In Spring 2012, Ken Ham from the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., spoke in Paducah, Ky., at the Heartland Baptist Church.
The end of a Christmas season and the beginning of another spring semester here at Murray State, an institution dedicated to the dissemination of information on how our world really works, is an opportune time to comment on the disastrous content of his talk.
Despite his dogmatic claims to the contrary, dinosaurs and humans have never co-habited this planet.
His utterly absurd interpretation of Biblical scripture requires a complete fabrication and thorough denial of all we know about dinosaurs, humans and other animals’ existence on this Earth. We should be outraged.
The idea that dinosaurs ever walked the Earth at the same time as humans is as utterly fanciful and completely wrong as suggesting that Santa Claus is really, really real.
We tell our children the truth as they get older because given a complete absence of evidence for a real Santa Claus, we know better. We all know it is a myth. To insist Santa existed as our children got older would be the worst sort of lie, but there’s a worse one.
Ham’s supposition that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as humans is not only completely lacking in evidence as much as the Santa myth, but worse, is in direct opposition to mountains of evidence to the contrary.
The denial of the fossil, geologic, biologic and genetic evidence that absolutely demonstrates there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that dinosaurs were anywhere closer than 60 million years removed from the advent of humanity is as obscene a lie as ever perpetrated on the American public.
And the state of Kentucky is giving this clown millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when real education is being cut by millions in this state to turn his lies into a water park. We should all be outraged.
No dinosaur fossils have ever been found with human remains nor damningly with any of the millions of species that did exist on Earth with humans.
There are mammals, birds and reptiles that we know for certain that coexisted with humans: cattle, horses, antelope, monkeys, pigs, etc., and we find their fossils by the millions in strata all over the world with early human and recent human remains. But not once ever, anywhere on the planet has a single dinosaur bone been found with any of those millions of species, or us.
Not once. Not anywhere, not anytime.
The coexistence of dinosaurs and humans is a complete lie. To teach otherwise goes directly against the commitment to evidence and the honest advance of human knowledge that this and every other university stands for.
And yet we have religious organizations on this campus whose leaders tell our students to ignore their biology and archaeology textbooks and professors that demonstrate the data of the completely separate evolution of humans and dinosaurs.
We should all be outraged, and some of us are.
Letter by William Zingrone, assistant professor of psychology.