The Creation Museum, Part 2 - Corruption
One of the first things one notices at the Creation Museum is the dinosaurs. There is a dinosaur skeleton before the entrance. You have your picture taken cowering in terror from superimposed dinosaurs after purchasing your tickets. And there are dinosaurs shown living in harmony in the Garden of Eden. What, then, is the deal? Dinosaurs aren’t mentioned in the Bible, but I suppose so are a lot of other critters. Do the Young Earth Creationists (YEC) then take a literal interpretation of the Holy Word? Or is some extrapolation done?
Dinosaurs everywhere, but no sense in sight
The cursory view of YEC beliefs that I took is probably not enough to answer that question with total competency. But what I found looked like some ugly chimera of science and religion. The first point the “museum” attempted to hammer home was that, yes, they are scientific, but they have a different set of axioms. So while human reason says that dinosaurs died out 65 million years before the rise of homo sapiens, the alternative, infallible, Word of God states that dinosaurs died out in the Great Flood. At this point in the tour they had a video of an older white man explaining that his conclusions about the dinosaur fossil he was digging up differed from his colleague’s because he began with the Bible, whereas his colleague did not. I thought it important to note the fact that the colleague in the video was of Asian descent. The thing to take away, then, is that science and religion are not mutually incompatible, just that religion offers the correct starting point for scientific study.
Human reason vs. the Divine Word
So we see that the YEC viewpoint is a little more sophisticated than “The Devil buried fossils to turn man away from God!” But where did these fossils come from? Apparently, the Great Flood is the explanation for a lot of things. The Great Flood buried the dinosaurs in a massive mud slide, thus fossilizing them. The Great Flood carved the Grand Canyon, “proof” of which can be found in the explosion of Mt. St. Helens, the mudslides of which cut canyons down the side of the volcano in a matter of hours. The Great Flood is an incontrovertible fact (employees have to believe this to work there, by the way). Of course, what the “museum” doesn’t explain is why dinosaur fossils are layers and layers deeper than mammal fossils, or that the Grand Canyon was cut out of harder rock than the canyons created by Mt. St. Helens.
Another idea the “museum” was trying to push was that all the stages of the Earth’s landmass, from Pangaea to today’s continents, formed under the Flood. At first I wondered why it would be necessary to “extrapolate” this idea from the Bible (Genesis 7:11, apparently), but then I remembered that there are fossils of the same species on both sides of the Atlantic, which those dastardly scientists use to prove tectonic motion (and so that the Earth is a little older than 6,000 years). Of course, with an omnipotent god you would think reasoning that away wouldn’t be necessary, but YEC seem to treat the religion as a science, to steal a phrase from Reza Aslan.
Flood 1, Earth’s surface 0
For a group that believes in the Divine Word of God, the YEC sure do steep their ideas in a lot of “scientific” terminology. I think the reason for this is that it is an attempt to combat the secular scientific community, essentially using their own ideas against them. Because science relies on axioms to build ever more complex models of the world, if the axioms cannot be agreed upon then the system becomes meaningless, right? The only problem is that this approach by the YEC seems misguided at best, and really is only convincing for other Biblical literalists, although as we have seen YEC aren’t even true literalists.
In part 3 I will discuss the schizophrenia that becomes apparent when the YEC takes a myth and attempts to interpret it through the prism of scientific logic.
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