Ken Ham started out as a science teacher in Queensland. He ended up building a full-size Noah’s Ark in Kentucky that you can walk around inside.
How a man gets from one to the other is worth knowing.
A schoolmaster’s son
Kenneth Alfred Ham was born on 20 October 1951 in Cairns, in far north Queensland, Australia. His father Mervyn was a Christian educator and a school principal at several schools across Queensland.
So he grew up in a home where the Bible was taken seriously and where teaching was the family trade. Both of those things stuck.
The question he could not leave alone
He trained and worked as a science teacher. And in an Australian state school he ran into the same thing over and over — young people who had been taught the Bible at church and something quite different at school, and who had quietly decided the Bible was the part that must be wrong.
That is the thing he could not let go of. Not the science on its own. The effect it was having on young people’s faith.
Leaving to start again
He left teaching for creation ministry, and spent years with the Institute for Creation Research in America.
In 1994 he left that too, and with two colleagues — Mark Looy and Mike Zovath — started Creation Science Ministries. In 1997 it took the name it still has: Answers in Genesis.
It now runs the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, a full-scale ark built to the dimensions given in Genesis.
What he actually argues
People assume the argument is about dinosaurs. It is not, and never really was.
His argument is that Genesis is the foundation. Every doctrine that matters — sin, death, marriage, why the world is the way it is, why anybody needs saving at all — is laid down in the first eleven chapters of the Bible. Pull those out and the rest has nothing underneath it.
It is a question about authority. If the Bible cannot be trusted where it speaks about history, why would anyone trust it where it speaks about salvation?
Why we point people to him
Because young people in our own community get the same treatment he saw in those Queensland classrooms. Told one thing on a Sunday and the opposite on a Monday, and left to work out on their own which one to drop.
And because he is a schoolteacher at heart. He explains things plainly, for ordinary people, without needing you to have letters after your name.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” — Genesis 1:1
Sources: Wikipedia; Answers in Genesis; HandWiki.
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