburg, Kentucky for the grand opening of the Creation Museum. Judging by its appealing modern architectural style alone, the Creation Museum could be mistaken for any other natural history museum. But setting foot inside the seventy-five thousand square foot architectural feat would quickly reveal it was not like other museums. Inside the Planetarium, creationist cosmological models are depicted in opposition to the Big Bang model. Over 52 videos guide visitors through the exhibits, covering everything from the scientific plausibility of a worldwide flood to the societal consequences of belief in evolution.

The mastermind behind it all? Australian-born American Ken Ham. Despite holding only a Bachelor’s degree in applied science, Ham has spent his career persuading Christians and non-Christians alike of the dangers of belief in evolution. Founder of Answers in Genesis, the creationist ministry responsible for the funding of the Creation Museum, Ham is an influential speaker and key voice in the Young Earth Creationism movement. Central to the group’s identity is a rejection of biological evolution based on the belief the biblical book of Genesis dictates a literal history of the origin of the world. Because Genesis outlines a creation that occurred in six days, proponents of Young Earth Creationism also reject the age of the earth held by modern scientists (approximately 14 billion years) in favor of what they believe to be the biblical model (6,000-10,000 years).

Despite the virtual consensus among credentialed biologists regarding the explanatory power of evolution, the museum has been a success economically: Answers in Genesis estimated in 2013 approximately 1.9 million people visited the museum, with at least 250,000 visitors annually. Furthermore, a 2013 Gallup poll revealed the beliefs espoused by the Creation Museum are far from marginal: 42% of Americans reject evolution in favor of Young Earth Creationism (Newport). At this point, we must pause and ask the question: what term is best used as a descriptor for Ken Ham and his followers? Fundamentalist? Evangelical? Biblicist? For reasons beyond the scope of this paper, I believe there are problems with equating the hermeneutics of Ken Ham with any of these terms. Thus, throughout this paper, I will simply use the term “biblical literalist” to refer to the nature of Ham’s hermeneutic.

This intriguing example of American ideological diversity begs the question: what is the driving hermeneutical force behind Ken Ham’s interpretation of Genesis? This is a complicated question without a single, straightforward answer. In order to better understand the nature and source of Ham’s hermeneutics, one must take a step back and examine him within the larger context of American Christianity in the 20^th century. Comprehending the unique challenges faced during this time period will aid us in grasping the motivations that make Ham’s beliefs so compelling to him and his followers. In particular, a crisis of authority within American Christianity caused by higher criticism of the Bible and Darwinian evolution has contributed to the biblical literalism championed by leaders like Ham. His hermeneutic propounds a particular response to this crisis: a response whose nature is especially explicable due to the influence of Scottish Common Sense Realism, shifting scientific paradigms, and a uniquely American spirit of religious entrepreneurialism.

Higher biblical criticism’s rising prominence in the 18^th century began to shape new attitudes toward the Bible that were troubling for some Christians. The mere existence of fields such as “redaction criticism” had troubling implications for certain biblical scholars who equated the authority of God’s word with particularly modernist views about its transmission. To suggest there had been alterations to a divinely inspired text, in the minds of modernist American Christians, was to suggest the unthinkable: that God was a liar. For Protestants in particular, for whom Scriptural authority largely replaced ecclesial authority, the discovery of the messiness of the Bible posed a threat to faith’s very foundation. Likewise, Christians were disconcerted by the fact the field of biblical studies was increasingly becoming separated from theology. For those who saw the Bible as God’s special revelation of Godself to humankind, the idea an entire lifetime could be spent studying it without professing faith in God had to be indicative of a failure in method.

Furthermore, historical criticism seemed particularly at odds with Protestant ideals of the perspicuity of Scripture. When years of study in Greek and Hebrew are necessary before one can arrive at a realistic picture of “the world behind the text,” the Bible becomes impossibly complicated for the layperson to interpret. When scholars claimed this esoteric knowledge was not only useful, but necessary for a true interpretation of the Bible, the relevance of Scripture for the common person was challenged.

An equally threatening phenomenon was concurrently taking place: the rise of Darwinian evolution. In addition to the radically different timetables between Genesis and evolution regarding the origin of humanity, Darwin’s insights opened new doors into the history of humankind, threatening certain traditional religious ideas about the nature of humans. Rather than being specially set apart from the rest of creation, as seems to be indicated in Genesis, according to Darwin’s theory, humans were simply more evolved forms of primates. It forced Christians to rethink what it meant for humans to be created “in the image of God.” If humans were merely the product of natural selection, it becomes more difficult to claim humans were intentionally set apart from the very beginning to be like God, as Genesis claims. Moreover, humans only came about by the cold, heartless means of squashing other species and “beating them out” for survival over millions of years of suffering. Is this really what the “image of God” means?

