God's Great Outdoors

Guest (Male): All men and women in some way or another love God's great outdoors. The creation, not necessarily the radio program. God has set in the human heart a passion for something in creation. On today's program, we'll visit with possibly the world's foremost expert on creation.

He came to this country as a young man, and over the last 50 years, he's made studying the creation not only fun, but also very educational. While most of our programs are mostly based on outdoor passions, today we'll learn more about the creation of the outdoors, but more importantly, the Creator himself. Let's join Dean Hulce now and his very special guest as they dive deep into God's great outdoors and His creation.

Dean Hulce: Welcome to God's Great Outdoors, a trail to adventure. We are today in Kentucky at Answers in Genesis offices, and we're very blessed to have Ken Ham here. Ken, good to have you.

Ken Ham: Great to be with you.

Dean Hulce: Since I took the job with God's Great Outdoors three and a half years ago, you were kind of one of my top goals of someday being able to visit with. I think our listeners will enjoy it.

Ken Ham: Oh, great. I'm glad we could catch up.

Dean Hulce: Ken, I think there's a lot of people that, I would say most Christians, have an idea what Answers in Genesis is from the radio programs over the years and the Creation Museum and the Ark now, and it's gotten a lot of press, both negative and positive in the world. I would love to know how you went from Australia, how Answers in Genesis started from there, or even give us your testimony, your background from that.

Ken Ham: Well, it goes back a few million years. No, I don't believe in millions of years. Me either. I grew up in Australia, so that's my homeland, and we actually moved to the States in 1987. But I traveled all over the state of Queensland with my parents because my father was a teacher and he was transferred every time he was promoted, and he was a principal of the equivalent of elementary school and middle school.

They were wonderful Christian people, godly people. My parents had a heart for reaching people with the Gospel. Wherever they went in Australia, probably less than 1% would be born-again Christians, so it's a very pagan culture. They got transferred to little towns here and there. Sometimes there were no Sunday schools; they started a Sunday school. Or there was only one or two churches, and my father would have to look for which church taught the Bible the best. He was always on about Biblical authority and never compromising God's Word.

They had such an evangelistic heart and they would often invite missionaries from the Open Air Campaigners group. That's a group of missionaries that started in Australia. They would come in and do special programs to reach kids with the Gospel. It was actually one of those programs when I was 10 years old that the Open Air Campaigner missionary had a challenge for those who wanted to commit to trust Christ and to go wherever He wanted them to go and do whatever He wanted them to do. I remember getting a little piece of paper and I signed it to say yes, I'm willing to go wherever You want me to go and do whatever You want me to do. I didn't know that would mean living in the state of Kentucky in America many years later, but when you make that commitment and you mean it, God will take you up on that, obviously.

I was brought up in a home where my father was so adamant that God's Word is the absolute authority and you never compromise God's Word. I remember when we went to one town and the first service we went to in a Presbyterian church, the pastor taught that you can believe in evolution. Well, my father was so upset at that, and that was the last time we were at that church, I can tell you that. But I say all that to say my parents set an incredible example for us. They had a heart for training their children and others to trust God's Word and to trust Him for salvation.

So when it came time for me to go to high school and the books were teaching evolution, at that stage my parents didn't have the scientific answers that we have today. We have a wealth of scientific knowledge today, but back then we didn't, but he had the Biblical answers. He trained us that Genesis 1 to 11 is the foundation for all your doctrine. It's the foundation for everything, the Gospel, everything. If you compromise that, you're undermining the authority of the Word of God and you're undermining the foundation for all your doctrine, for the Gospel.

So I went through high school, then university, not having the scientific answers but still having the Biblical answers. In 1974, as I was graduating with my education degree, I went through and did a degree in biology and environmental science and then education to become a science teacher, a person in our church gave me a little book that had some of the scientific aspects of the fossil record and so on in there and dating methods. But then also that theologically you can't have death before sin. You'll hear me talk about that a lot in a lot of my lectures.

That is, if you're going to believe in millions of years, you believe that because the fossil record supposedly was laid down millions of years before man, but the fossil record is a record of death. Not just death, diseases like cancer in the bones in the fossil record. But after God made man, the Bible says God said everything was very good. So if you believe in millions of years, you're saying God called cancer very good. But the Bible makes it clear that the whole creation groans now because of sin.

That's one of the reasons you can go out and actually kill animals and eat animals. Originally, it wasn't so. We were all vegetarian to start with, the Bible tells us in Genesis chapter 1, verse 29. The animals were all vegetarian to start with too. It wasn't until after the flood that God said we could eat meat in Genesis 9:3 because now it's a different world. But you can't have death before sin, and that really hit me.

