Wednesday, July 23, 2014

What Is Ken Ham So Afraid Of?

Do yourself a(n un)favor and check it out Ken Ham's latest outburst in a cache somewhere, no need giving him ad revenue!  In a nutshell he's advocating the cancellation of the whole space program... because... wait for it... any life we find out there is damned to hell.

Let that thought detonate in your brain. In fact I'm sorry you even had to read it...

I got thinking about why Ken Ham really wants the space program cancelled.  I don't think it's because of his stated reason(s).

I think the idea that we could possibly find alien life scares him senseless.  He's spent a fair amount of his adult life completely invested in the idea that the scriptures, particularly Genesis as written are the straight dope and that's it.

Imagine if tomorrow NASA announces that Keplar has imaged an exoplanet that upon spectral analysis has plutonium in it's atmosphere.  Something that's NOT naturally occurring.  Imagine that NASA launches additional spacecraft to study this specific planet, makes much more detailed scans and makes the data public.  Upon analyzing all the data it's quite obvious that yeah, it's a civilization.

What could Ken Ham possibly say about this but to wave his bible about and call that civilization damned.  His world view is so constrained by his ideology he really can't have a rational position. The bigger problem he would have is that it would cause people to stop and reevaluate their beliefs.

Thus, his best move is to argue that we stop looking, you know because nothing you might find is worth seeing.

Think about what a maniacally close minded position that is.  Just imagine if whenever we found things that could possibly break or change our most cherished beliefs, we decided to stop because finding the truth might just be uncomfortable.

Where would we be as a civilization if whenever people were presented with questions they couldn't easy answer, they chose to close their minds.

No comments: