The climate may be changing, says Ken Ham, but human activity isn't to blame -- at least, not recent human activity. Instead, the creationist leader wrote in a blog post over the weekend, what we're currently experiencing is just the Earth "settling down" from the flood that God sent to punish biblical sinners.
Ham's words came in response to an article in ChristianToday reporting on a study that found that evangelicals "are the least knowledgeable, interested and supportive of space exploration" -- a phenomenon that, according to the study's author, jibes with the fact that they have also "been hesitant to recognize the discoveries of modern science — from evolutionary origins to climate change."
"Creationists are not against science!" Ham insists in the blog post. "We love science." No, he explains, they just have a problem with observational science: the stuff happening right now that is "testable, repeatable and observable." Ham distinguishes that from what he calls "historical science," which, from an evangelical viewpoint, begins with the assumption that the Bible is truth. Secularists, who for some reason refuse to see that viewpoint as valid, "want people to have a wrong understanding of what the word science means."
Ham also insists that creationists are not climate deniers -- again, they just disagree with secular scientists about why climate change is happening. Here's why Ham thinks it's happening:
Starting from the Bible, we know that there was a global Flood a few thousand years ago that completely changed Earth’s surface and climate, and that the earth is still settling down from this catastrophe. So we should expect there to be some variations in climate change, but this is not alarming and is not the direct result of modern human activity.
...And yes -- because of the effects of sin, the curse and the Flood -- we will continue to witness climate change until the Lord comes!
It serves as an elaboration of the comments Ham made on CNN following his much-publicized creationism debate with Bill Nye, when he told Piers Morgan that the climate change we're currently observing can be explained by original sin.
The comments, in other words, are nothing new for Ken Ham, but they're also a pretty timely reminder of the way that religious beliefs can presuppose opposition to climate action: a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 49 percent of respondents, and 77 percent of white evangelical Protestants, believe recent natural disasters could be attributed to biblical "end times." Climate Progress is careful to point out that not all evangelical groups disavow man-made climate change, while Pope Francis has made what's been widely interpreted as a biblical case for climate action: “if we destroy Creation," he said, "Creation will destroy us.”
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