Then in 1975, I became a schoolteacher and the first science class I taught in a public school in Australia, the student said, "Sir, we heard you're a Christian, but how can you be a Christian when we know the Bible's not true?" I said, "How do you know the Bible's not true?" "Because of what our textbooks teach about evolution and millions of years." And one of the students then said, "And Noah couldn't fit the animals on the Ark anyway."

I realized right then that they needed answers, and so I started to give them those answers. Actually, years later, I have met people who said they were students in that class, that because of what I taught them, God used that to bring them to salvation. I met someone just this past February, actually, when I was over in Australia doing a tour, who said she'll never forget what I taught in that class. Now she has her own family and so on, which makes me feel old, of course, but she said, "I'll never forget that and God used that in my life and now I'm a committed Christian and now I'm bringing my family to your conference."

That year in 1975, the pastor of the church we were attending asked if I would give a sermon in church. I decided to do it on the topic of Genesis, creation, evolution. People came out and said, "We never heard this before." I started to find some books that had some of the answers in from a scientific perspective as well as Biblical perspective. My wife and I moved to Brisbane. I was transferred there in 1977. I and a schoolteacher friend ran the first ever creation apologetics conference in Australia. I displayed my books and people said, "How do we get those books? We need this information." So my wife and I said, "Well, let's start a bookstore," and we started importing books and had a little bookstore in our home, and that grew and I started speaking all over.

The ministry started to really grow. In 1980, I visited America and the Institute for Creation Research, Dr. Henry Morris. He was one of the authors of the very famous book, *The Genesis Flood*. He asked if I would come over and help them in America get this message into churches. I did that in the '80s, came over each year. Then in 1986, he asked if I would come back and do this full-time with them. We left the ministry in capable hands in Australia to go to America for a season. We thought it'd be for a season. Now, associated with all of that, when I was a schoolteacher, as I was taking students to museums, they were always from an evolutionist point of view and very atheistic.

I cried out and said, "Lord, why can't we have a Christian museum? Why can't we have a creation museum?" So the burden for that goes back to the '70s. In 1980, I and a friend of mine, who was helping us with the ministry, he knew my burden for a creation museum. We stood on a piece of property in Australia and said, "Lord, can we build a creation museum?" God answered that prayer in 2007 in the state of Kentucky in America.

Obviously, God's ways are not ours and His thoughts are not our thoughts. Looking back on it, I could see that it was meant to be here in America because when I came over here, I started to realize, wait a minute, there's a big philanthropic base in America, there's a big Christian base in America. America sends missionaries out around the world. It's also the business center of the world. It makes sense that if you're going to impact the world, you would do it from here.

There is a long story as to how all that happened and then how we moved out here to Kentucky in 1994 specifically to build a creation museum. People often ask us why Kentucky. We were looking for an area that was demographically central. At the time, Cincinnati airport was a big Delta hub and we wanted a place that had a good airport, and we loved the rural aspect of Northern Kentucky, which is a part of the Greater Cincinnati area, but it's still very rural in Northern Kentucky, although it has really changed a lot over the years.

But this is within a one-day drive of two-thirds of America's population. Really? So if you take a compass circle around this area, we're just over the river from Cincinnati. In fact, people get confused because when they fly into Cincinnati, they don't realize they're flying into Kentucky and literally right out the door here from the airport. Well, you can see the tower right from my office window here. So our office headquarters, where our Christian school is, we have a Christian school as well called Answers Academy. We're just five minutes from the airport here.

When they fly into Cincinnati airport, it's actually the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky airport is what it really is. So they're flying into Kentucky. You're within a one-day drive, as I said, of two-thirds of the population, so it's really easy for most people to get here. It's easy for people to fly here. Cincinnati is a really nice airport, it's a big airport, and so I can see God's hand in doing all of this.

While we were building the Creation Museum, we said, "Well, what are we going to do next? What are you going to do, sit down and do nothing?" No, we've got to think of what we're going to do next. Because over the years, we'd always tried to get across the size of the Ark, because Noah's flood is such an integral event in history. The fossil record that is used by evolutionists to try to say this is evidence for evolution is actually the record of the flood.

Not only that, atheists use Noah's Ark to say it could never have happened because he couldn't fit the animals on board. We've always tried to get across to people the size of the Ark, and it wasn't different species needed on the Ark; it was kinds. You only needed two dogs that give rise to all the species of dogs today. That's not evolution, it's just dogs, by the way. Same for cats and so on.

We talked about in 2004, we said, "What if we built a life-sized Ark?" Then in 2005, we said, "When the Creation Museum's opened, why don't we make this our number one priority?" In 2007, the Creation Museum opened and then we said, "Okay, now let's build an Ark." By the way, that's not as easy as it sounds. You just can't go to an architect and say, "Could you design me an Ark?"

