A Mysterious Call from Friedrich Nietzsche: Follow Ken Ham’s White Rabbit! There is No Spoon, and Facts Mean Nothing!

The other day, I received a short note from someone who had a question regarding one of my posts on Ken Ham. He asked, “Since Ken Ham says that the evidence for YEC is all a matter of interpretation, is he subtly admitting that either YEC has no evidence (like he claims evolution doesn’t) or that evolution has lots of evidence (like he claims YEC does)?”

My response was basically this: Ham’s recurring mantra is “We all have the same evidence, but it’s all about interpretation.” You see this on display in one of the first exhibits at the Creation Museum: there is an archeological dig where scientists are digging up a dinosaur fossil. The exhibit explains that “secular scientists” interpret the fossil as being millions of years old, and the rock layers in which it was found as being laid down over millions of years, whereas “creation scientists” interpret the fossil as having being from a dinosaur that perished in Noah’s flood, a mere 4,000 years ago.

The message is clear: same evidence, different interpretations, and those interpretations are based on one’s starting point and one’s worldview.

A Mysterious Phone Call from Nietzsche…Follow the White Rabbit…
Then a funny thing happened. As if I was in my own scene from The Matrix, my phone rang. I picked it up, said, “Hello?” And a voice on the other end said, “Neo! I’ve been waiting to talk to you. I’ve had to wait until you were able to see the truth! I am…Friedrich Nietzsche!”

And then I let out the standard Keanu Reeves reaction, “Woah! How is that possible?”

And Nietzsche said, “We don’t have time for that now. You need to listen carefully:

There are no facts, just interpretations. The facts don’t speak for themselves. They must be interpreted. Now go, and follow the white rabbit…or the fruit-eating velociraptor…whatever…just go!”

And then the phone went dead.

I immediately got on “Google,” typed in “There are not facts, just interpretations,” and lo and behold: it was a Friedrich Nietzsche quote! The point Nietzsche was making was that in a godless universe, there is no such thing as actual truth, and that what people accept as “truth” really is just the interpretation of the person who has been able to exercise his “will to power” over society.

Nietzsche was the philosopher who foresaw the age of postmodernism and the current phenomenon of “alternative facts.” What that means, obviously, is that “facts” are squishy, and you can make them mean whatever you want or need them to mean. Spin things as much as you can so that you can win the argument, further your agenda, and exercise your will to power over others.

Indeed, that quote is really quite disturbing: it is saying there is no facts or absolute truth to rely upon. Everything is up for interpretation, nothing is stable. Or to quote from the Matrix, “There is no spoon.”

The Next Google Search
My mind was racing, so I quickly “googled” the other quote that Nietzsche had given me: The facts don’t speak for themselves. They must be interpreted.” And lo and behold! What came up was a June 4^th, 2015 article by Ken Ham at Answers in Genesis entitled, “Can Forensic Scientists Prove Evolution?”

In a nutshell, Ken Ham discussed the supposed difference between “observational science” and “historical science.” He likened “observational science” to forensic investigators gathering evidence from a crime scene; but at the same time interpreting the evidence falls into the realm of “historical science,” because the investigators “weren’t there” when the crime happened. Therefore, there is the chance that they end up interpreting the evidence wrong.

And for that matter, according to Ham, collecting the evidence involves a bit of “historical science” too, because what is collected is determined by what the investigators may or may not know: “The investigator does not know if the evidence was tampered with, planted to frame someone, or was contaminated, or perhaps the investigator purposely falsified the evidence. And sometimes evidence that would be very relevant is missed because the investigator did not know of its relevance! Now, after all of the observational evidence has been collected, the data must be interpreted. Reconstructing what happened is historical science.”

If you read the full post, Ham’s point is clear: forensic evidence doesn’t speak for itself—it has to be interpreted, and sometimes investigators interpret things wrong.

So what does that have to do with evolution? Ham says that evolutionists often claim that evolution is like forensic science: it’s just a matter of putting the evidence together. But the problem is, just as investigators can interpret things wrong, so do secular evolutionists. They have the same evidence Ken Ham has, but “an evolutionist interprets the evidence through the lens of man’s ideas about the past—millions of years and evolution.” By contrast, YECists like Ken Ham come to an entirely different conclusion because they have a different starting point, and that causes them to interpret the same evidence in an entirely different way.

According to Ham, the starting point determines the conclusion. The facts of the evidence don’t determine anything. It’s up to the person to “interpret” (i.e. manipulate) the facts in order to achieve his/her desired end, and to convince people that they’re right.

Take Them to Court!
So in a crime case, where does the evidence get heard? In court, of course. And, as Ham states, it is in court that the prosecutor puts forth the forensic evidence and gives his interpretation of it to try to convict the defendant. And, it is in that same court that the defense attorney tries to interpret the same evidence in a different way, in order to try to get a “not guilty” verdict for his client.

But there is one other piece of evidence that Ham then brings in to this analogy: eyewitness testimony. And it’s true: eyewitness testimony carries a lot of weight in a court case. Well, Ham points out that Christians do, in fact, have eyewitness testimony regarding “historical science” and the age of the earth: GOD. And since God never lies, His testimony is true.

But evolutionists ignore the eyewitness testimony of God, and that is why they come to the wrong conclusions about the age of the earth: their starting point isn’t the Bible. That is why, according to Ham, “Biblical creation—even if it provides a far more consistent and better explanation of the evidence—is automatically rejected because it doesn’t match with the starting assumptions of secular scientists.”

Ham then triumphantly ended his article with, “The evidence must be interpreted, and what you believe about the past determines how you interpret the evidence.”

So What’s the Connection?
As I soaked in Ham’s article, trying to get my mind wrapped around what he claimed, it came to me: Ken Ham is thoroughly Nietzschean in his handling of facts. Ham said it himself: facts don’t tell you anything…it’s all about interpretation.

And the ironic thing is that Ham plays fast and loose with the facts in an attempt to prove that the Bible is absolutely truthful. But his assumption that Genesis 1-11 is giving scientific historical “eyewitness testimony” is a claim that isn’t supported by any facts in Church history, and it contradicts some of the most basic rules of proper biblical exegesis. Now, there are a lot of things one can point out in Ham’s article that are highly problematic to say the least, but I just want to make this one point:

If you follow the white rabbit, you’ll find that Ham’s pre-fall fruit-eating velociraptors and pre-flood advanced technology that built Noah’s Ark takes you down the rabbit hole into a postmodern abyss where down is up, and up is down, and facts mean nothing, and interpretation is manipulation.