Ken Ham's Adam and Eve

Sure, I’ll help you. But when the Lesbian Latino Wicans for Social Justice and Equality label your Genological Adam another White Evangelical Christian racist view of America, you get needlessly harmed. You become canon fodder in the culture war. Your name and ancestry might give you some cover, but they won’t care as the damage will be done. I don’t know how Ken Ham gets away with his Adam and Eve at the creation museum. They look like they are from the Spanish Rivera. I hope your genological Adam has at least some hair on his chest. Does he have the lactose tolerant gene mutation?

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The photo you posted of Ken Ham’s Creation Museum Adam & Eve exhibit makes me both smile and cringe. Ham often emphasizes that the Eden story is a foundation for denouncing racism (“because we are all one race, the Adamic human race”) and even states that the skin color of both Adam and Jesus was “neither white nor black but something in between.” So the exhibit has always surprised me.

I got curious about this topic and found this on the current CreationMuseum.org website but dated October 10, 2003 when the museum was still in an early planning stage:

Recently we sat down with Dr Carl Wieland, CEO of AiG-Australia, to hash out ways to portray the world as it was before the Flood. For example, based on the study of genetics, we are relatively certain that Adam and Eve’s skin and eyes were middle-brown in color, but was Adam’s hair tightly curled, or wavy, or just plain straight? Did he have a full beard? Were Eve’s eyes almond-shaped? In order to help “flesh out” the physical descriptions of our first ancestors, Carl suggested (among other things) coming up with a “composite sketch” of the characteristics of all the various people groups combined into two people. Now there’s a challenge!

Yes, Ham and Wieland parted ways long ago. But I just find it interesting that the end product in today’s Creation Museum Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden exhibit looks closer to traditional Eurocentric depictions than what many of us might have expected. I really thought that Ham would have created a more “neutral” sort of “ethnic blend” for his Adam & Eve.

Meanwhile, isn’t that the same exhibit that includes pet dinosaurs frolickly near Adam and Eve? I assume that within a few more years we will start reading Internet blogs written by various adults telling the story of how they were raised to be hard-core Young Earth Creationists but that their family’s visit to the Creation Museum or Ark Encounter when they were ten-years old was the beginning of their abandonment of various beliefs, even their eventual atheism. I have no doubt that photos of that same Adam & Eve exhibit will illustrate those future blog articles.

I try to imagine how the visitors at the Creation Museum would react if the Adam & Eve figures in the photo had the dark skin and hair textures of a typical Nigerian couple.

A Newsweek cover comes to mind:

I used to preach in Kentucky at a church not a long drive from today’s Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter. I assume that much has changed since the 1970’s but I can’t help but recall how some of the church elders (at least two of whom had fathers or grandfathers who had been Ku Klux Klan members) might have reacted to such dark skinned depictions of Adam and Eve.

My favorite Hebrew professor was also a famous rabbi known for his Talmudic expertise and photographic memory. He regularly reminded us that HAADAM (the adam) was literally “the Dirt Man” or even “the Deep Red Guy” as in “the Red-Soiled Dirt Man.” So he often laughed about traditional European depictions of a light-skinned Adam and Eve.

(There’s a part of me that wishes that visitors to the Creation Museum would see a black-skinned Adam with a prominent Afro and an Eve with very long dreadlocks. I admit it.)

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Here, you’ve accomplished something truly remarkable, handing me, if inadvertently, one or two reasons not to entirely dislike Ken Ham, which I struggle with. For me, he is the definition of “smarmy,” I’ll admit… but then, you’ve also reminded me of the truly backwards cultural neighbors he has to deal with. Thanks for helping me contextualize him a bit. I still can’t help rolling my eyes at his style and content of exposition… but, that’s another story. This “being charitable towards all” thing is quite a challenge, sometimes.
The “red-soiled dirt man” has so much more going for it than most know. Thanks for sharing this, too.

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Here is what it looks like now. Eve is very pretty. Nice long hair that was just washed and conditioned beautifully. Adam looks like he goes to the gym regularly and his hair and beard look well groomed. Handsome couple. Newlyweds. Can’t see if either Adam or Eve had navels, nor a healed scare from the rib removal. The water looks clean and at the perfect temperature for skinny dipping. The red demon like snake looks rather ominous, ready to have a chat with them.

Oh yes, but back 6000 years ago dinosaurs were friendlier than in Jurassic Park. They were vegetarians even the Tyrannosaurus Rex that Adam named “Dino” in his native language.

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I would like to see A&E depicted as a couple of Denosivans.

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Yeah, I was wondering if Adam had fractured some obsidian rocks until he found the ideal razor for maintaining that excellent beard. Eve had made clear that she hated neck-beards. (Early rabbinical texts claim that Adam and Eve had their first argument when Adam discovered that Eve had used his favorite obsidian fragment to shave her legs.)

I have always wanted to ask Ken Ham about the differential hair lengths of Adam and Eve. After all, Young Earth Creationists have traditionally claimed that Adam was created early on the sixth day and then spent a few hours naming animals. That led to his awareness of being without a partner, and then his afternoon surgery and the creation of Eve. Nevertheless, Eve has much longer hair than Adam in every YEC depiction I’ve ever seen. (I’ve yet to see a pixie cut for Eve in any YEC illustration.) That is quite interesting considering that Eve was younger than Adam—at least younger by a few hours.