We've been there. It's an amazing thing. It's the biggest free-standing timber-frame structure in the world, 3.3 million board feet of timber. It's one and a half times the length of a football field, half the width of a football field. At the bow end, it actually is 104 feet high, so that's like 10 stories off the ground. But it's interesting, this is how God leads. When I look back on it, I see how God brought certain people and events at certain times that you can only look back and say, but that's miraculous.

We heard of somebody who knew an architect that grew up Amish and he was Mennonite. He had often talked about designing Noah's Ark. He told us who he was and we went and found him. He was up there near Shipshewana in Indiana, in that big Amish community up there. Found out he went to Notre Dame University and his thesis was to design Noah's Ark and to design it as a timber-frame structure. He introduced us to the Amish people who headed up building a timber-frame structure that was then the biggest in America.

It's not now since the Ark, but it was back then. He introduced us to them, I gave them the vision for the Ark, and they said, "You know, maybe God has been preparing us all these years just for this." Then they committed to get the group that was needed. Actually, the Ark Encounter, it took a few years to get all the engineering diagrams, all the permits, get the land organized, all of that. It's 45 minutes from the Creation Museum.

Once we got that done, it took 20 months to build all of that. We had to move half a million cubic yards of dirt. But the actual timber-frame structure itself, it's a massive timber structure, as you know. That structure with 3.3 million board feet of timber, 1200 tractor-trailer loads of timber that were brought in. There was a special lathe built at a timber mill out in Colorado to prepare the wood for us. The timber-frame structure itself took only nine months. There were 90 Amish and Mennonite craftsmen that did that. It's absolutely amazing.

The architect, once we had finished it all, he said to me, "You know, Ken, I believe this is my life's work. This is what God put me on earth for. I believe my life's work is now done." Then less than two years later, he went to be with the Lord. You look back and say God provided those people at the right time, right place, and been preparing them for years. Just amazing.

Dean Hulce: That's an obvious thing in the Ark and what's done, and you already had the dimensions because they're laid out right in scripture. But all of us, every one of us has the same thing in our lives and just a different way and generally a much smaller way. But we've really enjoyed. We've been to the Ark, we've been to the Creation Museum a couple times. I wouldn't trade it. It's just been an amazing experience for us. We need to take a quick break so our producer Adam can come on and share who makes this show possible. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Ken Ham on God's Great Outdoors.

Adam: For over 30 years, God's Great Outdoors trail to adventure has been broadcast out to win men and women, boys and girls to Jesus Christ. This is only possible by the generosity of our listeners. Thank you to all who have supported us in the past. God has blessed us because of you, and we pray for you to feel His blessings as well.

Additional underwriting support has been provided by Matthews Archery, the leader in the archery industry. Mission Archery, with revolutionary crossbow technology. Hunter Safety Systems, saving lives is what we do. Center Shot Ministries, hit the mark with Center Shot. Wheelchair Whitetails, guided whitetail deer hunts for wheelchair-bound disabled hunters. And Hodgdon Powder Company, the gunpowder people, delivering reliable performance and precision you can trust every time.

God's Great Outdoors has produced many ministry tools, including tracks, DVDs, and books to help you reach others for Jesus Christ. You can access these items, other God's Great Outdoors items, and so much more at our website, godsgreatoutdoors.org. That's godsgreatoutdoors.org.

Dean Hulce: Welcome back to God's Great Outdoors. We're on the trail to adventure outside of Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, right near the airport. When we first started, you mentioned something and it's of interest to me because I didn't know this building was here. The first time I went to the Creation Museum, I believe your office was over there. We actually stopped by to meet you and you were gone that day, but we did get to meet Buddy Davis. He was another one that was kind of on my list to want to interview someday, but I'll have to wait till I get to heaven now because I know he was a big hunter and loved the outdoors.

You mentioned when we first started about a school being here, about the academy, and as you drive up, you can see the signs and what goes on here with the academy.

Ken Ham: By the way, this building that we're in here, Toyota had this building. It was initially built by Cincinnati Bell, then Toyota bought it and added on to it. Beautiful building. It's just slightly longer than the Ark to give you an idea of the size of it. Then they moved to Texas and this building just sat here vacant for a long time. Through a series of miracles, we were able to get this building. We had to refurbish it; it took two years to refurbish it inside, but it's a beautiful building.

I've always had a heart for Christian education. A lot of people don't realize that kids that go to the public schools, which means secular schools, which means anti-God schools, because you're either for Christ or against, secular is not neutral. The majority of them walk away from the church, and we can see that there's been a catastrophic generational loss from the church.

