Jun
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Cretin Museum
June 2, 2007 | 2 Comments
John Farrell of Farrell Media had some fun yesterday with Evolution News, and I recommend perusing his comments. Indeed, John is a great science writer who also takes his religion very seriously, and he’s worth reading in general (some folks may be familiar with him from stuff he’s had published in First Things).
I’m sorry to say, however, that his witty and intelligent piece was overshadowed in the news somewhat by the opening, in Kentucky, of the so-called “Creation Museum”, a rather expensive little monument to the density of the narrow-minded and unimaginative. The museum itself will probably attract about as many folks looking for a laugh as it will genuine adherents of the bizarre, unscriptural, and generally unchristian world-view that it endorses, but it is a sad little testament anyway, and no less so for the fact that among its principal proponents can be counted a real live university-employed physicist.
For people with a morbid fascination for the moronic, there is a commercial available at the Creation Museum website that features funky 1950s-style art (pretty much right out of the era from which most of these ideas themselves emanate) and melodramatic music. Although the museum’s designers manifest a rather fundamentalist perspective on things, the staff apparently aren’t allowed to, since the museum is open on both Saturday and Sunday, requiring its workers to violate the third commandment (well, I guess for the fundamentalists it’s really the fourth commandment) no matter which day they count as the Sabbath. Maybe they view working for the museum as itself a kind of mitzvah.
Among the items available in the online bookstore are guides to the local aquarium and zoo written from a “biblical” perspective.
With aquariums around the world using God’s amazing creatures to teach evolution, Christians need information that gives them biblical truth. From the odd-shaped hammerhead shark and the powerful killer whale, to the colorful angelfish and the deadly lionfish, the Aquarium Guide covers more than 100 of God’s sea creatures and gives information about their features, their design, and much more. This spiral-bound book makes finding the truth about these animals easy.
God’s creatures are amazing, but apparently God’s methods of creation via natural selection are a lot less amazing. What kind of a God would “create” things just by bringing into existence a natural order in which God himself stands as the cause of all natural processes within that created order? Any old “god” could do that. The real “biblical” God would only create things ex nihilo, since that’s the only way to impress the heathen.
One of the things you will learn if you study these guides is that plants aren’t really alive. The bible says that there was no suffering or death before the Fall, and yet it also says that humans and other animals had things to eat. What did they eat, if not each other? According to these guides, they ate plants. If you’re worried that the plants therefore died upon being eaten, don’t worry, that didn’t happen because plants aren’t alive. They can’t be alive, because if they were that would mean that they died by being eaten, and we all no that there was no death before the Fall. QED.
This reminds me of a passage from Aristotle, who was created just a few short thousand years after the universe itself. He notes that when a menstruating woman looks into a mirror it will stain the mirror with a red color, because there is more red blood in the woman’s eyes during the time of her menstruation. Although this appears to contradict the empirical evidence, it must be true, because it follows logically from the theory of vision to which Aristotle subscribed. These two cases, the non-livingness of plants, the stained mirrors, are examples of what happens when you put the saving of an a priori theory ahead of empirical evidence and logical coherence, and it shows again why creationism is not genuine science.
It’s worth pointing out, just for fun, that the book of Genesis says quite clearly that humans were given some of the animals to eat for food even before the Fall, even though, according to the museum, animals are just as “alive” as human beings. So much for that part of the theory.
Comments
2 Comments so far
Nice title! I’ve actually read some creationist commentaries on the Bible that go to unbelievable extremes, but that statement about plants is way out there.
It’s worth pointing out, just for fun, that the book of Genesis says quite clearly that humans were given some of the animals to eat for food even before the Fall, even though, according to the museum, animals are just as “alive” as human beings. So much for that part of the theory.
Are you sure about this? I don’t recall any such passage.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said “quite clearly”.
But you have to be willing to play the fundamentalist interpretive game. There are two ground rules:
(1) the Bible is literally true
(2) everything in the Bible is consistent with what we can observe today.
To take an example of how to play the game: we can see dinosaur fossils today, but the Bible nowhere says that God caused dinosaurs to evolve or even to exist. Therefore, God put those fossils there to test our faith (this is a response that was actually given to me by a fundamentalist when I asked him about the fossil record).
OK, so, apply the rules to the present case: humans eat animals today, but the Bible nowhere says that humans can not eat meat, nor does it say that humans only began to eat meat at the Fall as a consequence of sin. Therefore etc. etc.
I admit that it can be a fun game if you’re willing to exploit the rules, you know, like the way soccer players will move up to force an offsides call against their opponent.