Now we all know that hair consists of dead cells, once living cells which are actually “programmed” to die soon after they are generated. So that is another reminder that death existed before the fall. (Yeah. I know, I know. I just had to say it.) Trees are supported by thick wooden structures which are dead but surrounded by living cambium. So I suppose YECs would explain Eve’s longer hair by means of the same “created with the appearance of age” omphalos argument. (They don’t seem to be aware that Philip Henry Gosse totally destroyed his career and credibility, even among other Christian scholars of his day, by promoting his omphalos hypothesis.)

I do understand why Ken Ham had to dye the snake red. He had to make sure that visitors to the exhibit would notice the serpent despite the far more interesting pet dinosaurs.

A lot of people don’t know that in addition to Tyrannosaurus Rex, Adam had a second tyrannosaurus named Reggie, the twin brother of Rex. Shortly after the fall and eviction from the garden, Rex ate Reggie. That’s why hardly anybody remembers Reggie.

As to vegetarian dinosaurs—as well as vegetarian lions, tigers, vampire bats, etc.—I’ve been waiting for years now for a Young Earth Creationist explanation of how carnivorous animals survived without meat and without the very different digestive systems found in cellulose-dependent herbivores. All I’ve gotten from Ken Ham is some anecdotal stories about two lions (at different zoos) who allegedly lived as vegetarians. (Of course, both lions were very proud of that fact and constantly annoyed the other lions by refusing to shut up about it. That may explain why neither lion survived for long on the vegetarian diet.) Ham also cites some species of vulture that can live on palm nuts if it needs to do so. I’ve always been impressed by the ways in which YEC authors will use a single anecdotal example to argue, “Therefore, it simply isn’t true that all carnivores couldn’t have been herbivores in the past.” I guess if one species of vulture lived on palm nuts for a while, all raptors did. (Proof-of-concept, I suppose.)

“Creation science” is an interesting field of study. All it takes is one uncited claim about something that allegedly happened in a zoo many decades ago—and that is all it takes to outweigh piles and piles of peer-reviewed scientific evidence and publications. No wonder “creation scientists” have so much free time to spend speaking at Young Earth Creationist conferences. Their “scientific research” can rely upon N=1 population studies. The data collection part of their research goes extremely quickly. Of course, the peer-review process before journal publication is also quite streamlined and efficient.

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That image of Adam and Eve is not defensible, even from a YEC paradigm.

That’s what I thought too.

Ken Ham is many things, but he is not racist. He does grandstand on racism, as if evolution causes it. However, in this one way, he does argue against the long history of racism in fundamentalism. That is good thing to for which to give him credit.

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But he doesn’t argue against the long history of racism in fundamentalism. He pins racism on Darwin and doesn’t even mention Bob Jones University or racial issues of today. Look at all of the Ark Encounter photos - very white, senior crowd.

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I totally agree. Still, he probably never supported Bob Jones in their racism and might have even part of why they changed some policies in 2000. He is an anti evolution zealot too. We know that. I wish he’d be more honest about fundamentalism. Bit at least he is not racist.

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Yes, he has moved on to anti-SSM, anti-abortion, and the biggest one - anti-science. Ham supports Liberty University “religious freedom” to not allow a SSM couple to live in married campus housing. Liberty University (and other Christian Universities) takes government student loans and has agreed to not to discriminate with regard list including race and sexual orientation. Can they discriminate based on their religious freedom? How about transgender? What about Professors speaking out on this issue? Can they be sanctioned or fired?

I’m assuming these pictures show Adam and Eve AFTER the fall since I doubt they would agree to star in what looks like pornographic film set by a waterfall and a scenic river BEFORE the fall.

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Judging by the photo of the exhibit appearing previously in this thread, the Adam and Eve figures are so obscured by rocks, lotus blossoms, and long tresses such they could have been wearing fig-leaf swimtrunks and a tankini for all we can tell. So that doesn’t seem much like “pornographic film” at all. Indeed, it looks more like a cheesy honeymoon grotto scene from an old episode of Fantasy Island which aired on primetime broadcast TV in the 1970’s. Pretty tame stuff.

I’ve wondered if any Jewish visitors to the Ark Encounter ever walk up to that Edenic scene and shout, “Look! It’s Adam and Lilith!”

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Oh God, I’ve been interested in Lilith legend for a while when I was younger. Of course, now I understand that that whole Lilith story was made to get rid of that whole ‘Adam and Eve were created equal in the Garden’ problem.

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Huh? Something you wanted?

Accidentally posted in the wrong thread. Have a good liturgy!

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Well, let me know how it was. Haha. I’m sitting in my car waiting for AAA. Left the light on in our car since Friday, and hence no battery power. I was actually planning on teaching a young adult class on Adam and evolution. :smiley:

Guess I’ll listen to the liturgy that’s broadcast live on AFR now. https://www.ancientfaith.com/radio

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