"DON'T ALIENATE THE ALIENS"

That is the headline for a small article in the latest issue of the Answers magazine, published by the renowned Answers in Genesis organization. If you're out of the loop, Answers in Genesis is a young-earth creationist organization founded and headed by Australian-born Ken Ham (there isn't even a "Dr." in there, he's an evangelist if anything). He currently resides near Cincinnati, Ohio just across the bridge from his popular Creation Museum just outside of Cincinnati, Kentucky (On a side-note, how did the U.S. so incompetently divide a city between two states? Is Cincinnati in Ohio or Kentucky? What do you think? Sorry, off-topic!). With the understanding that Ken Ham isn't a doctor of any scientific field, it is clear to anyone who has read my previous creationist rants which side of the roof this ball is rolling. Ken Ham is more of this evangelist playing dress-up as a scientist issue I'm always raving about. But maybe I'm being to hard on him? He is more respectable than a certain even more infamous creationist of the same initials... Kent Hovind of the Creation Science Evangelism organization. And I do respect Answers in Genesis in that as a creationist organization, they are active in the scientific community more so than Kent Hovind's CSE. They're still arrogant and biased (isn't everyone?), e.g. according to AiG birds are still birds and dinosaurs are still featherless reptiles. But out of sentimentality I do respect AiG for the little decency they are capable of. As a young-earth creationist myself, AiG was a large part of my childhood. They were God-fearing people who talked about dinosaurs! What wasn't to like? I wasn't so exposed to the beating heart of paleontology itself back then, so AiG was the closest connection to dinosaurs I had.
But I still don't agree with all of their creationist doctrine. Tonight's example, refer to the aforementioned headline, concerns extraterrestrial life. According to this article, AiG acknowledges space aliens to be an evolutionary doctrine, and therefor better safe than sorry to dismiss the possibility rather than look at it from a creationist perspective (similar to the bird/dinosaur ordeal, creationists certainly don't look at it from an evolutionary perspective and apparently not from a creationist perspective either; they simply dismiss it as though they have better issues to concern themselves with). I have transcripted the article for everyone to read here, with my own input added in within [brackets]:

"In 2008 a Vatican astronomer suggested that if we ever find intelligent beings in outer space, these aliens would be "our brothers" and "children of God" as much as human beings are. The UK's Daily Mail now reports that another Vatican astronomer also says he would be happy to baptize an alien.
"Such a statement reveals the silliness ["Silliness," clever terminology...] that results when someone tries to reconcile evolutionary thinking with the Bible.
"The idea of intelligent aliens is pure speculation that depends heavily on evolutionary presuppositions [We're dissing speculation, now are we? AiG's very own Kurt Wise developed a bizarre theory that giant "floating forests" may have existed before the Genesis flood: [link]. The argument is, 'Life evolved here, so it must have evolved elsewhere in this incomprehensibly huge universe--we can't be a special case.' The Bible contradicts both assumptions--life didn't evolve here, it was created from nothing [Creationists are tossing rotten eggs at evolutionists for saying the universe evolved from nothing, but here we are saying life was created from nothing? Hypocrisy!]. And we are special, the pinnacle of God's creation, created in His image [admittedly as a Christian I do believe humanity was designed after our Creator, remember I am still YEC].
"Because Adam's sin affected the whole universe, it would also affect any alien. But as non-humans, aliens would not be eligible for salvation; this is one reason we are confident that intelligent aliens do not exist. So baptizing an alien would be pointless at best, and a mockery at worst [$50 says this entire article was written because the writer thought of that clever line just there and wanted something to go along with it so everyone could see his literary ingenuity]. Jesus did not die for Martians--only descendants of Adam can be saved."

End transcript. What a load of crap! Non-humans wouldn't be eligible for salvation? Baptizing an alien would be pointless? Back up, this article never gave Biblical evidence that extraterrestrials DON'T exist in the first place. We creationists believe in an all-powerful God who created everything by speaking it into existence and breathed life into our lungs, but we can't grasp the idea that God created life on other worlds? Let me clarify to all you folks who don't participate in Christianity: The Bible DOES NOT say space aliens don't exist. The Bible DOES NOT say that God didn't create life on other worlds. And the Bible certainly DOES NOT say that non-humans aren't eligible for salvation.
And this article's stab at speculation is simply ridiculous. Young-earth creationists are among the most speculative people I know. Apart from the whole "floating forest" thing, it's funny because on the page adjacent to this article dismissing the possibility of alien life is an article speculating that dragons are real...

Once again my fellow young-earth creationists disappoint me. In attempting to unveil the idiocy of secularism through this article, creationists have once again reaffirmed their own hypocrisy, ignorance, bias and scientific incompetence.

-Rick Charles