Also posted at the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance
I struggled for a title for this post–indeed, I struggled with what to post about the Creation Museum, or even if I should post about it. It does seem ripe for mockery–anything so utterly filled with animatronic creatures is probably going to get a lot of that. The thing is, I don’t want to make fun of what these people believe. But it does make me sad…
Picture from the Grand Canyon web site.
During some down time at work, I read an article from last week’s Columbus Dispatch about the opening of the Creation Museum. It’s not available for linking any more, so I looked for another article and found this one at Salon. The teachings about the Grand Canyon are fairly new to me…
In Ham’s view, the great flood explains not only where scientists find fossils today but also the topography of the modern world. The Grand Canyon, he informs me, was made in a matter of days or weeks as the waters of the flood rushed away and the land was reclaimed. In the exhibit, you walk through a winding canyonlike corridor with spinning, dizzying lights into a wide-open room with videos, exhibits and diagrams explaining the hydrology of instant canyon-making. Ham says that instant canyon-making is based on the fact that volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens, created reservoirs of water for a time in their altered topography. When those reservoirs breached, deep grooves were cut by the flowing water, leading to the fast formation of canyons.
…
Inside the Confusion exhibit, I strike up a conversation with Tim Shaw, a high school student visiting from Florida. “I don’t care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon,” he tells me. “It’s not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin’s theory has no God. It can’t be right. I don’t know if this story is truer than Darwin’s theory, but I do know it’s better.”
I do empathize. When I first started to tenatively question some of the things I’d grown up believing, it was kind of anxiety-inducing. Sort of like I was tugging at a loose thread and could end up unraveling everything if I wasn’t careful.
I suppose I should point out, though, that it wasn’t creationism versus evolution that I was struggling with. That was never presented as problematic, and I was taught the theory of evolution in science class at the Catholic elementary school I attended. In the Dispatch article, Ham is quoted as saying that there is a “cultural war” going on between secular humanism and the Christian worldview. I disagree. Maybe evolution is threatening to his version of Christianity, but it has never been anything but compatible with mine.
Part of the reason I don’t want to mock people’s beliefs is that I’ve learned how counterproductive it is. When people are challenged, they often hold on to what they “know” for dear life.
I’ve gained some understanding into the phenomenon in the process of raising my son (who I’ve written about in recent essays). I’ve come to realize that he works so hard to get a handle on the way things work, how things fit together, etc., that, once he’s done that, the mere suggestion that he might be mistaken is incredibly threatening to his sense of well being. And over time, I’m becoming convinced that a lot of people react this way, even if they don’t have something like Asperger’s Syndrome.
You have to realize that Creationism isn’t the cause, it’s the result of a mindset. These people can’t handle a universe that is comprised of consistent laws, cause and effect. They want magic; they want a dominionist system where they don’t have to make decisions. And most of all, they want a “god” who has a magic wand. This “god” not only puts fake fossils in rocks, makes the radioactivity deceptive to test people, and makes it look like there are patterns to the DNA of all the organisms on Earth–but magically takes all the responsibility away from you for decisions and mistakes.
They don’t want their children to have to make decisions and accept consequences, either. So they home school them (so that they won’t have to reject the lousy language or rowdy behavior of others) until it’s too late. Daddies take their daughters to virginity balls and don’t teach them how to avoid pregnancy. Because life is magical, more abstinence-only girls are sexually active and get pregnant than kids who are taught that there are consequences to actions.
It’s not science, it’s psychology. (Well, I know psychology is a science, but you know what I mean.)
It’s also terribly damaging to religion. Without realizing it, these people are creating ridiculous straw men that can so easily be destroyed that when they say: “We know there is a god because…(say) there’s only one eye…” and science finds some 40 different working models of eyes in nature, they have to quickly find another “gap” in science or give up religion altogether. (Sociologists call this kind of religion “god of the gaps.”) Since science is always solving today’s question, these people are constantly trying to find new reasons to believe, rather than just believing.
It’s hard enough to raise a child and gradually educate him to the ways of the world without crap like this. But this development dovetails nicely with the “master plan” for production an uneducated class of drones to inhabit the counters of Walmart and Burger King. The assault on the middle class continues.