When you look at the Bible, it tells us that we're to be salt, but you can't be salt till you have it. If salt's contaminated, it's good for nothing. So you can't just throw your kids to the world. As parents, we need to be pouring that salt of Biblical truth in them, but preparing them for the world. In other words, the attacks the world makes on God's Word, and today Genesis is attacked big time. We need to be preparing them with answers so that they won't be led astray, teaching them a true Biblical worldview to get them ready for them being in the world so they can be a witness to the world.

I've always been a great supporter of good Christian schools. I say good Christian schools because there are many Christian schools that teach evolution and compromise, and they're destructive. And also home school; we're also great supporters of home school.

Our daughter Renee, she was a nurse, and after a few years said, "Dad, I want to be in the ministry," and she became my executive assistant. Then after a while she said, "Dad, I want to start a Christian school." And so she started what is now called Answers Academy. It's nine years old; we're starting our 10th year this year, actually. It's a very unique school because we want to use the school as a model school, also as a school where we can produce curricula that teaches true Biblical worldview and apologetics and to develop that as well.

We call it a Biblical worldview parent-partnership discipleship school. In other words, parents have to intentionally want their children taught a Biblical worldview to be able to even come to the school. So we're very exclusive in that regard. I know there's a lot of kids out there that if they had opportunity to go to a Christian school, maybe they could be evangelized. The problem is there's two types of Christian schools. Ours is a discipleship parent-partnership school. Then you can have your evangelistic schools, but you've got to be careful because the bad kids will impact the good kids, and they drag the good kids down.

That's why we wanted to have a school where the parents intentionally want their children taught Biblical worldview, they agree to our statement of faith, and they partner with us. In other words, they are delegating authority to us while the kids are at the school, but they're the ones responsible before God for the training of their children. The school has been growing and we've got a Biblical worldview curriculum we're producing. We're already up to grade three, now we're starting on grade four. We're going to produce it all the way through grade 12.

All the Bible curricula we see out there is not true Biblical worldview. Even a lot of Christians don't understand this. They think a Biblical worldview is when you add Bible verses in. But a Biblical worldview is understanding the Bible is a revelation from God who knows everything, and He's given us the key information to be the foundation for our worldview, for our thinking in every area. That's true Biblical worldview.

A lot of people ask questions like, how do you fit dinosaurs into the Bible? No, you don't do that. You start with the Bible to build a Biblical worldview to understand what these bones are in the present and how they got there, therefore to understand what they now call dinosaurs. When it comes to death and suffering, whenever there's a big tragic event, well, how do you fit that with a loving God? No, you start from Scripture to understand everything was perfect, it was exceedingly good, but sin changed everything. Now it's a groaning world because of sin. So it's not God's fault there's death and suffering; it's our fault. We sinned against God, that's why He stepped into history to save us so that we can go back to be with Him. We're alienated from God because of our sin.

To emphasize that we start from God's Word, and it's interesting, Answers Academy equips those kids. I've spoken at the graduation classes for the high school because we're K-12. They video these students to play to all the parents and so on as they're graduating, each of those students giving testimony. They all the time talk about how they know how to defend the faith and how they know how to go out and answer questions because that's the type of school that it is, is preparing them for the world, and we have high academic excellence. Actually, the standardized testing they do shows that the students here excel. So it is a very special academy, actually, right here in Northern Kentucky.

Dean Hulce: It's amazing. I remember, Linda grew up with me, we grew up at church together, we're high school sweethearts. But I remember we had my dad's best friend and was Linda's biology teacher, a strong Christian loving man. I remember him teaching us very young about Bombardier Beetles. That was the main one. Every time he talked about, he'd diagram the Bombardier Beetle and how it worked and how it couldn't work through evolution.

Ken Ham: It's intricately designed. I mean, you've got these cannons in his rear end, so to speak, and it mixes hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide together. Then there's this controlled explosion and if you're a toad or frog or something coming to eat the beetle, you could have a little explosion in your face and that might stop you from doing that. It's intricately designed. I think it was Dr. Duane Gish, who was the world's foremost creationist debater, he's with the Lord now. He used to talk about the Bombardier Beetle and say, "Can you imagine while evolution's trying to perfect the Bombardier Beetle, they're blowing up all over the place?" So you can use some humorous aspects to it too.

But Buddy Davis you mentioned before, Buddy was a singer, a songwriter, he was a taxidermist, he was an avid hunter, he was a dinosaur sculptor, incredibly talented guy. Buddy made up songs based upon my talks, and one of his songs was "It's designed to do what it does do, what it does do it does do well, doesn't it just? It does the thing it does do. I hope you do too, do you?" We talk about various aspects of God's creation that point to a designer, and the designer being God, the God of the Bible.

