I recently came across a recent YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_dlkjiQWGw) from Answers in Genesis featuring Ken Ham and Dr. Terry Mortenson discussing a conversation between Eric Metaxas and Dr. Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe. What I expected was a fairly standard young-earth critique of old-earth creationism—the kind of thing AiG produces regularly. What I found instead was something more troubling: a thirty-minute master class in the rhetorical strategies that have made AiG one of the most divisive forces in the evangelical church, all delivered with the calm assurance of men who believe they are defending the faith while systematically undermining the credibility of fellow believers.
I want to be clear at the outset about my own position. I am a conservative confessional Christian, a biology professor, and someone who has spent years engaging the claims of young-earth creationism from within the evangelical tradition. I do not write as a defender of Hugh Ross—I have my own significant disagreements with the progressive creationist model, as readers of this blog well know. But what concerns me about this video is not whether Ross is right about the flood or the age of the earth. What concerns me is the way Ham and Mortenson go about their critique, because it reveals patterns of reasoning that are far more damaging to the church than any disagreement about the days of Genesis.
The “Compromise” Accusation: A Rhetorical Weapon, Not a Theological Argument
The word “compromise” appears throughout this conversation like a drumbeat. Hugh Ross is a compromiser. Eric Metaxas is a compromiser. William Lane Craig is a compromiser, Joel Duff is a compromiser. Ok, the last one they didn’t mention in this video but they written about my comprising elsewhere in the past. Anyone who considers an old earth a viable theory of earth’s history is compromising God’s word with man’s word. This is perhaps the most effective rhetorical move in the entire AiG arsenal, and it deserves careful examination precisely because it sounds so theological while functioning as something else entirely.
Notice what the accusation accomplishes. It reframes a complex exegetical and scientific question—how should faithful Christians understand the relationship between Genesis and the findings of modern geology, cosmology, and biology?—into a simple binary: you either take God at his word or you compromise. There is no room in this framework for the possibility that devout, Bible-believing Christians might read Genesis differently than Ken Ham does for good exegetical reasons. There is no room for the long Christian tradition of distinguishing between what Scripture says and what our interpretation of Scripture says. There is no acknowledgment that Christians have held a range of views on the age of the creation for centuries, including many who are beyond reproach in their commitment to biblical authority.
Ham opens the video by quoting 1 Corinthians 11:19—“For there must also be factions among you so that those who are approved may become evident among you”—as a kind of scriptural warrant for what follows. But this is a remarkable use of that text. Paul is writing about divisions within the Corinthian church that he is lamenting, not celebrating or encouring. The verse acknowledges that divisions will come and that God will use them providentially, but it is not an invitation to go looking for fights with other believers. When Ham uses this passage to introduce an attack on Ross and Metaxas, he is, I believe, revealing something about how he understands his own role: not as a fellow Christian working through difficult questions alongside brothers and sisters, but as a gatekeeper tasked with identifying who is and who is not “standing on truth.”
The Observational-vs-Historical Science Canard
Partway through the conversation, Ham returns to one of his most well-worn arguments: the distinction between “observational” or “experimental” science and what he calls “historical” or “origins” science. The claim, familiar to anyone who has followed AiG for more than a few minutes, is that conclusions about the past are inherently suspect because “you weren’t there.” Real science, on this view, is what happens in a laboratory where you can repeat experiments. Everything else (geology, cosmology, paleontology, evolutionary biology) is just speculation dressed up in a lab coat.
I have written extensively about why this distinction, at least as AiG deploys it, is philosophically confused and scientifically illiterate. Philosophers of science do recognize meaningful differences between experimental and observational (or historical) sciences, but no serious philosopher of science would conclude from those differences that historical sciences are unreliable or that their conclusions are merely speculative. Astronomy, geology, forensic science, and archaeology all work by generating testable hypotheses about the past and then checking those hypotheses against observable evidence in the present. When a geologist examines the Coconino Sandstone in the Grand Canyon and concludes that it was deposited in a desert environment, that conclusion is testable—you can examine the grain size, cross-bedding angles, fossil trackways, and mineralogy and compare them with known desert environments. The fact that no one was there to watch the sand being deposited does not make the inference speculative any more than the fact that no one witnessed a crime makes forensic evidence inadmissible.
What is particularly revealing is that AiG itself cannot consistently maintain this distinction. Their own geologists and biologists constantly make claims about the past—about what happened during Noah’s Flood, about how animals diversified after leaving the Ark, about the formation of the geological column—that depend on exactly the same kinds of inferential reasoning they dismiss as unreliable when practiced by mainstream scientists. When AiG’s Andrew Snelling argues that radiometric decay rates were accelerated during the Flood, he is doing historical science. When Nathaniel Jeanson claims that mitochondrial DNA mutation rates prove a young earth, he is doing historical science. The distinction is not between reliable and unreliable methods; it is between conclusions AiG likes and conclusions AiG does not like.
