The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Creation Museum

Tom, <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/hello.gif" alt="" />

What Ham describes is more like Evidentialist apologetics, which focuses not only on God’s word, but archaeological, historical, and scientific evidence to support both the probable existence of God and the truth of the Bible, and refute the major objections to the same. Like John Frame, I don't believe that these arguments are good enough on the grounds that they start out by granting the assumption that human experience is intelligible without a complete acceptance of Scripture “alone”. Ham does this by stating, (1) Showing that the Bible and science go hand in hand, (2) Forcing the debater to logically defend his position consistent with science, (3) One can of course do this with numerous scientific examples, showing how the issue of sin and judgment, for example, is relevant to geology and fossil evidence, and (4) having a little thing called a scientific museum, which is kind of a dead give away to his apologetic method. This however does not mean the museum is useless, but merely that its apologetical method is somewhat flawed. At best, Ham attempts to mix the two apologetic methods (and like R.C. Sproul, some Classical, a defense that stresses rational arguments for the existence of God and uses evidence to substantiate biblical claims and miracles), which by definition does not make him a true Presuppositionalist. One of Frame’s required readings is the book, Five Views on Apologetics, by Cowan and Gundry. This will assist you in defining some of the apologetic methods further.

Hi Joe

Sorry it has taken me so long to respond to you.
Joe said:

I don’t see anywhere that Ken Ham says that he relies on scientific evidence to prove the existence of God or the Bible. He appears to be saying that what has been discovered about operational science confirms the Bible to be the reliable Word of God.
Is it inconsistent with a presuppositional stand to point out that what we see in science lines up with what we find in Scripture? I am not sure, after all they are just stating fact.

In number (4) you stated:This might have been a mistake on your part, but AIG has a Creation Museum, not a scientific museum. In my understanding there is a difference.
Donna O’Daniel, M.Sc. Answers Correspondence Representative Answers in Genesis says:
She also says:

I don’t see anything in what Donna O’Daniel says that conflicts with my understanding of Presuppositional apologetics. Do you?

Tom

Tom,

In PA why do we need science, etc. ? After all we ALREADY presume the truthfulness of Scripture and the existence of God. In PA we merely show how science, archeology, etc. is "consistent" with the Bible, but not as proof of the Bible, etc. and thus have no purpose or reason to force the debater to logically defend his position consistent with "science."

Amen to this.

The following is a poem that I think demonstrates the idea of presuppositional apologetics well. One might notice that nowhere do I answer the Darwinists on "scientific" ground as the Creation Museum attempts to do. My epistemology is in my belief in the reason of the Scripture alone.

Darwin's Jawbone

Fish learned to walk
On the beach for a stair
And to run up to Wal-Mart
To buy underwear

By the accident of morals
They did soon understand
To be nude underwater
Wasn’t decent on land

And surprising to all
The cute little fellas
Could wait for a sale
On beach umbrellas

And patient they were
To calm all their fears
For they thought this all out
In but ten million years

But impatient they were
To be rid of vain fin
So they studied at Oxford
And enthroned King Darwin

Who in return invented
The Royal Law of Mutants
The birds, the herds, the lice, the mice
The apes, the men and the pork snouted rootants

Being intelligent and omniscient
Scaled atheist fools
The fishy-men got grants
To teach in our schools

They ridiculed with malice
To make their proud names
And laughed at truth tellers
And pronounced them insane

Then the fishy-courts agreed
And made law gone berserk
That to oppose Chucky Darwin
Was a hate crime at work

Yet still to this day
The fishy-priest’s best end
Is to love their ears tickled
And their pleasures in sin

Who could have mercy
On a fishy-faith like this
Or on those mutants who lap
From this dogfish dish

Why would one wonder
That in all of its parts
This fish story was honored
By Nietzsche and Marx

Then Mao that monster
That Samson of sin
With the jawbone of ass Darwin
Murdered fifty million men

And on Lenin’s desk
To justify his hand
Stood the statue of a monkey
And the scull of a man

And the Socialists and Nazis
And Feminists et al.,
Have sucked the world’s blood
With the fishy-theory’s call

Then the village idiot
Amid all of death’s splatter
In the name of “love”
Says belief doesn’t matter

So for those who love fiction
And love tales told tall
The Theory of Evolution
Is the best of them all

Denny

Romans 3:22-24

Funny, but sad, but for now