Creation Museum Visitor's Guide
From RationalWiki
The Creation Museum is a travesty created by creationist Ken Ham in order to propound the idea that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that the Biblical stories of the Garden of Eden and the Flood are not just "history" but "science". It was strategically located so that a large number of Americans live within a day's drive of its appalling magnetic center.
This Visitor's Guide will — at some point in the future — allow you to separate the spin from the truth, so you can understand what the "controversy" is really about. Along the way, you will learn the truth about evolutionary biology, and its ramifications in the world. A preview: they are not so frightening, but they are vitally important to understand.
Please understand we are waiting for some poor struggling (or highly entertained) RationalWikian to endure this "museum"'s entrails in order to fatten the pig that this article will someday be. Anyone want to journey into the whale's fat tummy? Anyone? Bueller? If you can't wait to read our guide then a number of other people have already been there and reported.
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[edit] Tilting at windmills
The Spanish writer Cervantes described, in his famous Don Quixote,[1] a Spanish would-be knight who tilted ("jousted") against windmills, imagining them to be larger-than-life enemies. To quote another author,[2] these small skirmishes were "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Quixote's struggle against an imagined enemy, in fact, much resembles the current "attack" on science posed by institutions like "Answers in Genesis", and the Creation Museum: perceiving harmless science to be a deadly threat to faith, many men and women have spent far too much time striking out at evolution, never imagining that the creationism/evolution "controversy" is actually based on misconceptions about the nature of science, coupled with a healthy dose of willful blindness and cognitive dissonance. Some would argue that the construct of "Evolution" — so imposing and deadly in the minds of many — is in fact no more harmful to religion than Quixote's windmills were to him. Nevertheless, evolution is certainly harmful to the idea that the earth was created in seven days 6,000 years ago.
[edit] Science and religions: eternally opposed?
People make the assertion that science must be diametrically opposed to religion in all forms and at all levels. Some people like this simplicity while others prefer a more ambiguous approach, looking at the strengths that each present and working from there.
- Science is a method of determining things we can know about the world around us with ever-increasing certainty and accuracy. It takes things that we can detect and tests them, models them and makes predictions about them. In short, science deals with what is essentially the real, testable world. Science's successes have led to the reduction in debilitating illnesses, awesome feats such as putting a man on the moon, and modern weather forecasting.
- Religions are purported revelations about what we don't know and can't know about the world we live in. So long as these revelations don't contradict what science has shown to be facts (such as with young earth creationism), they may enlighten us, providing some people with what they consider to be reasonable and satisfactory answers, about many eternal questions that will probably always lie beyond our ability to finally answer. As such, much what religion says doesn't particularly matter to science, because it just can't be detected or proved or disproved either way. Its successes include being the inspiration behind many great works of philosophy, peace and charity.
In this view of things — akin to the idea called NOMA — religion can stated as being the "whys" to science's "whats" and "hows". It should be noted however that NOMA is by no means a universally accepted viewpoint.
[edit] The theory of evolution: what does it say?
Those of a religious bent frequently object to the theory of evolution on the grounds that, in their minds, it implies consequences that are simply intellectually unforgivable.
For example, in the 2008 presidential season, former candidate Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) wrote an impassioned letter to the New York Times, explaining his objections to the theory, and saying, "I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos." People like Senator Brownback think that, if mankind was not "specially created," but is rather the result of a unique and eons-long process, which exhibits the cardinal sin of "materialism," humanity is somehow deprived of its grandeur.
To scientists, this seems a little ridiculous. Everyone likes the underdog, the little engine that could. Evolution's a little like that. Life starts, somehow, on a poisonous and inhospitable planet, and over billions of years, through cooperation, competition, hard work and diligence, it arrives at all the wondrous forms we see today, remaking the world to suit as it went. Evolution says we got here the hard way, didn't bilk off our Father, but rather made our own way in life until we got to the point where He could tell us how proud He was, and we'd be able to understand.
[edit] Dinosaurs and humanity?
[edit] A clue: Mt. St. Helens
"A clue: Mount St. Helens" is the name of a panel in the Creation Museum that uses Mount St. Helens to present arguments for a global flood.
Item number two on the panel reads "when 11 years old, a new lava dome dates greater than 350,000 years old by potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating.", in 1997 Steve Austin collected samples known to be 11 years old from the dome of Mt. Saint Helens and submitted them to a radiometric dating lab which told them the samples were 340,000 — 2,800,000 years old. This would appear at first to be a serious challenge to radiometric dating but in truth is entirely ficticious.
To start with, the dating method Austin used, K-Ar, was entirely misapplied. K-Ar dating is not accurate on recently formed materials, it takes many thousand years for the isotope abundance to build up to measurable levels. Austin also had the dating performed by a lab whose equipment was not accurate enough to analyze samples less then two million years in age, at the time of dating a footnote on their website read "We cannot analyze samples expected to be younger than 2 M.Y.". When a 11 year old sample was dated using a method that is not accurate under a few thousand years by a lab that admitted their equipment would only work on samples greater then 2 million years in age, it should be no surprise that the samples were inaccurately dated.[3] For more discussion see the article on this subject by Kevin R. Henke, Ph.D. here.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Pronounced "Don Kee-Hote-Ey".
- ↑ One of the contributors to the wiki also known as "William Shakespeare".
- ↑ Young-Earth Creationist 'Dating' of a Mt. St. Helens Dacite: The Failure of Austin and Swenson to Recognize Obviously Ancient Minerals
