"By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what is visible" Heb 11:3.

As a microbiologist with a doctorate this verse has served me well through out my career. Karl Giberson makes a good point regarding genetic relatedness and pseudogenes though I do think that phylogeny can as easily point to a common designer as to an evolutionary pattern. One can err is they try to infer a mechanism simply form a patternn of data. Of course, since expeerimentation in this area is limiter one is lef with inferences.

Ken Ham is also correct regarding the authority and reliability of the Scriptures. Still, he should remember, that Genesis gives a short outline of creation with the object of showing us how the world came about and who made it. We can err if we try to analyze these passages with the prism of our modern scientific outlook. Ultimately, it is by faith that I believe that our d earth. I have opinions about how he did it, but I can no more prove them than the evolutionists can prove the origin of man.

The fact of creation is that God created from nothing exactly what He needed to create man, and every other "kind". The fact that there is a commonality about the genetic structures does not indicate a "common ancestor" but a single incredibly brilliant creator using the base material He created, adn assembling it in many different ways, to make this amazing universe and all the life in it. What we see is what God intended, what's so confusing about that?

Jesus and the New Testament writers believed in a young earth (see e.g. Mark 10:6 and Jude v. 14), so why should His followers embrace ingredients from a basically atheist worldview?
BTW, humans share 50 per cent of their genes with bananas, also, but no one believes that humans are descendent from bananas or bananas from humans. For evolutionists, common descent is an a priori assumption that has more to do with a non-theistic worldview than with facts.

Resubmission with spelling corrections.

Unfortunately a theist view of evolution still presumes Macro-evolution. Macro-evolution requires death for the "fittest" to survive.

I find disappointing that we do not trust the GOD of Heaven, the Lord of the Universe enough to believe that He could transcend time to accomplish His work and then tell us about it. The Bible does not need to be a scientific treatise to give us incredible information about a transcendent Creator.(This Creator made his own dirt!)

Before Genesis 3 there was no sin. Creation was Good, yea, with man created in the image of God---Very Good.

Theistic evolution presumes sin death before the fall of Man. Thus the gracious move of God to protect us from eternally living in broken mortal flesh and broken relationship with God is also discounted.(Salvation provided through the sending of a Messiah) The truly unfortunate reality is that we do not take God as being sufficient to produce an infinitely better solution to our problem than we can dream up from within our finiteness.

Mr. Gilberson, do those "unnecessary genes" really do nothing? I find it rather thoughtful of God to take a "mutated" apparatus like DNA with genes doing nothing(probably marred by sin and the effect of sin) and to largely protect us from the majority effect of mutations, none of which have scientifically delivered "good" or "beneficial" adaptations. That is ingenious and something we only have begun to mimic as we put protective shields in front of our eyes, fuses in our electrical systems, or plugs in our ears. I suspect that you would never call cancer a beneficial mutation. But I suspect that God still uses things like cancer to show how He meets the deepest need of man to have a marvelous relationship with a God who loves him. May you come to know this too. :)

Ham's argument has three fundamental flaws.

First, Ham's notion of self-authentication relies on a hermeneutic that is foreign to Biblical scholarship, even in conservative circles. It ignores the realities of the canonization process and of the human role in that process. Ham's notion is tantamount to saying, "In the beginning was a book, and the book...." The eternal Word is Christ, not the book. We speak of the Canon as "the Word" because the Holy Spirit speaks Christ through it to His people. This was the position of Calvin and of orthodox Protestantism until now. Ham's view diverges from that historic precedent. I suppose he would have us to believe that he has uncovered something that had eluded Calvin, Turretin, Beza, etc.

Second, Ham misses the fact that self-authentication addresses procedural reliability and not substantive reliability. In other words, the principle of self-authentication implies that the document is what it purports to be, but does not guarantee the document's substantive veracity. Therefore, even if Scripture were self-authenticating (which it is not), that would have little effect on the interpretation of its substantive content.

Third, Ham's argument misses the covenantal significance of Christ's and Paul's references to Genesis. Christ's and Paul's references do not depend on the historicity of the event, but only require that their hearers have familiarity with the narrative. In our Western tradition, we often refer to "narrative events" as though those events actually occurred. For example, I might refer to someone as a "Daisy Buchanan," but that doesn't mean that I believe in the historicity of the events of The Great Gatsby. The creation narratives of Genesis have immense covenantal significance. Jesus and Paul refer to these narratives for that reason. If Jesus and Paul were concerned with historicity, then their statements would have no meaning in their context.