Last modified: Saturday, August 15, 2009 11:37 PM CDT

Reasonable Doubt: ‘Museum’ mangles facts, faith

By Jim Gaines, The Daily News,
Bowling Green

After my recent discovery that some of our local school board members
can’t distinguish between science and religion, while most others won’t
take a position, I received several exhortations to learn the “truth”
through Answers In Genesis and its “Creation Museum.” So I did.

The Creation Museum is the tiny-brainchild of Ken Ham, grand poobah of
AiG. This $27 million mess opened in 2007 outside Petersburg to raucous
laughter from actual scientists.

One such is P.Z. Myers, biology professor at the University of Minnesota
- Morris and author of the popular science blog Pharyngula. Myers was in
Ohio on Aug. 7 for a Secular Student Alliance conference, so he took a
side trip to tour Ham’s fortress of denial. Myers invited his readers -
including me - and conference attendees to come along, expecting maybe a
few dozen. He got more than 300, with most wearing science-themed or
skeptical T-shirts for identification.

Ham made himself scarce, pleading a prior out-of-town commitment. But he
left a swarm of armed guards, some with dogs. I’ve been to a lot of
museums, and though most of them have security, I’ve never seen anything
like this. What were they afraid of? Well, before the trip, the museum
security manager sent Myers a letter listing all the things they were
afraid we’d do, including “overtly homosexual” behavior.

Everyone did manage to refrain from that, but we couldn’t help laughing.

The museum’s first exhibit set the tone: it’s a fake. Billed as the
Burning Tree Mastodon, it looms over the lobby. But the fine print
reveals that it’s only a cast of the skeleton.

It also places the mastodon - and the ice age in which it lived - not
11,000 years ago, but “a few centuries after the Genesis Flood.”

And when did that supposedly occur? Ham’s museum adheres to the
chronology concocted by James Ussher, the Anglican archbishop of
Ireland, back in 1650. According to that, the flood occurred around
4,350 years ago, which puts the last ice age maybe 4,000 years back.

At that time, the Egyptians and Sumerians had been keeping written
records for nearly 1,000 years. Funny that they don’t mention any such
contemporary incidents. Or any of the long-extinct animals that Ham
claims were still roaming around at the time.

There are lots of dinosaurs in the museum, some cavorting with an
animatronic Adam and Eve, others in faux-skeletal form. It’s amusing to
see that even young-Earthers have ceded that field to real scientists,
admitting that such animals did, in fact, exist. I’ve heard many
declarations that supposed dinosaur bones were only fakes concocted by
God to test our faith.

What Ham’s exhibits test, however, is credulity. One early display sets
up the museum’s basic premise: that every word of the Bible, especially
the Book of Genesis, must be taken as literally true in all respects. No
allegory, no caveats, no possibility for scribal error before 1611. In
fact, it’s to be taken as ultimately authoritative on all subjects, not
just morality.

“I start with the Bible. My colleague does not,” says a
pseudo-paleontologist in an introductory video. Right from the start,
Ham and company commit what Bertrand Russell called the cardinal sin of
philosophy: starting from the desired conclusion, and disregarding
anything that might imperil that, rather than reasoning from all
available evidence and following where that leads.

Not that the creation museum can be trusted to even state its premises
honestly. “Joe the paleontologist” isn’t a paleontologist at all. A
display in the gift shop identifies him as Buddy Davis, a
“singer-songwriter, adventurer and paleo-artist.” He’s got a CD of inane
Ham-worshipping ditties.

The place devotes a huge amount of its 70,000 square feet to justifying
a literal worldwide flood, and to explaining away the extensive geologic
evidence of a 4.6-billion-year-old Earth. Most of those problems are
just ignored, but the exhibits make ludicrous attempts at a few. Rivers
slowly eroded canyons? Nope. Volcanoes can move rock, too. In short,
they can’t tell the difference between the effects of water and
explosions. So if your house ever catches on fire, don’t ask a
young-Earth creationist to put it out.

Problems with a worldwide flood are similarly glossed over. The Bible
says Noah had to take seven each (or maybe 14) of all birds and ritually
“clean” animals, and two (or four) of all others. Noah’s instructions
leave out plants, which can’t survive months underwater; fish, which
can’t survive mixing salt and fresh; and probably bugs, which drown just
as easily as humans. But that still leaves at least 60,000 species on
his hands.

