Ken Smith:

I’ve dug a bit more history out of my archives. These were obtained from the annual reports filed with the Queensland Department of Consumer Affairs (or wahtever the name of the Department was 20 years ago) to which all registered companies in Queensland have to submit their annual reports and financial statements.

Other posters wrote:

(Ken Smith) writes:

“Jason Gastrich” <> writes:

Has anyone visited AIG in Australia? They have one of their headquarters there.

Perhaps a bit of history might help here. Ken Ham first came to the notice of people when he started working for the Creation Science Foundation in Australia – in fact, if my memory is correct, he was one of the founding members.

Correct

Ken:

Here is the information which is on public record as mentioned above. The Creation Science Foundation was set up in 1980. The Articles of Association limit the membership to a maximum of 100. When set up there were only seven members: their names and occupations were:

Kenneth Alfred Ham – missionary, John Barry Mackay – teacher, John Andrew Thallon – accountant, Tyndale John Rendle-Short – medical practitioner, David John Denner – teacher, Alfred John Maynard Osgood – medical practitioner, Robert Stephen Gustafson – solicitor.

By 1984 the same seven people were the sole members, and the only change was that John Mackay was now described as a “missionary”. And in both years these same seven were the Directors of the organisation.

I haven’t bothered to get hold of any later information, but the occupations give little confidence in anything they say or write about science.

A comment a colleague made in 1985 about this sorry state of affairs:

Far from being a broad-based movement with mass membership, the Creation Science Foundation consists of seven members who regularly re-elect themselves to the Directorships and who, one assumes, report to themselves about how things are going at the Annual General Meetings. From the articles of association, it is clear that nobody can become a member of the Foundation without approval and so they remain as a small group in complete control of the foundation’s affairs.

Others:

After assorted disagreements between people, the full story of which hasn’t been revealed, John Mackay, another one of the founding members departed and set up his own creationist organizationh.

Yes, John MacKay lives down the road from the church I choose to worship in. He runs “Creation Research”.

Some time after this Ken Ham, who had been on several tours to USA, decided that the climate was much more favourable for creationism in USA than here at home, and moved there and set up Answers in Genesis.

I am unaware of Ken Ham’s motives for moving to the US. However it seems more reasonable to conclude it was because he thought the US was larger and needed the message more.

Shortly after that the Creation Science Foundation changed its name to Answers in Genesis. Rumour has it that this was done just in time to avoid a lawsuit about misrepresentation of the word “science”.

This “rumor” was made by the Skeptics. It is false, because if you look at the letter head of any Answers in Genesis newsletters, they will have in small print under it. Something like ministing as Creation Science. So they are not “hiding” from the word science like some skeptics would have people belief.

Ken:

I’ve since done a bit of checking. It was much more than a rumour.

A number of scientists throughout Australia had become very concerned about the poor understanding of the nature of science exhibited by first year students at universities. After conducting some surveys it was discovered that a significant number of students were so confused that they believed an incompatible mixture of creationist ideas and perfectly normal scientific ideas, such as accepting the 10 to 20 billion year age of the universe in response to one question, but stating that the earth (and life on it) was only thousands of years old in response to another question.

Further discussions led to discovering that many of these students got their ideas about cosmology from science books or TV, but their ideas about biology (and hence the age of the earth) from creationist preachers. And they were, at that stage, not sufficiently knowledgable about biological matters to put awkward questions to the preachers.

This was the first many scientists had heard about the Creation Science Foundation. So, naturally, they got pretty uptight about non-scientists going around preaching garbage (to use one of the politer words they used)

to ignorant masses under the guise of science. But by the time they got sufficiently well organised to inquire into possible legal challenges the organisation had become Answers in Genesis.

And given the extreme difficulty of even trying to do anything about a religious organisation – there had been a long-running battle over Scientology in Victoria a few years previously – they decided not to proceed any further.

