Ken Ham's Poodles (with
apologies to Pavlov and his dogs)
Michael Suttkus
Home Education Weekly News - 28 March 2003
Ken Ham: Actually, this world we live in is not the world as God made it.
Does Mr Ham not understand his own theology or basic English? According to the Bible, the world isn't as it was originally made, because God then remade it. So, yes, the world is as God made it, flawed to punish man for sin. So Mr Ham is wrong, even at his own game.
God declared His original creation "very good" - it was perfect.
So, Mr Ham's problem is basic English. If God meant perfect, why didn't he say perfect instead of "very good". Any collector (of coins, comics, etc.,) who uses mostly the same basic scale can tell you that "very good" is a far cry from perfect. I guess the Bible isn't literal in that part, is it Mr Ham?
But Adam's rebellion changed everything.
The world we live in today is suffering from sin and the curse God placed on it, as well as from the judgment of the Flood. As I say to people, you can tell this is not the world as God made it because we have poodles!
After it rains?
These dogs have lots of mutations, or "mistakes," in their genes.
Mutations=mistakes in Ham's world. In reality, it's quite different. Indeed, humans bred poodles because they found those mutations better than the dog that had been before. They obviously didn't think it was a mistake. Ham knows better, though, and will correct all wrong-thinkers.
There's no way God could have called the creation "very good" if there were poodles!
If Ham doesn't like poodles, he should just say so. I, myself, am not fond of them, but I don't torture innocent science to pretend that it's anything more than a personal opinion.
Sin has affected everything - including dogs.
God is cruel. Man sins, dogs suffer, but tape worms make out like bandits.
As Paul says, the whole of creation groans in pain--and it's all because of Adam's sin.
Except for tape worms, who, before the curse, had nothing to do with their hooks and other useful (to parasites) features that were useless when they were required to eat plants. All those starving, pre-fall tape worms must have jumped for joy when Adam sinned. "Yes, now let's get into an intestine, stick our vicious hooks into the walls and start stealing their
food! Yeah!"
Creationists have real trouble here. On the one hand, they pretend that everything was perfect and peaceful once. And yet animals have all those very non-peaceful features. Lions have teeth and claws for killing, turtles have shells to avoid teeth and claws. Creationism must either assert that they were created that way and that lions somehow chased down wild bananas and ate them with fangs (a preposterous assertion on the face of it), or that the whole assemblage evolved afterwards, revealing just how empty their claim that "mutations are mistakes" really is.
Alternately, you claim that God remade the world, but then, oops, Mr Ham is wrong again, isn't he?
By the way, those who believe that the Earth is millions or billions of years old must accept that groaning world we live in today with all its violence, death, disease, suffering, and mutations has always been this way, and that this is what God called "very good".
Or they can be atheists and ignore the problem. Or they can simply recognise that "very good" doesn't mean perfect and wasn't intended to mean perfect, since the whole story makes no sense that way anyway.
However, this idea undermines the very nature of God, and clearly goes against what the Word of God clearly teaches in Genesis.
Your blitherings Mr Ham do that more than adequately.
