Pat Robertson's CBN Is Still Promoting Ken Ham's Young Earth Creationism

In the wake of the Creationism vs. Evolution debate on Tuesday night between Creation Museum founder Ken Ham and Bill Nye the Science Guy, Pat Robertson made news (well, Internet news) by slapping down Ham and Young Earth creationism in general:

“To say that [the Earth] all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it's time we came off of that stuff and say this isn't possible… Let's be real, let's not make a joke of ourselves.”

As I've posted before, it's not news that Pat Robertson acknowledges that the Earth is billions of years old, but I get that most people assume otherwise, because it's not worth their time to differentiate between the gradations of absurdity that populate the Christian Right.

Then again, it's hard to make those distinctions when Robertson's own Christian Broadcasting Network still promotes Ham favorably on its website:

• An undated article entitled "Evolution – The Ultimate Compromise," reprinted from the now-defunct scienceministries.org, promotes Young Earth creationism and directs readers to Ken Ham's The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved (as screencapped above).
• Another undated article, "'Big Bang' A Big Deal?" by a guest columnist, scoffs at the Big Bang Theory that even Robertson accepts (although he maintains God initiated it), and cites "Dr. Ken Ham" as the primary "resource [to] promote the truth of Creation."  (Note: Ken Ham's doctorates are all honorary.)
• ShopCBN sells Ken Ham's 2011 creationist DVD Foundations: In Six Days.

CBN News and The 700 Club have also positively featured Ken Ham's Creation Museum on several occasions, including this favorable interview with Ham himself in May 2007:

I uploaded that video, but it's also available on CBN's website (Windows Media Player plug-in required to watch the video), with an accompanying article that devotes 18 paragraphs to promoting the Creation Museum, while giving an anthropologist a two-sentence rebuttal to say dinosaurs and man did not co-exist.

You can also watch CBN News reporter Paul Strand's return to the Creation Museum in 2009 (sorry, CBN's video-embed code does not work on Blogger; I don't know who to blame), where he pumped the Young Earth gospel at length—and without any rebuttal by an evolutionary scientist—in a segment titled "Creation Museum Bolsters Kids' Faith":

“For evolution to be true, the Earth must be billions of years old, with life forms on it evolving slowly over hundreds of millions of years.  That seems to contradict the biblical version of creation, with God making the earth an its many life-forms rapidly—and probably not all that long ago.”

And summing up (after a stopover to Mount St. Helens "proves" that fossilized layers can be laid down in a matter of minutes by a volcano explosion):

“With resources like the Creation Museum in Kentucky available, Christian kids can head back into the public schools with their heads held high, knowing that what's in their Bible and what science says don't have to contradict each other.”

The very same day this aired (May 22, 2009), CBN ran an additional piece on a German fossil being touted as the missing link.  The expert CBN brought aboard to debunk that fossil?  Ken Ham.

You can find more examples of favorable if cursory CBN coverage of the Creation Museum here and here.

Pat Robertson may not have started this "joke" that started the whole world laughing—but oh, if he'd only see, that the joke was on him, too.

♪♫  I-I-I-I looked at the skies, running my hands over my eyes…  ♪♫

No, It Is Not News That Pat Robertson Thinks the Earth Is Older Than 6,000 Years

In November 2012, in answer to a viewer question on whether the Bible allows for the existence of dinosaurs (spoiler alert: apparently, it does), Pat Robertson dismissed the idea that the Earth is only 6,000 years old (via Right Wing Watch):

“Look, I know people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop Ussher—God bless him!—wasn't inspired by the Lord when he said it all took 6,000 years.  It just didn't.

And you go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating, you've got all these things, and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time… And so there was a time that these giant reptiles were on the earth, and it was before the time of the Bible.  So don't try to cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years.  That's not the Bible.  That's Bishop Ussher.  And so if you fight revealed science you're going to lose your children, and I believe in telling them the way it was.”

Turns out that for once, Pat Robertson had a prophecy come true, because in June, the Young Earth creationists over at Creation Today lynched him (okay, maybe not lynched exactly) for what he said:

“Do you assume, then, that Archbishop James Ussher had no actual evidence for his proposition when he wrote such a big book?  People talk about this ‘six thousand years that Archbishop Ussher came up with.’  Pat Robertson is claiming, then, that the 6,000 years comes from Ussher's book, not from the Bible.  The point is, where did Ussher get his figure of 6,000 years?… [Y]ou will find that he takes those dates from the Bible!  So the figure of 6,000 years comes from the Bible.  Now then, Pat Robertson, are you claiming that the Bible is not inspired, when the Bible clearly tells us that the world is 6,000 years old?”

The Bible clearly tells us.  I mean, it's so obvious that Archbishop Ussher had to write such a big book to explain it!  Anyway, they go on with a lot more creationist b.s.—most of which turns out to be nitpicking Robertson's choices of terminology—but you get the idea.  (If you keep watching the video, you get to hear one of the creationists actually invoke Occam's Razor in support of God and the Bible and creationism.  Take that, Carl Sagan!  Take that, Jodie Foster!)

As I said, that aired in June, but for some reason The Raw Story only found it yesterday:

Now, I'm not saying this isn't news because The Raw Story is just discovering a spat from 5 months ago (based on a comment made a year ago)—although curiously their article doesn't mention any of these dates, so their readers naturally assume this all just happened.  And why online news syndicators think it's fresh.