When Hostility Helps

As many of our readers know, the media has a mixed relationship with AiG and the Ark Encounter. Even when they contain comments we don’t agree with, some pieces are fair and balanced, like the recent article in the Toronto Star. Though we might not share the views of a particular writer, we appreciate the effort put forth by these journalists to report on our activities rather than editorialize them.

However, other news pieces hardly qualify as reports. The recent article by Brandon Ambrosino in Sunday’s Boston Globe falls in the more hostile category.

Ironically, in attempting to attack the Ark Encounter and AiG, Ambrosino’s long article ends up undermining his own position—and illustrating one of the ways that more hostile media end up helping the very activities they’re trying to oppose.

Ostensibly, the Globe article claims to be about “Noah’s Ark, dinosaurs, and a theme park.” In practice, it’s a long editorial whose main goal is an attempt to prove how “unscientific” creationists are. The author specifically tries to demonstrate that creation scientists are so desperate to buttress their weak ideas that they habitually fit scientific facts to preconceived conclusions.

Paradoxically, in his efforts to substantiate his factually erroneous thesis, the writer showcases his own desperate attempts to fit facts to his preconceived ideas about creationists.

It’s obvious from the article that the reporter had formed his opinions before he ever interviewed AiG staff and toured our Creation Museum. Operating from the unassailable premise that creationists fit scientific facts to preconceived conclusions, nothing that he learned could shake him from his closed-minded position.

Secularists rarely read our scientific literature.

As just one of many examples we could cite, in his two-hour interview with me, the reporter asked me why so many scientists reject creation. In his Globe article, he correctly reported that I said that secularists rarely read our scientific literature.

Not surprisingly, the writer also interviewed a Fordham University professor of theology and science to get a reaction to my claim. Even less surprisingly, the professor parroted what the reporter hoped to prove—that evolutionists reject creation because creationists fit facts to pre-conceived ideas. As an example, the professor cited the supposedly overwhelming evidence against a 6,000-year age for the earth. In her mind, this evidence should persuade any open-minded person. Since it doesn’t persuade creation scientists, “what researchers at the Creation Museum are doing is not science.”

Unfortunately for the Globe writer, he appears to have forgotten a key part of our interview. At its conclusion, I handed him a copy of each of my published, peer-reviewed, scientific papers on the genetics of origins (see “Recent, Functionally Diverse Origin for Mitochondrial Genes from ~2700 Metazoan Species,” “Mitochondrial DNA Clocks Imply Linear Speciation Rates Within ‘Kinds’,” “A Young-Earth Creation Human Mitochondrial DNA ‘Clock’: Whole Mitochondrial Genome Mutation Rate Confirms D-Loop Results”). It just so happened that these papers documented evidence that puts the evolutionary ideas about the age of the earth into a logic tangle that is nearly impossible to escape.

A more open-minded reporter might have queried the Fordham professor as to whether my papers had been read, since she was offering comments about my beliefs. If she had not read them (which would have proven my point), the reporter could have graciously offered to send her copies (or links to the freely available PDFs) and then asked her later for a reaction. These simple steps might have allowed the writer to empirically test my claims about the practices of evolutionists. Furthermore, he had ample time to do so; the reporter interviewed me on February 19. But nothing in his lengthy article suggests that he read my papers. Which proves the point that I made to him—our opponents don’t read our literature.

At AiG, we appreciate contributions from media that are friendly or even hostile. In fact, despite Ambrosino’s take on the Ark Encounter, I personally enjoyed talking with him, and thought that I gave him much to think about. He likely did not intend to prove my central thesis, but he inadvertently supported what we do.

Perhaps, as a result of this article and others, more of our opponents will reconsider their positions about our science.