The Lie: Unraveling the Myth: Evolution/Millions of Years

by Ken Ham

Christianity is Under Massive Attack

How will you and the coming generations stand firm and uphold the truth of God’s Word when the culture is forcefully demanding you believe lies? In this updated edition of The Unraveling the Myth of Evolution/Millions of Years, Ken Ham exposes how the acceptance of evolution and millions of years has eroded belief in God as Creator. This issue is crucial to understanding modern worldview dilemmas, including gender and sexuality, abortion, racism, and the mass exodus from the church.

Why is the Christian church losing ground in its battle with the secular world?

Thousands of church leaders are nearing a dangerous precipice—the denial of the Bible's full authority and accuracy from its very first verse. Originally published in 1987, The Lie boldly predicted this trend.

This compelling book is a must-read for all Christians, providing crucial answers to common questions from unbelievers and offering advice for parents preparing their children to face a rebellious secular world. Chapters

Crumbling FoundationsThe Evil Fruit of Evolutionary ThinkingEvangelism in a Pagan WorldWake Up, Shepherds!Creation, Flood, and Coming FireThe Lie is more than just a book; it is a call to action inviting the body of Christ to stand firm in their Christian faith, reject the lie of evolution, and uphold the truth of God’s Word from the very beginning. As Romans 1:20-23 (NKJV) warns, those who reject God's truth are without excuse and their hearts are darkened.

Will you stand firm and uphold the truth of God's Word?

Genres: Christian

272 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 13, 2024

About the author

Dr. Ken Ham is the president of Answers in Genesis USA and is a well-known speaker and author on the subject of Young-Earth Creationism. He received a bachelor degree in applied science (emphasis on environmental biology) from the Queensland Institute of Technology, and a Diploma of Education from the University of Queensland. He has also received two honorary doctorates: a Doctor of Divinity from Temple Baptist College, and a Doctor of Literature from Baptist Liberty University.

He was a director of Creation Science Foundation (CSF) in Australia, an organization which he jointly founded with John Mackay. In 1987 he moved to the United States, still maintaining his links with CSF.

From 1987 to 1993, Ham worked for the Institute for Creation Research, and in 1994 set up what in 1995 became Answers in Genesis (AiG), a creation ministry dedicated to "upholding the authority of the Bible from the very first verse."

In 2008 Ham was described by well known atheist and evolutionary biologist PZ Myers as a "Wackaloon" for carrying out a prayer session with members of the Pentagon. Ham responded regarding the validity of that prayer breakfastand that PZ Myers and other critics were intolerant of his position.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Fear not, for I am with you…” Isaiah 41:10

When I first read this book, I would have given it 1 star due to its dishonesty about the topic at hand but since then I have seen value in this book that was unintended by its author. If read to examine the motivations of Ham and many that hold similar beliefs, I believe it can be invaluable. The Bible tells believers over and over not to be afraid, but Ham tells us very clearly throughout this book that he is afraid. He is afraid of what will happen to his belief if Genesis is not “literally true” and that has led him to fear scientific evidence and even free scientific inquiry itself. He has used it as an excuse to avoid examining the Bible more closely with an open mind. I’m going to go over some of the evidence that Ham presents for this fear and some of his misrepresentations of science and those he disagrees with. All page references are from the digital version of the updated 2012 edition of the book.

Ham discusses the origins of his position in the introduction to the original edition on page 6: “If Genesis was not literally true, then what part of the Bible could I trust?” and “If God did not mean what He said in Genesis, then how could one trust Him in the rest of the Scriptures?” Both quotes assume that Genesis must be taken entirely literally and anything else would make the entire Bible worthless. It shows a fear of nuance or critical thinking and examination of the available data in case the literal reading is contradicted. On page 7, Ham continues “I did not know from a scientific perspective why I did not believe in evolution but I knew from a biblical perspective it had to be wrong or my faith was in trouble.” It HAD to be wrong. He shows from the beginning of his investigation that he is starting with a conclusion and cannot accept any other possibility, clearly afraid of losing his faith if he allows in any thoughts of a different viewpoint. Ham further explains his inflexibility in chapter 1 on page 22, “It is not a matter of whether you are dogmatic or not but of which dogma is the best dogma with which to be dogmatized” and rewording the statement on page 26 “It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased.” Adherents of young earth creationism (YEC) can absolutely be scientists and can produce legitimate work, but that statement (whether about dogma or bias) is completely incompatible with scientific investigation. The scientific method is designed to minimize bias. A person cannot honestly engage in science if they have their conclusion determined ahead of time (an accusation that Ham makes of “evolutionists” multiple times in this same chapter). A little later, on page 46 Ham says "If the Bible is not the infallible Word of the One who knows everything, then we can never know for sure that we can come to right conclusions concerning the origins issue. Ultimately, we could never be sure about what this universe and life is all about. What then is truth: my word, your word, or someone else's word?" Ham’s entire belief system depends on Genesis, specifically, being entirely, literally, historically, and scientifically true. There are many other places in the book that Ham’s fear and justification of his deep bias come together but I believe I’ve made the point.