Well, this is great. Listen, we're out of time for the radio portion. It goes by fast, and you have to do this every day. You've done it every day since the '70s, started talking about it, but I love the passion. We should have a passion. If we don't have a passion, there's something wrong in our life. Thank you. We're going to sign off from the radio portion and we're going to go on and talk a little bit more for the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Ken Ham: My pleasure.

Dean Hulce: It's been exciting, it's gone by so quick. For our listeners, please sign on to the podcast and listen to the rest of the story and we'll gain some more. I think that one of the things we want to talk about is how adults can learn apologetics through the creation. But we'll be right back and we'll do that on the podcast. But again, thank you for joining us on the radio today. Join us every week here on God's Great Outdoors as we head down the trail to adventure.

Guest (Male): For over 30 years, God's Great Outdoors trail to adventure has been broadcast out to win men and women, boys and girls to Jesus Christ. This is only possible by the generosity of our listeners. Thank you to all who have supported us in the past. God has blessed us because of you, and we pray for you to feel His blessings as well.

Additional underwriting support has been provided by Matthews Archery, the leader in the archery industry. Mission Archery, with revolutionary crossbow technology. Hunter Safety Systems, saving lives is what we do. Center Shot Ministries, hit the mark with Center Shot. Wheelchair Whitetails, guided whitetail deer hunts for wheelchair-bound disabled hunters. And Hodgdon Powder Company, the gunpowder people, delivering reliable performance and precision you can trust every time.

God's Great Outdoors has produced many ministry tools, including tracks, DVDs, and books to help you reach others for Jesus Christ. You can access these items, other God's Great Outdoors items, and so much more at our website, godsgreatoutdoors.org. That's godsgreatoutdoors.org.

Dean Hulce: Welcome to the trail to adventure. We are in Kentucky again, in the middle of a rainstorm, and we are with Ken Ham. Ken, what we've got on the radio portion already just kind of blows me away. You get to share this stuff a lot and you've lived it, but you still, after every day, you have a passion. It comes out on the radio, comes out on the TV, but it comes out face-to-face in an amazing way.

One of the things I'd really, as Christians, we're lazy lots of times. We're no different than the world too often. But when we start talking creation/evolution, there's still so many Christians that believe it really didn't happen the way the Bible says. They talk about the days, how long a day. It's a lot of things that go on. But if you have some information on how people can learn an apologetics thought process through creation because that'll open the doors. You start a conversation talking about creation, it'll open doors. Is there something that you've done that's out there that people can gather and use to learn how to share Christ through creation?

Ken Ham: Well, first of all, First Peter 3:15 is one of the theme verses of this ministry and it tells us to always be ready to give an answer or defense, it depends on the translation, of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. So there's a number of aspects to that verse. We've always got to be gentle in the way we do things, but that doesn't mean you can't be bold. We need to make sure that we're bold and forthright in what we say.

But to give an answer or defense, now the word answer or defense is translated from a Greek word called *apologia*. And *apologia* is the word that we get our word apologetics from, and it means to give a logical reasoned defense of the faith. One of the sad things I have found over the years, I've been in this ministry for over 50 years. This is the 51st year since I gave my first ever creation apologetics talk. One of the things I have found is that so many churches have not taught apologetics. Now there's an increasing number that are because of the ministry of Answers in Genesis.

But they're not teaching apologetics, and a lot of them, what they do with their children too is what I call Bible-story based. Jonah and the great fish, feeding of the 5,000, Paul's missionary journey. Don't get me wrong, those things are true because they're in Scripture. But we need to be teaching them how to have a true Christian worldview. In other words, what is marriage? How do you deal with abortion? What about gender? We need to think about the issues of today and make sure we're teaching a true Christian worldview.

We need to be teaching them answers to the attacks on the Bible today. Because when you go back to Genesis chapter 3, verse 1, the very first attack was by the devil on God's Word: "Did God really say?" In other words, you don't have to believe God's Word. When you doubt God's Word, it puts you on a slippery slope of unbelief, which is what happened to Adam and Eve.

In Second Corinthians 11:3, God through the Apostle Paul, and by the way, do you know why I say God through the Apostle Paul? I don't just say Paul says. Because people need to understand it's not just the word of men; it's the Word of God. That all Scripture is God-breathed, and I think sometimes when we just say Peter says, Paul says, a lot of people just look at it as, "Oh, yeah, that man said that." No, this is God through the Apostle Paul.

