Truth or Myth: Darwin, Hancock and Ham’s Search for the Answer

The origin of humanity is a complicated topic. If we haven’t even discovered all the species of plants and animals that are alive at this moment, how are we supposed to find out everything about the past? Not just what is on earth, but the earth itself, one could say, is a hole full of the unknown. The problem is, people have developed their own interpretations and explanations about how the earth came to be, leading to two main categories butting heads, the Evolutionists and Creationists. Evolutionists are primarily led by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The Creationists have a prominent leader, Ken Ham, who is currently alive and fighting for his cause and opinion to be heard. This topic is so controversial, and so widely disagreed upon, that the world system, the education system, and society, struggles to find a solution that satisfies both sides. But who says one or the other has to be right? Both theories are remarkable and have the same goal: to explain the question we all ask ourselves, “Where did we come from?”, making them both important to society.

If, on one hand, you appeal to human beings trying to figure out our origins, then the theory that everything on the earth evolved from a common ancestor is a process only explainable by chance.

On the other hand, if you appeal to the Creator angle, then you can state that we created beings can argue, but in the end, God is the only one with true knowledge of our creation.

Who are the major players who embody these tricky questions?

The Mount in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, UK, welcomed Charles Robert Darwin on February 12, 1809. Charles was the fifth of six children of a financier, Robert Darwin and his wife Susannah Darwin. His grandparents, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, were abolitionists, against slavery. Erasmus Darwin was also the author of Zoonomia, published in 1794, that explained the concepts of evolution and was regarded by critics as a common descent into poetic fantasy, not implementing scientific processes.

Darwin later expanded on these ideas, and he became an English naturalist, geologist and biologist and greatly influenced the development of the theory of evolutionary biology. As a result of his fondness for fauna, he studied marine invertebrates and veered off the medical pathway he was following at the University of Edinburgh. In 1828 he started to pursue natural science at the University of Cambridge’s Christ’s College and did so for three years. Then, he gained fame and recognition as a geologist and author after being at sea on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. While on the HMS Beagle he received Lyell’s Principles by

A certain Charles Lyell had spoken to Captain Fitzroy of HMS Beagle before it departed on the journey, asking the Captain to keep his eyes peeled for ‘erratic boulders’. Fitzroy, seeing the connection between Darwin’s thinking and Charles Lyell’s idea of geological change, he gave Darwin Lyell’s Principles. Later on the voyage, when they observed the rock formations, Lyell’s proposition was proven and Darwin used this knowledge to support and create his theory of evolution. In 1838 on September 28th, Darwin confidently stated that the population, if growing unhampered, will eventually run out of food, also known as the Malthusian catastrophe. Thomas Robert Malthus, in his 1798 book An Essay on the Principal of Population, had delineated the idea that there was a ‘geometric progression’ of population growth which would be complicated by the ‘arithmetic progression’ of food production, spelling doom.

Additionally, he compared it to Augustin de Candolle’s research that populations, like those of plants and animals, are balanced. The explanation for both Candolle and Darwin’s research comes depends upon the idea of natural selection.

Natural selection says that there is an inevitable overproduction of a certain species but eventually the only ones that will survive are the ones that carry the beneficial trait, and then pass it off to their offspring.  Scientists widely agree with Darwin’s preposition that species grow and evolve, but when it comes to natural selection, they don’t agree that it wasn’t the only way that transformation occurs. The scientists that did agree with Darwin went on to explore the other perceived ways animals modified over time, one example being Ronald Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930).

This book opened the doors to discoveries about population genetics and modern evolutionary synthesis. Other books, like Philip E. Johnson’s Darwin on Trial appealed to people with the creationist views, or those questioning Darwin.

An opponent of all things Darwin, Kenneth Alfred Ham was born almost a hundred years later, on October 21, 1951, and challenged evolutionary biologists’ theories of evolution throughout his life. Born in Cairns, Australia, Ham went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in applied science. Shortly after receiving his degree, he began his career as a high school science teacher at Dalby State High School in Queensland.

After taking a closer look at the curriculum, he noticed that the textbooks his students used “taught evolutionary science successfully [and] proved the Bible to be untrue”. He started to advocate against the teaching of evolutionary theory and founded Creation Science Supplies and Creation Science Educational Media Services to teach creationism in public schools. His beliefs included the interpretation of the Book of Genesis as literal history because he argued that knowledge of evolution and Big Bang need observation rather than inference. In January of 1987, he decided to spread his teachings to the United States and he started giving speaking tours along with another organization called the Institute for Creation Research.

The lectures he gave had three key ideas: that evolutionary theory had led to cultural decay, that a literal reading of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis contained the true origin of the universe and a pattern for society, and that Christians should engage in a culture war against atheism and humanism. His reunion with Mark Looy and Mike Zovath led to the creation of Answers in Genesis.

Answers in Genesis is a non-profit organization that supports the idea that all Youth Earth Creationism is based on the Book of Genesis and the Bible. Throughout his career he had many disputes, one within his own organization, one dispute with Breden Ham, and even a debate between himself and Bill Nye in the Ark Encounter.

Before discussing their debate, you might be wondering, am I talking about Bill Nye the Science Guy? Yes, I am! If you haven’t heard his name before, here’s a quick introduction. Nye is a mechanical engineer, science communicator, and most famously, was a television presenter on Bill Nye the Science Guy. His interest in science continued as he published his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation (pretty targeted title, if you ask me). Obviously, being on the opposite side of the spectrum from Ham’s point of view, they ended up getting in a heated argument, or more formally, a debate. Before the actual debate, the lead up to it was intense. Nye proposed that Creationism was not appropriate for children and goes on to say: “If we raise a generation of students who don’t believe in the process of science, who think everything that we’ve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, you’re not going to continue to innovate.”

The Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate was focused on answering the question, “Is Creation A Viable Model of Origins?”. It took place on February 4th, 2014, in Petersburg, Kentucky, at the Creation Museum. Ham’s backup for his argument was the Young Earth creationist model that explained the origins of the universe, while Nye claimed to have scientific evidence supporting the existence of the earth dating back 4.5 billion years. The debate gained a lot of popularity and received attention from The Biologos Foundation stressing “that you don’t have to choose” between science and religion.

The overall consensus was that Nye won the debate, but some discreded Nye because he only had a background in mechanical engineering and was not an authority on evolution, but more of a media darling. In short, Nye’s response was that he entered the debate because he wanted to “draw attention to the importance of science education here in the United States.”

The public school system is often in the middle of the battlefield when it comes to deciding whether or not teachers should teach evolutionary ideas versus creationist ideas. In most schools, evolutionary theory is taught as a fact, when it is in fact only a theory out of a group of possibilities. This can confuse the students who are religious, because they aren’t sure whether they should be listening to their teachers or to the people from their places of worship. This is not to say that Creationism should be taught instead of Evolutionary theory, but it should be emphasized that the explanation provided by schools of the creation of the universe is a speculation, a theory, and has not been proven to be absolutely true.

It’s easy to feel sympathetic for the students, especially younger kids, for even in the best schools, the way natural selection and Darwinism is promoted makes everything else seem below it. Just as one wouldn’t undermine another’s thoughts, evolutionary theory shouldn’t take potshots, aiming to undermine the credibility of creationism. Science is all about ideas, and these ideas should learn to coexist with each other peacefully. But perhaps they cannot be peaceable, being diametrically opposed.

A prominent example of two different ideas butting heads in the scientific community is mainstream archeologists vs. Graham Hancock. Mainstream archeologists state that civilization only started to emerge 6,000 years ago, and before then only simple hunter gatherers lived, basically grunting and acting like animals, beating each other with clubs, for after all, only a million years or so before that, they’d been apes.

Contrastingly, Hancock uncovers that advanced civilization is traceable from 17,000 years ago, and that it was wiped out by a worldwide flood, leaving only a few survivors to carry on traditions of the old world into the new world. Hancock contends that mainstream archeology rejects and even disregards the flood as a whole, and to do that, they obscure that there were more advanced civilizations earlier in time.

Unfortunately, his ideas are laughed at by many and even shunned in the archeological community. His work is referred to as pseudo-archaeology, meaning it’s false and rejects the mainstream science’s approved data gathered. The flood Graham continuously referred to during his show Ancient Apocalypse has also been mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 6), in Batak culture, Indian folklore and many more preserved traditions. Once again, the mainstream archeologists think the talk of the flood is just a myth, similarly to how the evolutionists think that the creationist view of the world is wrong.
            To explain fully one interlocking piece of Hancock’s mind, and after watching all 8 episodes of Ancient Apocalypse, I am now going to detail Episode 5 of the series fully, so you can see what he’s up to. In this episode the main focus is on a structures called Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

Gobekli Tepe was built about 11,600 years ago, making it 7,000 years older than the Great Pyramids. Hancock’s main focus was the Pillar 43, also known as the Vulture Stone, located in the structure.

According to Martin Sweatman, a fellow archaeologist that studies the stone, the carvings on it could represent the asterisms, a pattern of stars most commonly know as the zodiac, and that an important date is being recorded based on the sphere that is theorized to be the sun. The important date is predicted to be about 10,900 years ago. Interestingly, the Great Flood that Hancock continuously mentions in the whole series happened around the same time. Could the stone be portending the Great Flood? Why did the creators think it was important to predict this natural disaster? Hancock also refers to this period as the Young Dryas, or Ancient Apocalypse, and his theory is that a civilization much more advanced than hunter and gatherers existed, but almost all of its traces were wiped off of the face of the earth due to the deluge.

Since there were a few survivors, they were the ones that rebuilt civilization with the knowledge of their previous culture. He contends that the survivors went to Gobekli Tepe and were introduced to agriculture, architecture, basically things of an advanced civilization.

In all the episodes, Hancock’s theories connect various ancient cultures’ reference of the great flood. For instance, one story says the gods made humanity to manage animals, but they became too lazy and unruly to do their job, so the gods sent the Great Deluge to restart humanity. According to ancient Babylonian myth (2,000 B.C.), then, the Seven Sages, a group of survivors, sent a human-fish hybrid Oannes to teach the other survivors about agriculture, architecture and astronomy. What is common among many ancient origin myths is that an enlightener suddenly arrives, normally appearing from the sea.

Hancock makes the effort to make his theories heard, but at the same time battles with the widely accepted ideas of mainstream archeology. There have been people before Hancock that also shared his ideas, one of them being a congressmen by the name of Ignatius L. Donnelly. Donnelly also supported the idea of Atlantis; although his ideas are as valid as any others, he’s regarded as a fringe scientist. In other words, he always looked out side of the box that mainstream scientists often closed themselves and the community in and pushes the regular boundaries of their thinking. The struggle between Hancock and other archeologists is much like the dispute between creationists and evolutionists.

This subject is rife with conflict and censorship – not only are experts divided, but the identification of origins affects society as a whole – so the way information is passed on to the public is key. Acknowledging both sides of the argument is always a good start, looking at how censorship functions within the debate is wise, and who knows, maybe listening to others talk about their beliefs or hearing their scientific logic which challenge yours will allow you to expand on your own.