Things were a bit different in Queensland, the base for CSF. In 1984 a back-bencher put a Dorothy Dix question to the then Minister for Education about the teaching of evolution in schools. His reply was rather confused, but he finished with the words “Creation is taught as the origin of the species”. The Dean of Science at the University of Queensland promptly fired off a letter complaining about this. At the next meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Science he reported on the letter, and the Board voted to support him 80 to 1 (the 80 is from memory, and it may have been a few more; the 1 is definite). There were about a dozen abstentions, and they wanted the number recorded, a very unusual proceeding, because they thought that the Board shouyldn’t even be taliking about non-scientific matters, much less voting on them

And apart from the single creationist, all the other Christians on the board (including me) supported the Dean.

Others:

So in one sense tha Australian organization should be regarded as the parent body, and AiG in USA as one of its successful offspring.

Correct.

I guess I should point out, that the “shop” that was in question initially. Is just a little shop, that is not very impressive to look at or even browse through. However, upstairs I recall they have a very impressive Video library, that has pretty much any video that deals with Creation/Evolution. Those videos are not available to the public (I asked 🙂 but theyare for the staff.

Ken:

Now I wonder why the videos aren’t available to the public? Could it be that many of them present evolution, and the evidence for it, so well that creationists can’t answer? Or could it be that some of them include interviews with evangelical Christians who support evolution, like the series on evolution from USA which the ABC broadcast a few years ago?

If this thread goes on much longer I’ll repost something from one of the eminent theologians of the period just after Constantine was converted. Apart from the comment in my current signature file.

Salaam Ken Smith

— Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `It [stupidity] is a disease proof against all efforts to treat it, not through any fault in the physician, but because the patient is himself incurable.’ Augustine of Hippo, in “The City of God”

I made my first contact with, what was then, the Creation Science Foundation, if my memory serves me correct about 1986, after I had spoken on 2GB, the first Sunday night in August, 1985, about the attributes of living things as taught at the Infants level of education. The aspect of importance is that living things procreate and that, from that, it can be deduced that there had to be a Supreme Living Being Who created originally.

As I do not have scientific degrees to personally research the issues in this topic it has been my intention to present the views of the Creation Scientists. I must admit that I surmised that one reason for the change in name to Answers in Genesis was because of the confusion that might exist with the Christian Science denomination – but I have not followed through on that.

While the Answers in Genesis organisation are working from the dating of the Biblical record, they are just not quoting those scriptures. They are seeking to show that THERE IS SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR A MUCH YOUNGER EARTH than evolutionists say it is.

From the readings I have done to date it seems to me that a very vital area of research in that matter is the accuracy of the dating methods given by evolutionists. I was following this in the topic ‘Answers to Creationism’.

I can’t see how that, after calculations in the present over a given period of time, that it is possible to extrapolate the results by a mathematical equation to many thousands or millions of years. The mathematical equation may be valid for the present, but its extrapolation may not be necessarily true over those long periods. It seems to me that much more scientific evidence must be evaluated before a decision can be made.

Ken Smith wrote:

This is where you need to delve into the basic laws of physics. Quantum electrodynamics for a start, and then you can go a bit further and learn about electroweak theory, which unified QED and the weak nuclear force. This is adequate for an understanding of beta-decay. If you want the background for alpha-decay you need to study quantum chromodynamics, and the interactions of quarks and the way they form what are called elementary particles even though quarks are more elementary.

And on the way you should be able to pick up some of the predictions which these theories have made before there was any evidence of the particles. I’ll give just three examples of predictions. (a) Dirac’s prediction of the positron, identical with an electron except that it has a positive instead of a negative charge. (b) Fermi’s predication of the neutrino. (c) The predication of the omega- hyperon – that’s a negative sign after “omega”, not a hyphen. I can’t remember who predicted this.

All these predictions were made on the basis that the laws of physics don’t change with time. Now if creationists want to dispute using the known decay rates to date ancient rocks, they will have to come up with some theory in which the laws of physics change, and then derive a prediction from their theory, and then find experimental evidence in support of their prediction. But until they do all this, their rantings will, rightly, be dismissed by the scientific community.

I could mention the germ theory of disease, and the bad air theory of disease, and the demon possession theory of disease, but that’s too far outside my expertise – maybe someone else can take up that one.

http://www.icr.org/newsletters/impact/impactdec03.html?ref=afoh

Salaam Ken Smith

— Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `It [stupidity] is a disease proof against all efforts to treat it, not through any fault in the physician, but because the patient is himself incurable.’ Augustine of Hippo, in “The City of God”