Rerun: My Visit to the Local Creationist Museum (Seriously, I'm Not Making This Up)

In honor of Charles Darwin's birthday tomorrow, this piece from Dec 2010 ...

Believe it or not, this museum is only 10 or 12 miles from my home, outside San Diego.

This journey through time will be a very short one, as the entire universe, earth included, according to creationist belief, is only 6,000 years old.

This works way better than carbon-14 dating.

I missed whether it was a standard day or a metric day.

In support of a worldwide catastrophe, creationism cites the same geological evidence as science, though with some rather significant differences in interpretation.

Noah's sons went their separate ways, assisted by land bridges spanning the oceans, thanks to a Flood-induced ice age. The animals from the Ark dispersed along these same land bridges, perhaps not whales and other sea creatures.

And I thought Neanderthals survived in the form of Tea Party followers.

I wish I had our high school class valedictorian, Karl Van Bibber, to explain this to me.

If I can follow the logic, mutations (which are all bad) get filtered out of the gene pool, keeping creation constant. There is, however, the mother-in-law exception.

That's right, evolution is just a religion, which makes creationism the true science. Why aren't our kids being taught this in school?

The "bad fruits" of evolution. No good can come from allowing people to think for themselves. That's why we need knowledgeable people in authority to do our thinking for us.

Evolution apparently played a part in the Final Solution. Actually, murderous bigots were killing Jews en masse long before Darwin. The Catholic Church even made saints out of some of these medieval pre-Hitlers. (Sorry, I was trying really hard to keep this objective.)

A browse through the museum's book store. No, I didn't Photoshop the book title.

Creationism vs Evolution: The War Against Reason and Why It's Ruining My Life

A little background to my photo-essay from yesterday: What prompted Tuesday’s visit to the Creation and Earth History Museum just down the road from where I live in San Diego’s East County was Robert Whitaker’s 2002 “Mad in America,” which I have inexcusably only just gotten around to reading. Part Two, “The Darkest Era,” includes a chapter, “Unfit to Breed.” Many others have related this shameful and outrageous story, but Whitaker pulls it together with the eloquence and authority of a Biblical prophet.

The early part of the nineteenth century ushered in the asylum movement, based on enlightened principles of “moral treatment,” namely if you regard those with mental illness as fellow human beings they tend to respond in kind. It’s amazing the outcomes you can produce when you don’t chain them to walls in freezing dungeons on starvation diets.

Fiscal constraints and other pressures squelched that one brief shining moment. The circulation of Darwin’s theory on evolution in the late nineteenth century only made matters worse. A whole new generation of “social Darwinists” came on the scene, eager to latch onto any excuse to justify their positions of power and privilege. Instead of “all men are created equal,” we were now hearing that “some men are created more equal than others.”

This gave rise to all manner of abuses across all of society. One outcome was the rise of the quack science of eugenics that encouraged weeding out from the gene pool those of degenerate stock. You guessed it, those with mental illness were at the top of the list. In the US, in the first decades of the twentieth century, some 30,000 individuals with mental illness were sterilized.

Hitler took eugenics to its tragically unforeseen but totally logical conclusion. The mentally ill were sterilized, then became the first population singled out for the gas chambers. We know the rest of the story all too well. In the aftermath, eugenics disappeared as a science, but Darwin was tainted forever. Those espousing creationism shamefully link Darwin to the Holocaust. I witnessed it yesterday in my museum visit.

Karen Armstrong in “The Case for God” notes that initially Darwin did not meet much resistance from organized religion. Yes, Darwin challenged Genesis, but hardly anyone at the time interpreted Genesis literally. Christianity, which grew up without printed Bibles in circulation, was constantly - excuse the term - evolving its teachings. Religion, she says, has never been about pat answers.

Throughout the ages, science and religion were more or less in accord. The Galileo controversy, Armstrong points out, is overstated and Galileo himself was largely to blame. Newton’s theories were seen as validating a creator God (without having to get into ridiculous arguments about whether it took God six days or six billion years to fashion the universe).

Literal interpretation of the Bible is a fairly new phenomenon, beginning with the Millennialist movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. This movement may have remained on the fringe had not other Christian groups felt threatened by the scientific revolution around them. This gave rise to fundamentalism, until recently on the outside of the mainstream.

Karen Armstrong makes the very strong point that what we think of Christianity today is not the Christianity our Founding Fathers practiced. Theirs was an Enlightenment-based belief, which (naively) assumed that the mysteries of God would be solved by rigorously applied science and reason. Thus my surprise when on my museum visit I came upon an exhibit asserting that not only the Founding Fathers, but the scientists and philosophers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, all had creationist beliefs.

No, they didn’t. They simply had no reason to quibble with the Genesis story, that’s all. Jefferson rather than accepting the Bible word-for-word, actually decided to improve upon it (see image above).  

Armstrong notes that social change triggers extreme reactions. She got that part right. In her book, she is equally critical of atheists (including proponents of evolution such as Richard Dawkins) as she is of religious fundamentalists. In Armstrong’s view, atheists are as stupid to God as fundamentalists are to science. Both sides are shouting way too loud, leaving no room for reasoned discourse.

And now we are suffering through another extreme reaction in the form of a certain movement with a beverage in the title, again co-opting our Founding Fathers (who have every reason to be spinning in their graves). According to a 2005 Pew Research Center Poll cited in Scientific American, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists and only 11 percent accept evolution. (Forty percent of Democrats accept evolution, which is not good either.)

Obviously, the creationists and their fellow travelers are very successful in getting their word out. Scary, isn’t it?

My Visit to the Local Creationist Museum (Seriously, I'm Not Making This Up)

Believe it or not, this museum is only 10 or 12 miles from my home, outside San Diego.

This journey through time will be a very short one, as the entire universe, earth included, according to creationist belief, is only 6,000 years old.

This works way better than carbon-14 dating.

I missed whether it was a standard day or a metric day.

In support of a worldwide catastrophe, creationism cites the same geological evidence as science, though with some rather significant differences in interpretation.

Noah's sons went their separate ways, assisted by land bridges spanning the oceans, thanks to a Flood-induced ice age. The animals from the Ark dispersed along these same land bridges, perhaps not whales and other sea creatures.

And I thought Neanderthals survived in the form of Tea Party followers.

I wish I had our high school class valedictorian, Karl Van Bibber, to explain this to me.

If I can follow the logic, mutations (which are all bad) get filtered out of the gene pool, keeping creation constant. There is, however, the mother-in-law exception.

That's right, evolution is just a religion, which makes creationism the true science. Why aren't our kids being taught this in school?

The "bad fruits" of evolution. No good can come from allowing people to think for themselves. That's why we need knowledgeable people in authority to do our thinking for us.

Evolution apparently played a part in the Final Solution. Actually, murderous bigots were killing Jews en masse long before Darwin. The Catholic Church even made saints out of some of these medieval pre-Hitlers. (Sorry, I was trying really hard to keep this objective.)

A browse through the museum's book store. No, I didn't Photoshop the book title.