Mortenson’s History of Geology: What He Knows But Will Not Tell His Audience
Of all the elements in this video, the most frustrating to me is Dr. Terry Mortenson’s claims about the history of geology. Mortenson holds a PhD in the history of geology from the University of Coventry, and his doctoral work focused on the so-called “scriptural geologists” of the early nineteenth century—clergymen who resisted the emerging consensus about deep time. He is, in other words, someone who has studied this history in detail and knows better than what he tells his audiences.
In this video, Mortenson asserts that the idea of millions of years was the result of “philosophical anti-biblical assumptions” that “took control of geology 200 years ago from a conscious rejection of the word of God.” This is a story AiG tells repeatedly, and it is deeply misleading. What Mortenson’s own research demonstrates—though he consistently declines to emphasize this point—is that many of the geologists who first recognized that the earth must be far older than a few thousand years were themselves devout Christians, including ordained clergy. These were not atheists waging war on Scripture. They were Bible-believing men who went out to study God’s creation and found that the rocks told a story far longer than they had expected. Their conclusions were driven not by anti-biblical philosophy but by the sheer weight of the geological evidence they encountered in the field.
As one historian of science has noted in response to Mortenson’s own published work: “Mortenson’s arguments also seem to imply that once upon a time Christians studied nature through the lens of an uncompromising scriptural worldview, with the Bible in one hand and their scientific instruments in the other. One point I am trying to make is that such a golden age of heroic Biblicism never existed.” The narrative of a noble church corrupted by godless geologists is a myth. The actual history is more interesting and more theologically instructive: faithful Christians encountered God’s creation, studied it carefully, and found that it challenged their existing assumptions. They did not abandon Scripture. They revised their interpretation of Scripture in light of what God had revealed through his creation—which is exactly what conservative evangelical tradition, with its robust theology of general revelation, would predict.
“Secular Means Anti-God”: The Theology of Suspicion
One of the most alarming moments in the video comes when Ham declares that “secular doesn’t mean neutral” but rather “secular means anti-God.” He goes further: “The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. As soon as non-Christian scientists are making some statements about origins, I’m immediately suspicious.” This is not merely a theological claim about the noetic effects of sin—a claim I would affirm in its proper Reformed theological context. This is an epistemological declaration that the findings of non-Christian scientists should be presumed false whenever they touch on questions of origins.
But consider where this logic leads. The same non-Christian scientists whose conclusions about the age of the earth Ham rejects are the ones whose work undergirds modern medicine, engineering, and technology—the fields Ham praises as legitimate “observational science.” The geologists who date rock formations also map the subsurface for oil and gas exploration. The physicists who developed radiometric dating also developed nuclear medicine. The biologists who study evolutionary relationships also develop the antibiotics and vaccines that keep us alive. You cannot declare an entire class of human beings epistemologically unreliable on matters of origins while simultaneously relying on their competence in every other domain of scientific practice. The inconsistency is not just philosophical; it is practically absurd.
More importantly, as a evangelical Christian, I find this theology of wholesale suspicion deeply troubling. The doctrine of common grace teaches that God restrains sin and enables even unbelievers to discover truth about his creation. Calvin himself wrote extensively about this. The Westminster Confession affirms that “the light of nature” reveals something of God’s character through what he has made. When Ham teaches his audience that non-Christian scientists are so corrupted by sin that their conclusions about the natural world should be dismissed by default, he is not defending biblical authority. He is undermining the doctrine of general revelation—the very doctrine that should give Christians confidence that studying nature, whoever does the studying, can yield genuine knowledge of God’s world.
The Death-Before-the-Fall Argument and the Character of God
A substantial portion of the video is devoted to one of YEC’s most emotionally powerful arguments: that accepting an old earth means accepting millions of years of death, disease, and suffering before Adam’s sin, and that this would make God the author of a monstrous creation that he inexplicably calls “very good.” Mortenson asks: “What kind of a God creates over millions and billions of years of exploding stars and asteroids hitting the earth and death and disease and mass extinction events and calls that all very good?”
This is a serious theological question, and it deserves a serious answer—not the dismissive treatment it often receives from both sides. But what Ham and Mortenson present as the only possible faithful reading is, in fact, one interpretation among several that have been held by thoughtful, orthodox Christians throughout church history. The claim that Romans 8:19–23 must refer to a cosmic transformation resulting from Adam’s sin in Genesis 3 is a defensible reading, but it is not the only defensible reading. Reformed theologians have long debated what exactly “subjected to futility” means in that passage and whether it refers to the curse in Genesis 3 or to the inherent limitations of a creation that was always intended to be consummated and glorified. The eschatological reading—that creation groans in anticipation of its future perfection, not in memory of a lost past perfection—has deep roots in Reformed theology.