In Second Corinthians 11:3, to paraphrase it, the devil's going to use the same method on you, which means on your children, on your friends, on you, as he did on Eve to get you in a position of not believing the things of God. Well, what was the method he used? Well, the method was to attack the Word of God. One of the things I've always said is this ministry ultimately is not a ministry primarily about creation, evolution, or the age of the earth. It's a ministry primarily standing on Biblical authority. It's just in our time, particularly since the late 1700s, the issues of creation, evolution, age of earth, and so on have been used to attack God's Word. So many Christian leaders have compromised God's Word in Genesis, thus undermining Biblical authority.

That's why we need to have answers to those attacks. I traveled around the world for over 50 years. One of the things I have found, it doesn't matter what country you're in, when they know you're on about the Bible or Christianity or the Gospel or Jesus, they ask the same basic questions: "Wait a minute, hasn't science disproved the Bible? Don't dinosaurs disprove the Bible? How do you believe in a loving God with all the death and suffering? How do you explain the fossil record? Where did Cain get his wife? How do you explain the races of people if we all go back to Adam and Eve?" And so it goes on.

The trouble is so many churches haven't taught answers to those, whereas you need to teach answers to them because the reason people ask those questions is because they think it shows the Bible's not true. We need to answer those questions as a defense of the faith. I tell you, from my experience in over 50 years in ministry, and this is subjective, but it makes the point, I would say when people oppose you and people reject God's Word, atheists, others, people opposing Christianity, from my own experience, I think 98% of them have no idea what they're talking about.

They're regurgitating what they've heard. They just regurgitate what they were taught at school, what they saw on TV. You question them the right way and you get them to define terms, and you'll find they start to fall apart pretty quickly. Not only that, if you're equipped with answers, you can be an incredible witness to them and an impact on them.

One of the problems is a lot of Christians today aren't prepared to go out and witness. They're not prepared to go out and challenge people. The reason is because they know they can't answer questions and they know they're going to be intimidated. That's the reason many Christians just, it's church on Sunday and that's it, for the rest of the week you're not game to say much. What a difference it makes when you're equipped.

For instance, at Answers in Genesis, we have a series of books called the *Answers Book*. We have a set for kids and then we have a set for teens and adults. They answer the most-asked questions that people ask today, those attacks on God's Word. If people just go through those books, they can get answers to the most-asked questions that are likely to be asked, and they'll run rings around people out there.

We also have our own streaming platform, Answers TV, which is a God-honoring family-friendly streaming platform. We have thousands of videos on there, and we add more all the time, teaching videos. Then we have a website, answersingenesis.org, that has thousands of articles where you can get answers. Our YouTube channel, and of course YouTube channel is free. I have a Ken Ham YouTube channel and an Answers in Genesis YouTube channel. They total up to 1.2 million subscribers and we've had, I think as of today, something getting closer to 300 million views on YouTube. So it's impacting a lot of people.

I respond to all the sorts of things happening in our culture. So there's ways of understanding all that. I also recommend to people, it's on YouTube as well as our streaming platform, I debated Bill Nye the Science Guy back in 2014. When I first debated him, it was February 2014. That debate was seen live by millions. They estimate, conservative estimate, they think it's way more than this, 25 million people have now watched that debate. What I show is how to communicate this issue to people.

When somebody says science, stop and ask them, "What do you mean by science? How do you define science?" because most people misunderstand the word and don't even understand it. Then when the Ark was opened in 2016, July 2016, Bill Nye came and I videoed him and me walking through the Ark for two hours. I challenged him all the way through, but that'll give you an idea of how to challenge people and how to answer their questions.

We've got a lot of other material that we have. That's what Answers in Genesis is; we're a resource for people to equip them, to teach them how to defend their faith and how then to be able to argue correctly with people. In fact, one of the latest books I did is called *Defending God’s Existence*, which is teaching people how to argue foundationally. Too many people argue at the worldview level, and that's why it becomes emotional and you get accused of hate speech and intolerance.

You need to learn to argue foundationally because your foundation of what you believe determines your worldview. Atheists, their foundation is there is no God, everything happened by natural processes. Out of that comes moral relativism. Our foundation is God's Word; therefore, God is the Creator, He defines everything. He created marriage, He defines marriage, He created gender, He defines gender.

In this ministry, this Biblical authority ministry, we deal with everything. We deal with all the social issues, we deal with scientific issues, we deal with those moral issues, we deal with the Gospel, we deal with everything. That's what it should be if you understand Biblical authority and Biblical worldview.

Dean Hulce: It's interesting because I remember back I was a very young man. I went to our pastor and I said, Linda and I were married very young right out of high school, like I said, we grew up together, we were high school sweethearts. I went to our pastor one time and I said, "Is there a book out there where I can read on what God's will is for me?" And this goes back to the same thing you're teaching. He said, "Yeah, go read the Bible, keep reading the Bible." It's the same thing as what you're talking about. Our basis has to be in Scripture. In order, we can spout a lot of answers, but if they're not based in God's Word, they're empty answers.