Since Ham insists that Genesis must be taken literally for his faith to be safe, let’s look at a few points in the book where Ham clearly adds to the meaning of verses beyond the plain reading that he claims to represent. On page 112 Ham says “The first death was in the Garden of Eden when God killed an animal as the first blood sacrifice (Gen. 3:21) – a picture of what was to come in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God…” The verse says no such thing, it simply states that God made Adam and Eve garments of skin. It says nothing about an animal dying and since God created all the animals ex nihilo there’s no reason to say any death was involved let alone any sacrifice. Ham’s interpretation may or may not be correct, but it is an interpretation. There is no disputing the fact that it is not a literal, plain reading of the verse. He also insists that Genesis says, “Marriage consists of one man and one woman for life (Gen 2:24).” On page 118. That verse does not say that at all (that is a huge stretch for “becoming one flesh”, definitely not a literal one) and a plain reading of Genesis clearly contradicts this claim showing plural marriage of Jacob/Israel without claiming sin directly connected to it, his children are the fathers of God’s people. There are many other examples of him using non-literal interpretations to support his claims, here are a couple from a single page: Page 118 “From the beginning God promised a Messiah to save us (Gen 3:15)” and “The ultimate purpose of life is to walk with God (Gen. 6:9-10)”. Ham’s interpretation of the text is simply not based on a plain or literal reading of the Bible. If it helps his argument, he uses literal readings and when it doesn’t, he goes with a different interpretation. He also ignores the fact that the creation story in Genesis is clearly written in the genre of a creation myth. These myths are often, if not always, told to give deeper meaning than their literal words and are not meant to present a literal history. He also takes this to the next step of interpreting a group called out in the Bible to be the equivalent of people he thinks of as enemies (a dangerous step to take as Christian) in chapter 10 page 165 by quoting Rev. 3:15-16 as talking about the “compromising church”. This is far from the only time he claims that Christians that believe differently about the Bible are talked about in the Bible, on page 168 he calls them “vipers” (Matt. 12:34) and on page 172 he calls them “shepherds leading the sheep astray” (Jer. 5:31). 

This focus on people that disagree with him is what I think is most damaging about this book. Ham is not just saying that the earth was made ~6000 years ago in 6 days and that God killed all life on the planet except the animals and people on the ark in a worldwide flood around 4000 years ago but that anyone that doesn’t believe that is going against “the Biblical worldview” and is choosing man’s false word over God’s perfect word. On page 166 he says, “Most of the Church and its leaders have adopted the pagan religion of the day (evolution/millions of years) and compromised on God’s word.” Ham presents an extreme interpretation of the Bible as the only “biblical interpretation” and produces a false dichotomy that everyone must believe his version or is choosing the “pagan religion of the day.” He also allows no room for people that disagree with him to have come to that conclusion by honest study of the Bible and the scientific evidence. He continuously says the people must do it because of peer pressure or out of fear of losing their jobs (ironic since his organization requires all employees to sign a statement of faith that they believe in a young earth and a worldwide flood putting them at risk of being fired if their beliefs change). One example of his hubris on this topic is on page 162 “Much opposition to biblical creation ministry comes from within the Church, particularly from those who have compromised God’s Word with evolutionary ideas and/or millions of years. Please understand that I do not want to sound as if I am hitting too hard at those who have done this. Many people simply do not understand the real issues involved. They really believe scientists have proven evolutionary ideas.” He cannot be wrong on these issues, or his faith will be in real trouble. He also cannot allow for any acceptance of opposing ideas to be anything but an attack on God and Christianity. On page 194, he says "The belief in billions of years was originally postulated by materialists, atheists, and deists in an attempt to explain the geological record by natural processes rather than by a global Flood, as revealed in the Bible." History clearly shows this as a lie. Many people that postulated these explanations were believers and came to these conclusions to explain the evidence they found. Ham projects his inability to open mindedly examine data on anyone that disagrees with him. Given his dishonest approach to evidence, he can't give credit to anyone else for earnestly attempting to address the evidence, they MUST be trying to disprove God or avoid accepting responsibility for their moral failings if they disagree with him. Ham’s fear has led him to these insecure attacks, and to misrepresent real scientific investigation. One of his favorite methods of attack is to claim the evolution or science are religious beliefs based on faith. He has many names for the adherents of these “faiths”, he sometimes calls them evolutionists (appears 83 times in the book) or secularists (appears 29 times) even though many of the people he uses these terms for are Christians.

