The Creation Museum, Part 3 - Confusion
Like any institution purporting to be a museum, the Creation Museum has its own gift store. Here one can buy books and videos devoted to Young Earth Creationism, so that they might bring up a new generation of believers. Naturally I had to buy something, opting to purchase postcards for my secular brethren. One of these postcards featured a zorse, which is the offspring of a horse and zebra. The back of the postcard claimed that the zorse is evidence of a divinely planned world because it showed horses and zebras are descendants of the same horse ancestor. Which is funny, because I’m pretty sure a non-Creationist scientist would say that it is proof they evolved from the same horse ancestor. When I read this it sounded like tacit belief in evolution. At this point YEC started to look to me like a rabid fox dancing around a sampling of roadkill infested with evolving maggots, about to be hit by a speeding Hyundai.
Har har!
Why the schizophrenia? Why this dancing around the e word? The answer, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, is that the YEC are reading the poetry as prose. Myths were never meant to be read literally. They are metaphors, attempts to convey some higher truth about the human experience. Jonah wasn’t literally swallowed by a whale, Jesus didn’t literally ascend into heaven, Muhammad wasn’t literally picked up and thrown about his cave, and God didn’t create the world in six 24 hour days. None of these events would stand up to scientific rigor. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful images in their respective parables. It is the poetry that is important, not the prose.
The trouble is, poetry is difficult to decipher. To make matters worse, religious institutions base their authority on the prose. There can be no Christian church without the belief that Christ literally died and ascended into heaven. And since Jesus’ divinity is derived from the prophesies of the Old Testament, all that needs to be true too. So God needs, needs to have created existence in six days. The YEC have anchored their belief system in these “facts”. The only problem is that science has exploded them. Evolution has shown that we are not descended from Adam and Eve. The YEC, then, have to discredit science to protect their faith. But, ironically, since science is the intellectual coin of the realm, they use science to “prove” something that has always been based on faith. Faith is irrational. Faith is poetry. Yet, since the YEC have chosen prose, they must wrangle with science. Science is rational. Science is logic. How can one use logic to prove something that is illogical?
The serpent
The schizophrenia, then, derives from using something in a way it was never meant to be used. In the end, the whole movement hurts the Christian faith. Whatever truth about the mystery of life the myth contains has been relegated, replaced by a literal interpretation. And when the intellectual rigor of the modern scientific community goes head-to-head with the musings of Jewish holy men from millennia ago, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see who will come out on top. The YEC refuse to see this, blinded by their own inability to read their holy text as myth.
My journey into the bowels of the Creationist whale has shown me the perils of reading the myth literally. If you ever want to see religious ideology devoid of religion, and a scientific school of thought devoid of science, might I suggest you take a trip down to the Creation Museum?
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