Furthermore, the young-earth model does not actually escape the problem it claims to solve. On the YEC timeline, death and suffering enter the world almost immediately after creation—within days or at most weeks, if Adam fell shortly after being created. Animals begin dying, thorns appear, and the entire creation is cursed. Then, roughly 1,600 years later, God destroys virtually all terrestrial life in a catastrophic global flood that, by AiG’s own reckoning, deposited most of the fossil record—a record that includes the cancer, parasitism, and predation they find so theologically troubling. On this view, the “very good” creation lasted for an almost infinitesimally brief moment before being plunged into suffering and then largely annihilated. I am not sure this picture of God’s purposes is any less troubling than the one they attribute to old-earth creationists.
Who Is Really Driving Young People from the Church?
Perhaps the most painful claim in this video is Ham’s insistence that the acceptance of millions of years is responsible for the “catastrophic generational exodus” from the church. He returns to this argument repeatedly, and it clearly functions as the moral justification for his entire project: we must fight against compromise because compromise is destroying the faith of our children.
I take this concern seriously because I share it. I am deeply troubled by the number of young people leaving the evangelical church, and I believe the way the church handles science-and-faith questions is a significant contributing factor. But here is what I believe the evidence actually shows, and it is the opposite of what Ham claims: it is not “compromise” that drives young people away. It is the rigid, all-or-nothing framework that AiG promotes—the insistence that if you accept an old earth, you have denied biblical authority; that if you find evolutionary biology persuasive, you have chosen man’s word over God’s word; that if you cannot affirm a global flood, you are on a slippery slope to atheism. When young people raised on this framework encounter the actual evidence in a college geology or biology course—evidence that is overwhelming and internally consistent—they do not conclude that AiG was wrong about one interpretive question. They conclude that the entire Christian faith was built on a lie, because that is exactly what AiG told them: if this goes, everything goes.
I have heard from many such young people over the years. Their stories are remarkably consistent. They were told that belief in a young earth was essential to Christian faith. They encountered evidence that the earth is old. They concluded, exactly as they had been taught, that Christianity must therefore be false. The tragedy is not that they learned about deep time. The tragedy is that they were given a framework in which deep time and Christian faith were made to be incompatible. That framework was not imposed on them by secular universities. It was imposed on them by Answers in Genesis.
Ham claims, without providing evidence, that 100,000 people per year come to know Christ as a result of visiting the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum. I have no way to verify that number, and I suspect it deserves a great deal of scrutiny. But even if we take it at face value, it tells us nothing about the far larger number of young people who have walked away from faith because they were taught that Christianity requires the denial of what they can see with their own eyes in the rocks, the fossils, and the stars. Those people do not show up in AiG’s statistics, but they show up in my inbox.
The Irony of the Berean Appeal
Near the end of the video, Ham makes one of his most common appeals: “Be like the Bereans. Search the scriptures. See if these things be so.” He immediately follows this with the admonition that “we’re fallible. We don’t know everything.” This sounds wonderfully humble. But watch what happens in practice. When the letter-writer Ham quotes on his blog is handed a book by his pastor—John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One—what does he do? He leaves it on the desk. And Ham commends this response. The message is clear: search the Scriptures, yes, but do not read the scholars who might interpret them differently than we do. Be a Berean, but only check your Bible against what AiG has told you. Test everything, except the claims of creation science.
This is the deep irony at the heart of AiG’s project. They appeal to the authority of Scripture while simultaneously telling their audience which interpretation of Scripture is permissible. They warn against trusting human authorities while building an entire organization around the personal authority of Ken Ham. They encourage critical thinking about mainstream science while discouraging any critical examination of their own claims. And they accuse Hugh Ross of leading people astray with “scientific claims nobody in the audience can check”—which is precisely what AiG does every time one of their speakers presents a young-earth geological argument to a church audience that has no way to evaluate it.
A Better Way Forward
I do not write any of this to defend Hugh Ross’s theology of creation, which I find problematic in its own ways, or to suggest that Eric Metaxas does not deserve critique for some of his claims. I write it because the way Ham and Mortenson conduct their critique reveals everything that is wrong with the approach AiG has taken to these questions for decades. The “compromise” framework is not a theological argument; it is a rhetorical strategy designed to foreclose honest inquiry. The observational-vs-historical science distinction is not a philosophical insight; it is a device for dismissing inconvenient evidence. The narrative of godless geologists corrupting the church is not history; it is a myth that Mortenson’s own research contradicts. And the claim that accepting an old earth destroys faith is not supported by the evidence; it is, tragically, a self-fulfilling prophecy for those raised within AiG’s all-or-nothing framework.
There is a better way to be a faithful Christian who takes both Scripture and creation seriously. It begins with the conviction that all truth is God’s truth—that what we learn from studying the natural world cannot ultimately contradict what God has revealed in his Word, because both revelations have the same Author. It continues with the humility to recognize that our interpretation of Scripture is not the same thing as Scripture itself, and that faithful Christians can disagree about how to read Genesis without anyone being a “compromiser.” And it matures into the confidence that faith built on truth is stronger, not weaker, than faith built on the denial of evidence. The God who made the rocks and the fossils and the distant starlight is not threatened by what they reveal. The question is whether we are willing to listen.
Blessings,
Joel
Naturalis Historia 
Comments or Questions?