The Creation Museum is a lavish 27-million dollar edifice devoted to a literal belief in the creation of the world as recounted in the Christian Bible. Created by Answers in Genesis, one of the most prominent creationist groups in America, the Creation Museum paints a history of the world where humans coexisted with dinosaurs, the biblical flood carved the Grand Canyon, and the Earth itself is only 6,000 years old. Despite, or perhaps because of its wholesale rejection of modern scientific consensus, the Creation Museum is popular–it claims to have had almost two million visitors since opening in 2007.
I know that tearing apart a fundamentalist's creation myth is a bit like carefully explaining to a child why Santa Claus could not possibly deliver all of those toys to all of those children in one night propelled by flying reindeer while squeezing down chimneys despite a BMI far north of 30. Most of us simply smile and say something polite such as, That's nice, but the difference is that fundamentalists are not children and they are at risk of making other adults believe this silliness, thereby lowering the scientific IQ of America even further (very few Christians outside of America believe in a literally true Genesis account).
Only in Turkey do more people (over 50%) than in the United States (40%) believe that human beings have not developed from earlier species of animals. In no Western European country except for Greece is the number significantly higher than 20%. Beyond Europe, only about 11% of Japanese believe that evolution is false. What is also interesting is that in countries with low endorsement of evolution, there is a high level of confusion ("Not Sure"), further evidence that this is more a function of scientific ignorance than of religious faith per se (not that the two are not highly correlated).
But the museum is cute in places. I like how Adam and Eve look like relatively hairless, nudist hippies of Northern European descent - perhaps the people (coincidentally of Northern European descent) who created this exhibit did not realize that the bible was written by Mediterranean Semitic people who were far hairier and swarthier than the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian peoples they never met and certainly never intended as the target audience of these stories.
What's not to like? An Adam with no body hair and a nicely-trimmed G.I. Joe Beard goes skinny-dipping with Eve.
Did you know that Adam and Eve were vegetarians until Eve's illicit fruit-picking expedition with the talking snake. Not only that, all animals, including the dinosaurs that allegedly co-existed with humans, were vegetarians until Eve broke her diet. (Why DID an all-knowing god put a talking snake into Eden - surely, he could have anticipated this was a Really Bad Idea if eating delicious fruit within arm's reach (also not so bright) would have such an impact on so many people and animals.) So anyways... god went through all the trouble of creating (since there was no evolution in this parallel universe) dinosaurs equipped with tearing claws and razor sharp teeth ideal for hunting, others with wings or speed ideal for evading predators, and others with flat molars and long necks ideal for grazing plants, but make most of those features dormant until bam! it's fruit-eating time in Eden.
Yet this harmonious model (until Eve ruined it!) ignores the fact that even in a vegetarian world, there is plenty of brutal struggle for survival among and within animals and plants (our bodies are really farms with more host bacteria than cells and specially-equipped cells (phagocytes) whose only job is to surround, devour, and kill invading, competing microbial life (but I guess since this violence is microscopic and unknown at the time the biblical authors were making this stuff up, it doesn't count to a creationist). In fact, there are carnivorous plants and certainly carnivorous insects; without spiders, for example, Adam and Eve would have been spending so much time fending off mosquitoes, they would not have had time to do much else. And how on earth could an insect that lives off of blood, sometimes killing its host in the process as it introduces parasites such as malaria, have refrained from bloodshed without dying? And who says plants don't have as much right to life as animals? We each need each other for survival, so isn't this plant-ism mean-spirited and misplaced? Certainly not very god-like.
Adam, a mother-less man, never born, never with an umbilical cord, mysteriously has an umbilicus (belly button).
Eden certainly must have been a very crowded place since without evolution, all species, including the 99.9% we now know are now extinct, must have coexisted in one place and time. Also, without evolution, the mutation of viruses that leads to the emergence of different strains of virulent influenza would have been impossible, so somehow all of the strains that have ever existed must have existed then. Small pox, diphtheria, polio, malaria, and even HIV (no evolution, no possibility of a virus evolving). Who among the early humans was seropositive and how did they have lifespans of 700 years or so without antiretrovirals?
No! Leave Voltaire out of this! And if you must drag him in, at least get the facts right. Unlike Diderot and some other Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire was not an atheist, and felt that abandoning religion would be dangerous at a societal level. On his estate at Ferney, France, he built a church and encouraged anyone from the village to attend. He was more accurately a Deist. The idea that the Geneva Bible Society took over his house is a myth, by the way, perhaps one created in America over a misunderstanding in another century (the 19th) in another Swiss town (Lausanne) involving another skeptic (Edward Gibbon).
OK, I'm done for now. These would all be harmless beliefs if adults outgrew them or if those who didn't were not intent on dumbing down an already dilute scientific curriculum in our public education system. Put another way, there would nothing wrong with a Tooth Fairy museum if it didn't make some people get it into their heads that they no longer needed tooth brushes or dentists.
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