I listened to Ken Ham’s appearance this afternoon on KMMS radio, an evangelical Christian radio network in Minnesota. PZ Myers was allowed through on the call in portion of the show and managed to get in a short exchange with Ken. Ken, like most Young Earth Creationists, like to insist that the main difference between them and evolutionists is that we each have different “starting points” and therefore arrive at different conclusions. The second Answers in Genesis figurehead on the show, Jason Lisle (oh I am sorry, Dr. Jason Lisle), put it this way: It is not about science but about worldviews.

Ham castigated PZ Myers for being an atheist and asserted that because his starting point is atheism then he will never agree with Ham’s biblically friendly worldview. Ham and his gang, on the other hand, start with the Bible as their starting point.

Having starting points is fine, but there should be reasons to prefer one particular starting point over another. Atheism is the rational default position given a lack of evidence for the existence of gods. One starts out not believing that any gods exist until there are compelling reasons to believe otherwise. One does not, rationally, start out believing in god and then wait until there are compelling reasons to believe in god’s existence (or non-existence). The former starting point is clearly preferable to the latter.

Ham, on the other hand, begins by asserting that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God. This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. It is not, therefore, a valid starting point any more than the assertion that the Koran is the literal and infallible word of God.

One could also think about atheism not as a starting point per se but as a conclusion reached after a careful consideration of the facts. What then, should be one’s starting point? A starting point, rather than requiring significant evidence to prove, should be trivial or self-evidently true. I would propose the following as a good starting point for Ken Ham and other creationists.:

The natural world exists and our senses provide a reasonable measure of it.

Everybody’s day to day experience more less confirms this starting point. If you deny it then you no longer have any basis on which to make any conclusions about reality at all. Even if you grant that the natural world is an illusion you must still grant that our senses provide a reasonable measure of that illusion from which we can draw conclusions about it. Given that there is no compelling reason to prefer an illusionary world over a real one, the existence of the natural world seems to me to be a good starting point.

This is fundamentally the starting point for all of science. Creationists do not like it because it does not include the existence of supernatural gods as a given, but the existence of supernatural gods (unlike the natural world) is not self-evidently true.

So the question for Ham et. al. is simply this: Given that starting point can one arrive at the conclusion that the Bible is the infallible and inerrant word of God?