Ham states on page 29 "one must have a complete understanding of the beliefs adhered to by both biblical creationists and secular evolutionists." We’ve already talked about how he misrepresents people that disagree with him on these specific topics and puts worldly and dishonest motivations on their reasons for holding other beliefs but let’s look at how well Ham understands the beliefs of his non-Christian opponents. On page 25 he says, "Can atheists entertain the question, ‘Did God create?’ The answer is no. As Soon as they even allow it as a question, they are no longer atheists." What?! That is not how belief or lack thereof works. Atheists can and do ask and answer this question and how condescending do you have to be to claim that another group stops being who they are if they allow open inquiry into a topic? He must have a better understanding of what it means to be agnostic, right? "An agnostic is 100 percent biased. He believes one cannot know anything for sure, so no matter how much evidence he hears, he can still say, ‘I do not know.’ As soon as he knows, he has stopped being an agnostic." (page 26). Not so much. He doesn’t even understand what it means to be agnostic on the existence of a god. How can you spend time debating people and not understand that agnostic doesn’t mean that you can’t know about ANYTHING? To be fair, Ham’s description of his own position from page 26 is nearly as damning:  "what about a revelationist, that is, a person who believes that the God of history has revealed the truth about Himself by means of a book? (A book that claims over 3,000 times to be the Word of God.) Can such a person consider the opposite question, that God did not create? No! Because he starts with the premise that God is Creator and His word true." Again, Ham has to believe every person that disagrees with him, whether Christian brothers and sisters or unbelievers, must be unable to examine data without having their conclusion first. They can’t even question it without giving up on their entire belief system (if they were belief systems), because he is afraid that questioning his bias will lead to complete loss of his faith.

Ham claims to have debunked evolution in the book but talks very little about scientific evidence and when he does, he consistently misrepresents opposing positions and the state of the evidence. His biggest attack against the scientific evidence is the purely YEC concept of “historical science” and contrasting that against “observational science”. This is not a dichotomy that the scientific community at large recognizes and is clearly intended to frame “historical science” as not real science: implying that we can’t have any real evidence without laboratory experiments and live observation. This is not true; the fossil record provides literally tons of evidence of evolution that is very convincing and therefore the well must be poisoned to trick his readers into thinking that it is not valid. Geological and fossil evidence absolutely can be used to make testable hypotheses and has been successfully. Fossil locations and layers are often predicted for transitional fossils and then found where they are predicted. Fossil fuel companies also rely exclusively on mainstream geology that gives evidence of an ancient earth to find sources. In an attempt to put a nail in the coffin of “historical science” Ham claims on page 24 "It is important to understand that special creation, by definition, is also a belief about the past. The difference is that creationists base their understanding of creation upon a book that claims to be the Word of the One who was there, who knows everything there is to know about everything, and who tells us what happened. Evolution/millions of years comes from the words of men who were not there and who do not claim to be omniscient." Scientists don’t need to be omniscient to find and test evidence from the past and his position is relying on both circular reasoning on the accuracy of the Bible and the assumption that the Biblical creation story was meant to be a literal history. He also attacks scientists with science’s biggest strength on page 39 "No human being, no scientist, has all the evidence. That is why fallible scientists change their ideas continuously. As scientists continue to learn new things, they change their conclusions." Yes, scientists change their beliefs when confronted with contrary evidence. That’s a good thing. Ham then has the gall to claim ON THE SAME PAGE "secular evolutionists have set beliefs too! They claim life can only be explained by naturalism and that the account of origins in the Bible is not true. They are not prepared to change these beliefs!" I don’t think there is likely a better example of projection, especially given the juxtaposition to the previous quote. 

