Revealed: the vegetarian Eden that was home to Adam, Eve and T Rex
by James Randerson, Science correspondent
The Guardian (UK), page 12
April 5, 2008
Creationist preacher Ken Ham is used to the problems that arise from combining what he reads in the Old Testament and what scientists tell him. He has no difficulty squaring six days of creation and 6,000 years of Earth history with evidence from fossils and geological dating — for him, scientists who think the world is millions of years old are simply wrong.
Ham, a US-based Australian, has been on a tour of the UK, and listening to him explain this week that most of the fossils on the Earth were left during Noah’s flood, and that dragon legends are ancient memories of dinosaurs, it would be easy to dismiss him as a crank.
Scientific evidence suggests the Earth is around 4.5bn years old, the universe is around 14bn years old and dinosaurs died out 65m years ago, long before anything resembling a human evolved.
But Ham’s ideas and his organisation, Answers in Genesis (AIG), are influential, especially in the US. In May last year, the organisation built the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Within eight weeks of opening, the $27m (£14m) attraction had clocked up 100,000 visitors. The operation in the UK is smaller but still significant, with an annual turnover of around £500,000. One report suggested it dispatches between 30,000 and 50,000 books, DVDs and videos each year.
