An entertaining and instructive exchange unfolds between William Lane Craig and Ken Ham, the leader of Answers in Genesis. This was a back and forth, on several platforms, one of which was our podcast. Following the links bellow will take you to each response.

It all begins with a facebook post. According to Ham, William Lane Craig “pseudo-intellectual arrogance that mocks God and his Word and instead exalts the word of fallible.” Craig “represents one of the major problems with much of the church,” because he interprets Genesis in a different way than does Ken Ham.

Ham took some heat for this statement. A couple weeks later, he followed up with a longer explanation of his reasoning.

Dr. Craig first responded to Ham in an interview at Peaceful Science. What a great conversation it was, and surprising in many ways. Looking past the ad hominem, it turns out that William Lane Craig agrees with Ken Ham on some important points.

We also talked about the Elephant and the blind men, each one taking ahold of a different part of the beast. They each really have hold of something legitimate. It seems that so much conflict can be traced to these blind men forgetting that what they see is not the whole view.

I ended with a playful question:

if you could take a time machine and go back to the first century and meet Jesus and ask Jesus, “Is evolution true? Is the theory of evolution true? What would Jesus say?”

Of all things, Ken Ham’s answer focused on Craig’s answer to this question. What a great place focus. Ham misunderstood Craig to be denying Jesus’s deity, but he was just articulating orthodox Christianity, as stated in the historic Creeds.

So at the Council of Chalcedon the church fathers affirmed that Jesus is truly man and truly God. And as a true man he had a complete human nature, namely a human body and a human soul (that is to say, a human mind). So in his human nature Jesus’ human mind was limited and finite just as ours was even though in his divine mind (the mind of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity) Jesus was omniscient. So the person is omniscient with respect to his divine nature but he’s not omniscient with respect to his human nature. And that is not (contrary to Ken Ham) some sort of heretical view. That is Christian orthodoxy!

What an interesting exchange indeed. Ken Ham, it seems, is unacquainted with orthodox Christian beliefs about Jesus. He was confused, and thought that Craig was denying Jesus’ deity.

Christian tradition is important, and it is one reason I left Young Earth Creationism many years ago. Even if committed to literalism, I was surprised to find that literal readings of Genesis in the past were totally different than the scientific creationism of Answers in Genesis.

So this is an exchange to follow. This was the time that Ken Ham and William Lane Craig discussed evolution and Jesus at Peaceful Science.

On February 20, 2021 a small typo correction was made, inserting a missing word, “Ken Ham’s answer.”