Ham’s organization often misleads its followers with created vocabulary that only shows up in internet searches within creationist sources. One of these terms is “macro evolution”. He doesn’t specifically talk about micro versus macro evolution in this book but he does talk about the YEC concept of “kinds” on page 30 “…creationists agree that natural selection occurs, but they point out that this is not a mechanism to change one kind of animal into a totally different kind. It only operates on the genetic information already available within each kind.” There is no evidence of this greater genetic information in older examples of “kinds”. Ham also makes some blatantly false statements about mutations on page 175 “Mutations are mistakes that occur in our genes, and they are virtually all harmful.” This is easily disproved by geneticists. Most mutations are neutral, having no real effect on fitness, and there are many beneficial mutations. Mutation is the only explanation with scientific evidence to provide the genetic diversity for speciation through the mechanism of natural selection and there has to be speciation for the global flood and ark to be true. There simply is not enough room for all the species that are extant and in the fossil record. YECs used to claim that there was no evolution but now must claim speciation through natural selection dodging that it isn’t actually evolution. This means that AiG agrees that there is speciation above the genus level and that natural selection is a part of that speciation. In AiG’s “The New Answers Video 1”, Georgia Purdom talks about mutations in bacteria that allows them to have antibacterial resistance through mutation. That is a clear example of beneficial mutation. She goes on to say that the bacteria would have to pay a price for that mutation “if the environment changes”. She is presenting a basic misunderstanding of evolution. There is no such thing as absolute fitness. Evolution is not a progression always moving forward to an ideal. There is only fitness for the environment that an organism finds itself in. If an environment changes, the selection pressures will change. She’s also misrepresenting the ideas of mutation. A mutation does not always mean that the organism will “pay a price”, new functionality can come without loss of previous functionality. She claims that “genetic information is lost in this process” which clearly does not follow (ignoring the vagueness of what is meant by “genetic information” in this context). A common type of mutation is duplication where it is common for the original genetic material to maintain its current functionality and the duplicated section to be able to develop new functionality after additional mutations of many generations. Since AiG confirms cases of mutations increasing fitness, it clearly allows for the possibility of change over time due to mutation and selection. The only real hurdle left to unlimited speciation is the “kind” barrier, fortunately, AiG provides no reason to believe there is one. They provide no mechanism that would stop mutation and selection at the “kind” level. AiG doesn’t even provide a consistent or complete description of what the “kinds” are as this is another YEC specific term not used in conventional scientific parlance. Continued small changes over time can and do lead to macro changes and isolated populations with different selection pressures will change until they are no longer able to interbreed. There is nothing scientifically shown to stop this process at any phylogenetic level. AiG acknowledges all the basic mechanisms of evolution, they just don’t call it evolution or talk about all of them at once. They simultaneously require extremely rapid speciation to create the gigantic increase in diversity necessary to get from the ark to today with all the species extant and extinct.

This is not a book that is intended to change anyone’s mind. Ham presents no evidence that would even start to convince the most weakly committed “evolutionist.” This book is meant to preach to the choir, giving those believers convinced of the rightness of their position more ammunition against the evil “secularists” undermining the very foundations of Christianity by questioning the historical accuracy of Genesis 1-11. Ham believes that kids are leaving the faith because they aren’t taught this foundation. From my experience, it is exactly the opposite, people leave the faith because they are taught blatantly false things by people like Ham and when they realize that what they’ve been taught about the world was a lie, it’s a very hard pill to swallow. I was recently told that I was supporting the Marxist evil group of anti-Christians that are removing God from the public schools because I disagree with Ham and others like him. This is a book that desires to teach you to demonize those that disagree with you just as that Sunday school teacher did to me. It wants you to turn off your brain to what actual biblical scholars will tell you about the Genesis creation and flood myths. It wants you to only get your science from trusted sources that start from the conclusion and work their way back to find the explanation that works. Ham needs you to believe that "Evolution and its foundation of millions of years is an anti-God religion held by many people today as justification for their continued pursuit of self-gratification and their rejection of God as Creator" (Page 97). He has to believe that because if he allows himself to think that others could be right and he could be wrong, his entire faith could fall apart. If the Bible is truth, honest investigation of scientific evidence that God has left us could not possibly undermine that truth. This book wants you to think that real science is the enemy, and that the pseudoscience of young earth creationism is the only inquiry that can be trusted. I know this review is also not likely to change any minds, but I hope that I’ve demonstrated how dishonest Ham is throughout this book and how his entire mission is driven by fear. 

[Christopher Sweet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is scientific-biblical truth shared out of concern for those who will perish if they continue to deny the continuously-growing evidence of the biblical account of creation.

It's not shared for the purpose of just arguing to be right, it is written to plead with people to come to the truth of God's creation, man's fall and God's redemption from His coming, righteous judgment.

This is a compassionate truth!

[Esteban · Rating 5 out of 5]

A useful summary of contentious points

Whilst it is not possible to cover all aspects of the implications of a belief in millions of years this gives a good overview with several useful updates from previous editions.