I recently came across a short post from Ken Ham on the Answers in Genesis website titled “New Study About Eggs Reminds Me of God’s Word.” It is a brief piece of only a few paragraphs. But brief does not mean inconsequential. Ham is making a significant epistemological claim, one that I believe does real damage to the faith of thoughtful Christians, so I thought it would be worth taking some time to address his concern.
The argument goes something like this: nutritional science told us for decades that eggs were bad for us; then it told us they were fine; now a new study says eating eggs might reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s by up to 27%. Since science keeps changing, we shouldn’t put our faith in “man’s fallible interpretations about the world around us.” We should trust God’s Word instead.
At first glance this sounds like reasonable advice. And there is something genuinely right buried in there. Our ultimate confidence, as Christians, is not in scientific consensus but in the One who created the world that science investigates. But the argument Ham is actually making is not a humble theological observation. It is a rhetorical maneuver, and a familiar one. It uses a real phenomenon (science revises its conclusions) to smuggle in a far larger and much more dubious claim (scientific findings about the history of the Earth and life on it cannot be trusted). Understanding why this argument fails is, I would suggest, one of the most important things a thoughtful Christian can do when engaging with YEC literature.
Not All Scientific Claims Are Created Equal
Let’s start with the science itself, because the example Ham has chosen is actually an instructive one, although not in the way he intends. The back-and-forth history of dietary advice about eggs is a real story of scientific revision. But it is worth asking why nutritional science has proven so difficult to get right in the first place.
Human nutritional science is, frankly, one of the hardest areas of empirical science to do well. I’m glad I don’t work in this field but I’m thankful some are willing to tackle these very complex and time-consuming studies. Researchers cannot randomly assign people to eat specific diets for decades and then observe health outcomes under controlled conditions. They rely heavily on self-reported food diaries, which are notoriously unreliable. How much of an effect eating eggs may have on your risk of heart disease—as compared to everything else you may eat—is genuinely small. Further, because the effects are small, large, well-designed studies may reach different conclusions than smaller, poorly-designed ones. Confounding variables are everywhere. A person who eats eggs every morning in 1975 may also be eating bacon, white toast, and smoking half a pack of cigarettes before noon. Disentangling the effect of the egg from all of that is genuinely difficult. Consider that back then we didn’t know what the effects of any of those variables were so it was extremely difficult to sort out the variable that may be important and which ones aren’t. Scientists publish their results and news agencies often inflate their significance and don’t report the nuances of the conclusions which also adds to the impression that the science is constantly changing.
This is not a failure of science. It is a description of why certain kinds of scientific questions take longer to answer with confidence than others. The revision of dietary advice about eggs reflects the actual complexity of the thing being studied such as human metabolism, interacting with diverse diets, across diverse populations, over long timescales. When we understand this, the story Ham tells looks less like “science is unreliable” and more like “science, doing its job properly, eventually arrived at a more accurate answer than it had before.”
Now compare this to the scientific claims that Ham is actually trying to undermine. When geologists using multiple independent radiometric methods such as uranium-lead, potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, all converge on the same ages for the same rock formations, that convergence is not the same kind of claim as “dietary cholesterol raises LDL levels.” When ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica preserve hundreds of thousands of annual layers, each with its own chemical signature, that is not the same kind of claim as “eggs are bad for your heart.” When light arrives from a galaxy one billion light years away, the physics governing the speed of that light is not subject to the same methodological difficulties as distinguishing the effect of egg yolks from the effect of bacon. These are not frontier questions where conflicting small studies are slowly being resolved. They represent decades of convergent, cross-disciplinary evidence with extraordinary mutual corroboration.
Ham’s argument works only if you treat all scientific claims as epistemologically equivalent — as if the evidence for the age of the Earth is as murky and contested as the evidence that eggs reduce Alzheimer’s risk by 27%. It is not. And I would argue that conflating these categories, as Ham’s post implicitly does, is not careful thinking. It is a category error that serves a predetermined conclusion.
The Self-Undermining Nature of the Argument
There is a deeper problem here that I suspect many of Ham’s readers do not notice, because they encounter this argument in a devotional register rather than an analytical one. But let’s follow his logic where it leads.
If “science changes its conclusions” is a sufficient reason to distrust scientific findings, then this principle must apply to all science. Ant that includes the science that Answers in Genesis produces and relies upon. AiG employs credentialed scientists with earned PhDs. It publishes papers in its own Answers Research Journal. It makes specific empirical claims: about sediment deposition rates, about the rate of genetic mutation, about the behavior of flood waters, about the distribution of fossils. When AiG researchers argue that the geological column can be explained by Noah’s Flood, they are making a scientific argument — they are claiming that the physical evidence is better explained by their model than by the mainstream one. That is, by definition, a claim subject to the same evidential evaluation they are telling us not to trust.
Ham cannot simultaneously argue that (a) AiG’s scientific research supports a young Earth and a global Flood and (b) science is too changeable and fallible to trust. If fallibility disqualifies mainstream geology, it disqualifies AiG geology on exactly the same grounds. The argument is self-undermining at its foundation. I have made this observation before in other contexts, and I think it deserves emphasis: YEC organizations cannot sustain a wholesale skepticism about scientific methodology while also claiming to practice it. They want the credibility of science including the journals, the credentials, the citations, while deflecting the accountability that comes with it.
What’s particularly frustrating is that the Christian tradition Ham claims to represent actually has robust resources for thinking about this more carefully. But those resources require a more nuanced engagement with epistemology than Ham’s post attempts.
