Talk:Ken Ham

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Ken VS Ray

I wonder who'll be the worst of the two. Clearly this is a contest for the second place, as both Ham and Comfort are at light-years of the Hovinds. --Panzerfaust (talk) 14:39, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

List of Ken Ham targets

I have compiled a list of well-known Christian leaders who have been attacked by Ken Ham/AiG with direct links to the AiG website. I call it the Wall of Honor.

It includes virtually everybody who’s anybody.

I do not wish to intrude or violate COI rules since it is on my website and nowhere else.

Anyone care one way or the other?

http://swilling.com/christian-leaders-criticized-by-answers-in-genesis/ Sjwilling (talk) 16:06, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Article appears based on dislike of subject rather than rational arguments and refuting his ideas logically

EDIT: I just found a [Saloon Bar | https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Saloon_bar#Idiot_whines_about_tone] article, which explains everything. My mistake. I'll withdraw and leave you to it.

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So I'm new and more used to a Wikipedia approach to facts and figures. So forgive me if I don't actually "get" the point of this article.

My first reaction when I saw the crossed-out words in this article was that it was a joke article. Not an article that could be used in any way as a basis for further research. It contains personal attacks, judgements and presumptions. Ironically making the writer as bad as the man being criticised.

This is not rational. It's a personal attack. Fine, don't like the guy, that's an opinion. I don't like him either. The point of the wiki is to be rational. This article is the opposite.

Here's one of Ham's arguments from the page which I'm suggesting is rewritten much more logically:

"I want everyone to understand when you go backwards and say everything happened from natural processes, that's Bill's religion. His religion is that there is no God, the Bible is not true and everything started by natural processes. He has a religion, I have a religion. His is based off blind faith, mine is not because when you start with God's word it makes sense of the world that we see and we can use observational science to confirm it"

This statement contains several logical fallacies:

• False Equivalence - A religion is a belief system, whereas the argument of natural processes is verifiable by several different methods, including radiocarbon dating of the fossil record, and DNA evidence to name two.

• Ad Hominem attack - The personal attack comes from the attack on Bill's character, he positions himself as a scientist and supporter of science, yet Ham represents his beliefs as opposing God's writings, the creation story and the conjecture the Earth is 6000 years old. Bill is represented as opposing God's writings.

• Appeal to Emotion - the argument that Nye's science is "based off blind faith" whilst Ham's is based on the word of God, appeals to the emotion of the crowd, largely christian fundamentalists, attending the Church. It's also, arguably, an Appeal to Authority, where the authority Ham defers to is God.

• Circular Argument - Ham suggests science can prove the truth of God's word. Except God's word is not verifiable other than being God's word, taken as gospel. You can't prove something that's just written down. There's no way to verify the burning bush or Jesus' resurrection or Angels or Demons with Science or anything else.

Whether or not I've perfectly argued these points, surely this is a better way to make the point that Ham is a sheister of the highest order?

Ljsinclair (talk) 11:57, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Criminal record

No mention of the fact that he has a criminal record and was still making his videos one of which laughably claimed atheists are more immoral? Lavalizard101 (talk) 16:02, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

You're mixing Ham up with Hovind. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 22:16, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

No Ken ham also evaded taxes as well with the Ark Encounter Land. Lavalizard101 (talk) 22:43, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

In that case he isn't a criminal as he hasn't been convicted. Nor does he have a criminal record, again, due to not being convicted. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 23:13, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

He was forced to pay a fine so it technically can be considered as having a criminal record, as most tax evasion cases end in fines. Lavalizard101 (talk) 23:26, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

No it isn't. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 23:32, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

GrammarCommie is correct. The IRS levies fines for late payment of taxes, that doesn't make late payers criminals. It only becomes criminal if one either refuses to pay taxes and conceals one's assets to prevent the IRS from garnishing them, or one files taxes deceitfully and commits fraud. A court of law also needs to issue a ruling of illegality, the IRS can't do that on its own since it's in the Executive Branch. Bongolian (talk) 02:53, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

Let's Make a Better Page, please

The information at the top of the page is too silly. It's jokes. It's sarcasm.

Is that the most convincing way to get people to be rational?

An antidote to ignorance is questioning. If God created Heaven and Earth, how, and why? What can we find out in the sky? What can we find down in the dirt?

I'm not sure whether humor or reasoning or questioning is best for the page. It's hard to convince someone by logical argument if they don't want to believe. We might hope to open up some minds that happen to land here, to lead them towards questioning over their certainty.

To make a better page, we could argue more according to the Hierarchy of Disagreements, discussed at Counterargument and Hierarchy of disagreement, which is one of the talk pages where I added this discussion by mistake (the other one is somewhere else. Life is confusing!)

I'm motivated because it's crucial to the future of humanity on Earth to combat anti-science in general and climate denialism in particular. Thinkadoodle (talk) 17:32, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

You are welcome to try to improve the page. When there is a choice to be made, we do prefer rational argumentation and scientific evidence over satire or snark. We do not exclude the use of humor however, particularly to get the point across, to lighten things up a bit, or to deflate the overly pompous (which Ham would seem to be a good example). See Fun:Humeur and see the Ig Nobel Prize, whose motto is "first make people laugh, and then make them think." It's always good to strike the right balance between humor and seriousness, but often hard to figure out what that balance is. Bongolian (talk) 17:47, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Ugh, I'm sorry I wrote a lot of that. A lot of the page is really good! I think what put me off is that the humor in the very beginning of the article ("not to be confused with") was not only tricky and funny but also obscure, so that it took me some time to figure out what kind of humor was being used. So anyway, now I've lowered the complexity of that humor so that the jokes can be seen more simply. I hope they are as funny or even funnier but I did remove the layer of humor that said "this is a puzzle, let's see if you can solve it". If the "this is a puzzle" humor has a higher reason to be included in the RationalWiki in seemingly irrelevant places like this then I would appreciate a reference so I can understand why! Thank you! Thinkadoodle (talk) 17:11, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

That's fine with me. Bongolian (talk) 17:41, 25 September 2021 (UTC)