Ken Ham: Today we've got a lot of scientific evidences and things that are used to confirm God's Word, not to prove it because you can't prove those things ultimately, but to confirm it. If the Bible is what it says, if there really was a flood, you'd expect to find evidence. Oh, we find fossils all over the world. The way they're laid down catastrophically confirms what we'd expect from a global flood. That's how we use those evidences as confirmation, but it's the Bible that is God's Word and it's the Bible that is the foundation for our thinking.

Dean Hulce: This has been great. I could go all day and I'm sure you could too, but you have other things to do. But there is one thing, and I learned this actually at the Ark when we talk about the dog kind. This is because we're a outdoor program. I would love for you to talk about how we went from a pair of deer on the Ark to 43 species. I'm saying deer because the vast majority of hunters hunt deer. But how we went from a deer kind to 43 species that's busted up. Could you explain that? Because a lot of people don't have any clue.

Ken Ham: Well, I'll do it with dogs first of all because there's a lot of documentation in regard to dogs. There's at least 36 different species of dogs, but one of the things you can document is that they're all connected by genetics. In other words, this species bred with that one, that one with this one, that one with that one, that one never bred directly with the first one here, but they're still connected. What you find is all dogs are connected at the family level of classification. All cats are connected at the family level of classification.

When the Bible says God made kinds of animals according to their kind, the word kind comes from a Hebrew word *min*, which sadly the Spanish Bible translated as species, which gives people a wrong idea. It's not species; kind is a better word because two of every kind of land animal went on the Ark, seven pairs of some, but two of every kind of land-dwelling breathing animal. Each kind gave rise to many species.

When God made the original kinds and life is built on DNA, all replicating life is built on the molecule of DNA which makes up our chromosomes, the genes, all the information that builds us or builds a dog or a deer or whatever, and there's an incredible amount of information that God put in the DNA. Information can never arise by chance. Information can only come about from an intelligence, and that information has to be read by a language. If you have a book in Russian and you only speak English, you're not going to understand it, but you need to have the code to understand it.

DNA has all this information like a library of information, and it has the information to make a code to read it. There's so much information in there that two dogs were needed on the Ark, only two of each kind. Then when they gave rise to more dogs after the flood, and then as the population builds and some move over here, some there, some here, some there, the flood obviously changed the climates of the world and generated an Ice Age that also changed climates of the world.

As they were separated from each other and isolated from each other, depending on which breeds were with which, which die out, and which combinations survived better, long-hair dogs survive better in a colder climate, short-hair in a hotter climate, over time you end up with all these different species of dogs, but they all go back to the original pair on Noah's Ark. It'd be the same for the deer kind. The deer kind on the Ark gave rise to all the different species we have today. Moose are in the deer kind because deer and moose are all able to interbreed, so we know that they're all the same kind.

The different species form because after the flood as they separated from each other and depending on the information that was there in the genes, God put incredible variety in the genes. Look at the humans; there's 8 billion humans on this earth. We're all the one species, but you look on the outside and you can see distinguishing characteristics for different groups. The Tower of Babel split up the human kind to form those different groups. Well, after the flood, animals split up and were isolated from each other, and that's what eventually forms your different species.

But that's not evolution because over time you get new combinations of information and you can lose information. Evolution requires brand-new information to provide a new characteristic that never was there previously. Matter can't produce one bit of information. Do you know how many bits of information there are in living things? Zillions. It's incredible. So no, that's easily explained. You only needed two of the deer kind on the Ark, two of the dog kind, two of the cat kind, two of the elephant kind, two of the horse kind, and so on.

Dean Hulce: When you think of creation and as an outdoorsman, the beauty of what God's created, and I think of deer kind again. I was a hunting guide for years and most of my life and different things. The attraction of hunters, fishermen, outdoorspeople, probably appreciate creation as much as anybody. That's hard for a non-hunter to understand because they're thinking, okay, we're out trying to shoot these animals and eat them. But the beauty of, you say a moose and you look all the way down to say a roe deer or a Coues deer in North Mexico, huge difference, it's beauty, but genetically it goes back. What you've explained here in the last 20 minutes, 30 minutes, is enough if somebody really opens their eyes and opens their heart, explains that there's a God that created all of it.

Ken Ham: And when you talk about from a moose down to a very small deer and people often say, "How could they be the same kind?" Well, think of a Saint Bernard and a Chihuahua. Look at the size difference there, but they are the same kind. They're all dogs and they all descended from the two dogs that got off Noah's Ark. I would say this: there's great beauty in the creation, but there's also ugliness. We've got to remember it's a fallen world and the ugliness is there because of our sin. So it was once all beauty, but now it's beauty and ugliness.