According to AiG’s calculations, the ark was 510 feet long, 51 feet high
and 85 feet wide. The museum narrative says they were on there for a
year. Incredibly, Ham even admits “dinosaurs and other animals that are
now extinct” to the ark. He thinks some dinosaurs survived to spark
medieval legends of dragons.

So how’d they fit? They didn’t all have to. The big Ham says Noah only
took a few.

But they evolved.

Yes, that’s right. To squeeze in all those critters, the Creation Museum
accepts the reality of evolution. It just refuses to call it that.

Instead, Hammy engages in elaborate semantic gymnastics, saying that
Noah took “kinds” of animals that later morphed into today’s species,
but refusing to define how a “kind” differs from a regular ol’ ancestral
species. Young-Earthers reluctantly acknowledge that creatures change
through “microevolution,” but they denounce “macroevolution” as impossible.

That, of course, is a false distinction. Microevolution is
macroevolution, over an extremely long period of time. Instead of very
gradual divergence over millions of years, the Hamseum presses great
changes into an absurdly short period, then denies that any serious
change took place.

It’s very funny to consider the family trees Ham’s acolytes construct to
explain the profusion of modern animals - and people - from just a few
prototypes 4,350 years ago. All the illustrations show the greatest
growth at the bottom, so it’s curious that the Bible - and the other
extensive written records from 4,000 years ago - fail to mention the
necessary centuries-long orgy.

Maybe it’s because so many of those couplings turned out badly. Consider
Lucy, the famous 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus Afarensis
skeleton. Turns out she was really Noah’s granddaughter, according to
the Creation Museum. Perhaps Noah forbore to mention his midget,
deformed, tiny-brained granddaughter, but Ham happily claims her as a
near relation.

And speaking of relatives, the most disturbing part of the museum is
Ham’s willingness to endorse incest.

He tackles the old stumper, “Where did Cain get his wife?” Locked into
their narrow narrative, Ham and company don’t flinch before the
conclusion: Cain married his sister, one of Eve’s later children. And
God was just fine with that.

We can’t do that anymore, Ham says, because sinning “corrupts” the
genome to cause birth defects. I have heard this bizarre argument before
- always unsupported by any evidence - that naughty thoughts cause
genetic mutations. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Ultimately, Ham is arguing that there’s nothing inherently wrong with
diddling your sister, if you can just avoid birth defects. Think about
that for a while, then tell me again that literal creationists are
champions of morality.

Yet morality is what it’s all about. Exhibit after exhibit makes
explicit the real concern: that not accepting every bit of Genesis as
literally true causes the breakdown of all moral standards.

“Scripture abandoned in the culture leads to relative morality,
hopelessness and meaninglessness,” one sign says. What’s that got to do
with cosmology, geology or biology?

Nothing. And that’s my point: what’s really worshipped at the “Creation
Museum” is fear.

Ham insists that his carnival attraction is about real science, not
religion, but he can’t keep his message straight. Using your brain
causes genocide, slavery and anti-Semitism, the museum proclaims. Of
course, no reasoning or evidence backs up those assertions. Nor will you
catch Ham admitting that his version of Christianity has been used to
justify exactly those things, by reference to massacring the Amalekites
in 1 Samuel 15:2-3, the cursing of Noah’s son Ham (not, unfortunately,
Ken) in Genesis 9:20-27, and the supposed Jewish acceptance of eternal
guilt in Matthew 27:25.

Far from saving Christianity, Ken Ham and his minions are damaging it by
making it look ridiculous. They’re devaluing the Bible by trying to make
it something it’s not.

Science describes the physical world around us and how it works. The
Bible talks about morality, about why, not how. But it’s no more a
biology book than it is a car repair manual; and proclaiming that
Leviticus is the perfect guide to changing oil filters should only
provoke laughter.

Not everyone will laugh, of course. Those who fear motorized vehicles,
have never seen a car, or have never learned anything about mechanics,
might consider Levitical filtering plausible. And those people are Ham’s
victims. That’s all his “museum” does: it preys on the anti-science, the
young and uninformed. They all deserve better.



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American christian fundies are no different intellectually from muslim
fundies.