Revision Is What Trustworthy Knowledge Does
Let me say something that may surprise readers who have absorbed the framing Ham offers: I am more confident in science precisely because it revises its conclusions. Not less.
Think about what it would mean for a body of knowledge never to revise its conclusions. It would mean that the knowledge claims were not subject to correction — that evidence, however compelling, could not change what practitioners believed. We have a word for that kind of belief system. We call it dogma. The willingness to revise is not a liability. It is the most fundamental marker of intellectual integrity. A doctor who updates her treatment protocols when new evidence emerges is more trustworthy than one who has not changed her practice since medical school, not less.
In the egg story, notice what actually happened. Early studies, relying on imperfect methods, suggested a connection between dietary cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Later, larger, better-designed studies showed that the connection was more complicated: saturated and trans fats, not dietary cholesterol per se, were the stronger predictors. Later still, researchers began identifying specific compounds in egg yolks (choline, lutein, zeaxanthin, specific fat-soluble vitamins) that might have protective effects against neurodegeneration. Each revision represented an increase in understanding. The system was working. To use the fact that it was working as evidence that it cannot be trusted is to invert the logic of the situation entirely.
This matters theologically as well as epistemologically. The Reformed theological tradition carries a beautiful motto: semper reformanda — always reforming, always being reformed according to the Word of God. The great figures of the Reformed tradition understood that our access to truth, even in theology, is partial and developing. We confess a faith that is always being refined through careful engagement with God’s two books: the book of Scripture and the book of nature. John Calvin himself, in his commentary on Genesis, invoked the concept of secondary causation — the idea that God works through natural means, and that understanding those means is a legitimate and even worshipful activity. B.B. Warfield, the great champion of biblical inerrancy at Princeton Theological Seminary, saw no contradiction between a high view of Scripture and the evidence for an old Earth and biological evolution. The intellectual tradition Ham is claiming to defend has far more room for scientific revision than his post implies.
The False Binary and Its Pastoral Consequences
There is a pastoral dimension to this that I want to address directly, because I think it is where the real harm is done.
Ham’s post frames the situation as a choice: trust “man’s fallible interpretations” or trust God’s Word. This framing is rhetorically powerful and theologically confused in equal measure. The question is never, in practice, God’s Word versus science. The question is always a particular interpretation of God’s Word versus a particular body of scientific evidence. Ham’s reading of Genesis 1-11 is an interpretation — a specific hermeneutical tradition with a specific historical origin, one that post-dates the Westminster Standards, Calvin’s Institutes, and most of the great confessional Reformed tradition. When he presents it as simply “what the Bible says,” he is omitting centuries of exegetical diversity within orthodox Christianity.
I raise this not to argue about Genesis interpretation in this post, but to point out the structure of the problem. When a young person in a church is told that the Bible teaches a young Earth and that the only alternative is to trust fallible man-made science, they have been handed a package deal. If they later encounter, as they inevitably will, the genuinely overwhelming evidence for an ancient Earth — not just from one field but from physics, astronomy, geology, genetics, and paleontology converging independently on the same conclusions — they face a crisis. Not because Christianity is false, but because they were never told that a faithful, confessional, Christian could follow the evidence without abandoning their faith.
I have heard from dozens of people in exactly this situation. They did not leave the faith because of geology. They left because they were told there was no middle ground, and when the geology proved impossible to dismiss, they concluded that the theology must fall too. This is the pastoral catastrophe that arguments like Ham’s post, however sincerely offered, produce. A faith that depends on scientific gaps and contested empirical claims is a fragile faith. A faith that rests on the resurrection, on the covenant faithfulness of God, on the testimony of Scripture to Christ — that faith has room to let geology be geology.
What Scientific Change Actually Teaches Us
Let me close where Ham tried to open: with eggs.
The history of egg science is genuinely interesting, and I think it actually teaches us something rather different from what Ham intends. It teaches us that natural reality is more complex than our first approximations of it. Early researchers were not stupid. They observed real correlations and drew plausible inferences. But they were working with imperfect methods on a complicated system, and they got some things wrong. Subsequent researchers, building on that earlier work, refined the picture. The latest findings that regular egg consumption may reduce Alzheimer’s risk by up to 27% are themselves not the final word. They represent the current best understanding, which may itself be refined as methods improve and sample sizes grow.
This is how knowledge works. Not as a sequence of random lurches between contradictory conclusions, but as a long, patient, self-correcting refinement of our understanding of a creation that is far richer and more intricate than any single generation of investigators can fully map. As a biologist, I find this genuinely exciting. Every correction is an invitation to look more carefully. Every refinement reveals more of the structure of the world that God has made.
Our confidence as Christians does not rest on the infallibility of any scientific finding, including this one about eggs. But it also does not require us to treat scientific revision as evidence that knowledge is impossible or that the findings of geology and biology are no more reliable than a 1975 dietary survey. The doctrine of natural revelation, embedded in confessional Reformed theology since the Belgic Confession’s famous second article, teaches that creation reliably reveals the glory and power of its Maker. Studying that creation carefully — following its evidence honestly, revising our conclusions when the evidence requires it — is not an act of unfaith. It is an act of intellectual obedience to the One who made both the creation and the minds with which we investigate it.
We can trust science to do what science does: to test, to revise, to refine, to converge on truth through patient accumulation of evidence. And we can trust God’s Word to do what it does: to bear witness to the living Christ, to call us to covenant faithfulness, and to tell us who we are and whose we are. Conflating the reliability of those two things — or using the ordinary operation of one to undermine confidence in the other — does not serve the church. It leaves people less equipped to think well about the world God has made.
Blessings,
Joel
Naturalis Historia 
brilliant post
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