We see the beauty but we also see the ugliness as well. You see diseases, you see animals killing each other. Or you see what happened to me recently, and that is a deer wiped out my car. I was traveling up in Amish country in Ohio and one jumped out in front of me and I had that was it. I'm not looking on deer in a very happy way right now.

Dean Hulce: Well, I won't tell you how many deer I've hit in my life because I've hit lots and lots of them. Ken, I so appreciate your time. This has been a huge blessing for not only me but for our listeners and for others.

Ken Ham: Great to be with you.

Dean Hulce: I'm going to challenge our listeners, what was the name of the book series again that you were talking?

Ken Ham: The *Answers Book*.

Dean Hulce: The *Answers Book*. I'm going to challenge our listeners to pick up those books, go to the YouTube channel, prepare ourselves, because I believe that through creation we have as good a chance to reach somebody as any other way.

Ken Ham: By the way, come to the Ark and the Creation Museum. They're in Northern Kentucky, the two leading Christian themed attractions in the world. 30% of those who come are non-Christians. The research we do year after year, we have about 1.5 million visitors a year that come into Northern Kentucky for the attractions, and our research shows conclusively about 100,000 a year become Christians as a result of coming to the Ark and the Creation Museum. So bring your non-Christian friends.

Dean Hulce: Please. I do have one other question. With our change in our world, things are changing so rapidly, and since the Creation Museum opened, if you look at how much our world has changed with new generations, with things like AI, are there plans of where you're going from here that you can share?

Ken Ham: Well, you've got to remember something. I always tell people when you look at the mess our country's in and politically and around the world, here's a shocking statement for you: the government is not the answer. Legislation is not the answer. The answer has always been and always will be God's Word and the saving Gospel. So we've got to keep that at the back of our mind. God's Word, that's the answer, and the saving Gospel.

But we've also got to be able to say in what ways is God's Word being attacked and how can I help reach people by giving them answers to point them to God's Word. For instance, we just recently opened a Radiance exhibit it's called; it's an identity exhibit at the Creation Museum because identity has become a big issue in the culture. We keep looking at where the culture's at and we put in new exhibits.

We are going to open, it'll be the most archaeologically up-to-date model of first-century Jerusalem in the world in 2028 at the Ark, and that'll also lead people to Christ through what we do there. We also down the road are talking about building a Tower of Babel. People ask me when that's going to be finished and I say, "Read the Bible, it never was." But we want to put in an exhibit on that to finish off Genesis 1 to 11. We have a master plan for the Ark and the Creation Museum. At the Creation Museum, we'd like to put in a children's museum because really the battle for our children is a battle in the education arena and that's a battle for the coming generation. We want to try to do more to reach more of the younger generations as well and more curricula for church and Christian school and homeschool. So we've got enough plans that our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren could be working on them.

Dean Hulce: And the truth doesn't change. The Bible doesn't change. It stands forever, never changes. Ken, I thank you again.

Ken Ham: My pleasure.

Dean Hulce: For our listeners, I'm going to challenge you to do some studying. Get your mind ready, get your heart ready because the answers of what Genesis teaches, of what the Bible teaches, is what our world is really fighting against right now. So go pick up some information, go watch some YouTube programs with Ken Ham, and get ready for those answers because from First Peter we are called to be prepared to give those answers. Thank you for joining us, join us every week as we head down the trail to adventure in God's Great Outdoors.

Guest (Male): It's hard to imagine someone that loves the creation could possibly not believe that there's a powerful Creator behind it all. How many of us sit in a boat on a cool morning or on a mountainside overlooking the creation and say, "This all happened by chance"? We believe that it takes far more faith to believe that there is no Creator than to believe that this beautiful world, as well as you and I, were created by a loving God.

We hope that you've enjoyed today's program. As you heard on the program, there is a wealth of information available on the Answers in Genesis website and on YouTube. You can find some of this information at answersingenesis.org or on YouTube at Answers in Genesis. It's been a very special program for us to share time with Ken Ham. Again, we hope you found it special as well. If you've enjoyed it, please share it out with your friends.

And let us know if you feel led, please consider going to godsgreatoutdoors.org and becoming a ministry partner with us. You can also hear the extended podcast version of this program by looking for Dean Hulce or Trail to Adventure wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. This program is provided by and can be contacted at God's Great Outdoors, P.O. Box 414, Powers, Michigan, 49874, or on the website, godsgreatoutdoors.org. Thank you for joining us on God's Great Outdoors as we traveled on the trail to adventure. Please join us each week right here, and have a great week.