#1829: Carl Kerby

Carl Kerby is one of the founding board members of Answers in Genesis, one of the most ridiculous organizations in existence. Kerby is a representative specimen, and we’ll just give two examples of how his mind seems to work:

Like his fellow AiG members, Kerby believes that more or less all of the Earth’s inhabitants were wiped out some 4,500 years ago during the Biblical flood, and like other young-earth creationists Kerby doesn’t even use this event to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs – Noah brought the dinosaurs on the Ark, all types; anything else would violate the Biblical claim that he did, indeed, bring every kind on the Ark. Of course, as a scientific hypothesis the Ark story has some flaws, but Kerby is a self-styled “creation scientist”, and he’s got them answers. So, to the problem of how to fit two of every animal, for a year, on a boat about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 50 feet high – “how did they put the big old dinosaurs on there?” as Kerby poses the question – he goes for the obvious: “Well, I would suggest to you they didn’t take the big old dinosaur — they would have taken the younger ones.” Uh-huh. “My grandson is a whole lot smaller than I am,” elaborated Kerby.

There’s a good report on Kerby’s talk, “Evolution and Pop Culture”, at the 2005 Creation Mega Conference here, which was basically a rant about how references to anything “prehistoric” in movies or TV series is offensive since the Earth is 6000 years old and there is no prehistory. For instance, there was a scene from the movie Ice Age that Kerby didn’t like: A scene from an ice cave showing three animals frozen beside a (living) sloth so that the four are lined up in a row, from a primitive looking creature on the far right to the modern sloth on the left – like an illustration of how the sloth evolved from more primitive ancestors. Enter Kerby: “They [Blue Sky Productions and 20th Century Fox, presumably] were trying to indoctrinate your kids, they were trying to show evolution, but they failed. You know why they failed?” Oh yes, bring it on: “Because they show all four of those animals existing at the same time. That’s not evolution!” Even Ray Comfort would probably not be able to top the inanity of that one. Now, Kerby’s revelation of how Ice Age tried but failed to brainwash kids into believing in evolution would probably render most reasonable people speechless. We’ll grant him that. But yes, one of the premises is that evolution is part of an orchestrated plot to lead children away from Jesus; Hollywood is part of it, but like all Satan-inspired evolutionists Hollywood is doomed to make mistakes that God-fearing people like Kerby are able to spot right away.

Diagnosis: This one might be dim even by young-earth creationist standards, but he’s still a reasonably influential figure – which figures but is nonetheless quite amazing.