Christians were compelled to respond to these threats. With the rise of higher criticism and the growing popularity of Darwinian evolution, Christians found themselves at a crossroads in the mid-20^th century. Cultural tides were shifting as well. With the advent of the 1960s came the Civil Rights Movement, the “Sexual Revolution,” events in Vietnam, and rising levels of religious pluralism, each accentuating the need for an immutable source of truth from which direction could be gleaned for a changing world (Beckman). In this vacuum of authority, Ken Ham saw two choices: jettison the Bible as culturally authoritative, or stand ever firmer in defense of its truth. His choice was clear.

Ken Ham’s most enduring work, The Lie: Evolution, explores the effect he believed the acceptance of evolution would have on various aspects of American society. To Ham, salvation itself is at stake in the question of how to read Genesis properly. Ham’s hermeneutic is essentially one that privileges the “plain sense” of the text. This view takes the Bible at the face value for the reader. Ham believes this ought to be obvious: “If you cannot take what it says to arrive at the meaning, then the English (or any other) language really becomes nonsense” (Ham 89). The argument amounts to a reductio ad absurdum: if Genesis does not “mean what it says,” we have no way of arriving at a meaningful interpretation of the text. Therefore, Genesis must mean what it says. Any suggestion otherwise is noted as a rejection of the text’s authority. Indeed, perhaps the most important aspect of Ham’s interpretation of Genesis is he does not consider it to be an “interpretation” at all. In one of Ham’s many television appearances, this time for commentary on PBS’s Evolution series, Ham is pictured confidently stating, “I don’t interpret Scripture; I just read it (Stephens 48).”

The ideological currents surrounding the crisis of authority perhaps aid us in understanding why Ham responded to it in the way he did. Specifically, with a fuller understanding of the influence of Scottish Common Sense Realism as represented by Thomas Reid, the scientific paradigm shift from Baconian to Humboldtian science, and the American spirit of religious entrepreneurialism nurtured by the 2^nd Great Awakening, the popularity of Ham’s hermeneutic is explicable.

In response to the empiricism of philosopher David Hume, Thomas Reid played a large role in the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18^th century, particularly in his advancement of Common Sense Philosophy. Advocates of the new Common Sense philosophy rooted themselves in the belief humans are “naturally implanted with an array of common sense beliefs and these beliefs are in fact the foundation of the truth.” Whereas Hume’s philosophy prompted skepticism of any belief for which one did not have direct sensory or experiential evidence, Common Sense philosophy instead encouraged confidence in one’s innate cognitive abilities to deliver the truth about the world.

According to one advocate, James Oswald, common sense is “that power of perceiving and judging peculiar to rational beings” and can be trusted to deliver the truth. Oswald is convinced “men of sound understanding” will essentially agree on primary truths if they are indeed utilizing common sense. Any disagreement in interpretation is ultimately explicable by the fact one party must not be using common sense. In fact, Oswald argued common sense ought to hold even more authority than knowledge gleaned through senses. While sensory knowledge is available to any creature capable of sensing, common sense is a quality unique to rational beings held in addition to these beings’ sensory capacities. It is a higher faculty altogether, and for that reason commands a higher degree of authority.

Of course, what happens in Scotland does not stay in Scotland. For a significant period of the mid-nineteenth century, the philosophy of Common Sense was arguably the single most powerful intellectual influence in educated circles in America. 18^th-century philosopher of science Thomas Reid, another key proponent of Common Sense Philosophy, was best known for developing a scientific epistemology based on the dominant scientific paradigm of his lifetime: Baconian science.

Developed by Sir Francis Bacon centuries earlier in his 1620 work Novum Organum, the Baconian paradigm privileged inductive reasoning as the only method by which responsible scientific conclusions may be drawn. This mentality encouraged scientists to realize the limits of their knowledge and to draw conclusions only for which concrete evidence could be offered. Generalization beyond what “the facts” themselves demonstrate was unscientific, because according to Baconian science,  “abstract concepts not immediately forged from observed data have no place in scientific exploration.” The work of Sir Francis Bacon was incredibly influential in both British and American thought even centuries after his lifetime, causing many to refer to him as “the father of science.”  Reid’s Baconian epistemology privileged common sense and the validity of sense perception, and became widely influential as a rebuttal to Hume’s skeptical empiricism.

Such a philosophy grounded in induction and common sense principles is easily detected in biblical literalism. In the mid-nineteenth century, transcendentalist J.D. Morell drew a salient parallel between the process of induction encouraged by Baconian science and his view of Christian theology: “Just as the facts of nature lie before us in the universe, and have to be generalized and systematized by the process of induction, so also the facts of theology lying before us in the Bible, have simply to be moulded into a logical series, in order to create a Christian theology.”

This attitude, in which the Baconian method of induction is essentially commandeered to apply to the realm of constructing theology from the Bible, has been referred to as “the naturalization of Scripture.” The motivation was clear — to find such a straightforward way of reading the Bible that one’s theological conclusions could be as certain as those a scientist could draw from a science experiment. This claim was further explored by J.S. Lamar, theologian and pastor in the Disciples. We might therefore say with the prevailing Baconian philosophy evolved what might be called a Baconian theology as well.

