Ken Ham,what is good, & good eating

Glenn Morton (GRMorton@gnn.com)
Mon, 19 Aug 1996 19:13:52

With the recent discussion of Ken Ham I looked again at one of his books.

A large part of Ham's rejection of evolution arises from his concept of
what is good when God proclaimed the world good. Good to him, and to
Morris, means absolutely no death of animals and no flesh eating.

Ham writes:

"In Genesis we find that man and animals were told to eat only
plants; they were vegetarians.
. . .
"To believe in evolution is to deny a universal paradise
before Adam, because evolution necessarily implies that before Adam
there was struggle, cruelty and brutality, animals eating animals,
and death. Is the world going to be restored to that? If you
believe in evolution, you must deny a universal paradise before
Adam (because you believe that there was death and struggle
millions of years before Adam), and also at the end of time
(because the Bible teaches the world will be restored to what it
used to be). Thus, evolution not only strikes at the heart and the
foundation but at the hope of Christianity as well."~Ken Ham, The
Lie, (San Diego: Master Books, 1987), p. 77

But this view when flesh eating began is contradicted by the objects found
in the fossil record, which according to Ham and other creationists came
from the flood. If flesh eating was not allowed until AFTER the flood,
then we should find no evidence of animal eating animal DURING the flood.
Yet we find lots of evidence of carnivorousness. Gould reports of a
trilobite found in the stomach of a Sidneyia, a cambrian animal:

"One excavated specimen revealed a tiny trilobite right in the
[alimentary] canal, near the posterior end - a remnant of
Sidneyia's last meal before the great mudslide."~Stephen J.
Gould, Wonderful Life, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 91

There is a picture of a trilobite that had a bite taken out of him in
Richard A. Robison, "Middle Cambrian Biotic Diversity: examples from four
Utah Lagerstatten," in Alberto M. Simonetta and Simon Conway
Morris, ed. The Early Evolution of Metazoa and the significance
of Problematic Taxa (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 87

"Recently Kaufman and Kesling (1960) reconstructed the fantastic
pursuit of a cephalopod by a pursuing swimming reptile more than
100 million years ago. Only the fossil shell of the cephalopod
has been found but its study show that the reptile was able to
sink its teeth into the shell of the cephalopod sixteen different
times during the chase. From the study of the tooth points, the
investigators were able to tell the direction and effectiveness
of the various bites as well as the identity of the species of
swimming reptile which was doing the biting. Evidently, the
cephalopod was a good match for the reptile, at least for a
while. The overlapping tooth prints on the cephalopod shell were
interpreted in their chronological order indicating a final and
sixteenth bite ended the chase. This final bite severed the
entire body chamber of the cephalopod with all of the vital soft
parts."~ David L. Clark Fossils, Paleontology and Evolution
2nd. ed. Dubuque: William C. Brown Co. Publishers 1976 p. 104-105

glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm

Free at last, free at last, just got rid of that nasty old cast!