Help defend free speech and free scientific inquiry in the U.S.
Sign the Academic Freedom Petition.

Creation Science Foundation

From CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

Jump to: navigation, search

Creation Science Foundation Ltd (CSF) was a former name of Creation Ministries International in Australia. It was founded by Ken Ham and John Mackay, and was the main driving force of creation science in Australia throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. The organization's headquarters until the early 1990s were in a warehouse on the corner of Bradman and Bellrick Streets in Acacia Ridge in Brisbane, Queensland, and then moved to new offices in Overlord Place, Acacia Ridge—another suburb of Brisbane.

Contents

Early years

Ken Ham was a public school science teacher in Queensland, Australia, in the 1970s. From 1976 to 1979 he was also a part-time creation science speaker. The church he attended held a special service to bless and prepare him in the lead-up to what became the Creation Science Foundation.

The ministry at first had two roles: A book ministry called Creation Science Supplies, and a teaching ministry called Creation Science Educational Media Services. Ken and his wife Mally originally ran these two outreaches from their home. [1] Ken resigned from school teaching in 1979, and for the first few years of the ministry in Australia he had no salary and relied on personal gifts from family members and friends.

Ministry expands

In 1980, the new ministry joined forces with Dr. Carl Wieland's Creation Science Association, and was then officially named Creation Science Foundation. Dr. Wieland had begun a magazine titled Ex Nihilo (meaning "out of nothing"), and now handed this over to Ken Ham and John Mackay (who took over as editor). They renamed it Creation Ex Nihilo, and when John Mackay left the organization in 1987 and began his own creationist organization called Creation Research, the magazine was soon renamed Creation magazine.

Creationist geologist Dr. Andrew Snelling joined the expanding group in the early 1980s. (He later moved to the Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, California, as an Associate Professor of Geology. He was also a member of the RATE group (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth). Dr. Snelling now works for Answers in Genesis (United States) as Director of Research. CSF also managed to secure the services around that time of talented illustrator, designer, and cartoonist Steve Cardno, who signed on as art director for the magazine, which saw a rising readership and was soon being exported to dozens of countries. Steve Cardno continued to work on Creation magazine until he left in 2007.

U.S.A. connection

In 1987, the year John Mackay left Creation Science Foundation, Ken Ham began spending more time in the United States—eventually moving there permanantly—and Dr. Carl Wieland took over running CSF. He was initially working with the Institute for Creation Research. Meanwhile, CSF's staff numbers increased rapidly, as did attacks from skeptics. An early newsletter from CSF says that as the skeptics' attacks increased, so did financial support for CSF from concerned Christians.

In 1994, Ham started a new creationist organization in the U.S. Although he was still aligned with Australia's Creation Science Foundation, he had to find a new name because a foundation in the United States usually dispenses money or grants, which is not what the Australian group did. Ham called his new ministry Creation Science Ministries, and in the following year renamed it Answers in Genesis. In 1997, Creation Science Foundation in Australia changed its name to Answers in Genesis as well.

In March 2006, the Australian and U.S. groups separated. Ken Ham remained president of Answers in Genesis USA, and Carl Wieland became Managing Director of the newly named Creation Ministries International in Australia. The dynamic force of the tiny home-run ministry of Creation Science Foundation can now be seen to have multiplied millions of times over more than 100 countries.

References

See Also


v • d • e
Resources
Feature resources
Categories
Retrieved from "http://creationwiki.org/Creation_Science_Foundation"
Personal tools