Years later, an emphasis on common sense as a means of establishing truth led many Americans like Ken Ham to believe the correct reading of Genesis 1-2 was not in fact an “interpretation” at all, but was instead simply the only common sense reading of the passage. For biblical literalists, part of what it means for the Bible to be God’s Word is the gap between ancient document and modern reader is either nonexistent or unimportant. The idea their own common sense could not be trusted to interpret the Bible was not only to insult their intelligence, but a denial of God’s ability to stand in the gap and make Scripture comprehensible to the modern lay reader. In this sense, common sense is an incredibly reader-centric hermeneutic. Because Genesis 1 outlines creation as a seven-day process, and because the modern western reader most often hears the word day as a literal 24-hour day, Genesis 1 must have been describing creation as seven 24-hour days. Naturally, this attitude manifested itself in an anti-intellectualism that tended to downplay the importance of being trained in the arts of interpretation, often accompanied by a distrust of academia. Academics were those people who wanted to take their Bible away from them — far more trustworthy were the intuitions of other everyday people who were not corrupted by the liberal, atheistic bias of academia.

Naturally, the belief Scripture counts as “empirical data” as much as does scientific data led to a conflict of interest between Darwin’s theory of evolution and Genesis. Although the denial of evolution has been criticized by many as anti-science, historian George Marsden argues for a more nuanced approach: that we consider anti-evolutionism as a clash between two scientific paradigms. A common misconception about the nature of science is it is essentially a body of facts growing with each generation. What is actually the case is science is a series of revolutions, in which new bodies of knowledge continuously supplant one another. With the advent of each new scientific paradigm comes new base assumptions and presuppositions about experimentation and methodology not present in the previous one.

This was precisely the case when Baconian science faded out of the field of biology. Inductive inference was a key tenet of this scientific paradigm. One was only justified in claiming something scientific could be believed if one had actually observed such an event happen empirically, and could reasonably generalize the event’s occurrence. However, when it was replaced by Humboldtian science, which instead privileged deductive reasoning, such an inductive method was no longer necessary for a theory to be presumed scientifically likely. Many biblical literalists who opposed evolution referred to it as “religion” because the experiments used to support it never reproduced its effects in the way Baconian science would have necessitated. It is important to understand this was not a rejection of the scientific method entirely, but a rejection of a certain scientific paradigm.

Finally, Ken Ham’s actions make sense within the framework of American entrepreneurialism nurtured since the early 19^th century. The political refrain of America being a “land of the free” in which hard work and ingenuity pay off had manifested itself not only politically but religiously as well. In particular, the Second Great Awakening brought a rush of spiritual energy that channeled itself into the creation of several new off-shoots of traditional Protestantism, including Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, and additional denominations of Protestantism. Everywhere, people were being encouraged to reject corrupt belief systems and return to the true nature of “pure Christianity” (much of the same impetus for the Reformation a couple centuries earlier).

 Ironically, this drive to return to the pure and essential elements of Christianity led people to consider themselves authoritative on religious matters, and in the case of Ken Ham, hermeneutics. Naturally, when many people from diverse backgrounds all try to conceive of a “pure” Christianity, the ideas are as multifarious as the people. Regardless, this might explain why someone like Ken Ham would have felt he had the authority, as a layman, to call people back to the “true reading” of Genesis. Indeed, his lack of professional biological training, far from being a setback, is arguably one of his main selling points to his audience of biblical literalists, who are more apt to trust the intuition of the common person over the morally bankrupt over-intellectualization they observed in the universities.

Ken Ham’s hermeneutics did not arise in a vacuum, sociologically, culturally, or historically. A fuller knowledge of the context out of which this hermeneutic arose is helpful in at least two ways. Firstly, comprehending the depth of the crisis of authority that led to Ham’s literalism might aid in producing the empathy necessary for productive conversation with his followers. Secondly, it accomplishes the practical goal of providing a starting point for conversation with biblical literalists regarding hermeneutics. During a time of such unprecedented polarization as we now face in America, many doubt it is even possible to have productive conversations with those who we deem ideologically “other.” But the need to empathize and engage with such perspectives is a duty of those engaged in the work of religious studies. Rather than respond with flaming rhetoric, we can use the tools given to us to pave the way for genuine understanding between vastly disparate belief systems. May we rise to the occasion.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Christopher and Grant Wacker. “The Scopes Trial.” National Humanities Center. October 2000. Web. 30 March 2016.

Beckman, Joanne. “Religion in Post-World War II America.” National Humanities Center. October 2000. Web. 30 March 2016.

Ham, Ken. The Lie: Evolution. Green Forest: Master Books, 1987. Print.

“Higher Criticism.” New World Encyclopedia. 22 February 2014. Web. 31 March 2016.

Lee, Michael J. The Erosion of Biblical Certainty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. New York: OUP, 2006. Print.

Newport, Frank. “In U.S., 42% Believe Creationist View of Human Origins.” Gallup. 2 June 2014. Web. 18 December 2015.

Stephens, Randall J. and Karl W. Giberson. The Anointed. Cambridge: HU, 2011. Print.

“Westminster Confession of Faith of 1968.” Presbyterian Church of America Administration Committee. 2015. Web. 30 March 2016.