Creationists ready a museum to reconcile bones with Bible

By Michael Powell, Washington Post  |  October 2, 2005

PETERSBURG, Ky. -- The guide, a soft-spoken fellow with a scholarly aspect,
walks through the halls of this handsome, half-finished museum and points to the
sculpture of a young velociraptor.

''We're placing this one in the hall that explains the post-Flood world,"
explains the guide, ''when dinosaurs lived with man."

A reporter has a question or two about this dinosaur-man business, but Mark
Looy, the guide and a vice president at the museum, has walked over to the
lifelike head of a T. rex, with its 3-inch teeth and carnivore's grin.

''We call him our 'missionary lizard,' " Looy said. ''When people realize the
T. rex lived in Eden, it will lead us to a discussion of the Gospel. The T. rex
once was a vegetarian, too."

The nation's largest museum devoted to biblical creation science is rising just
outside Cincinnati. Set amid a park and 3-acre artificial lake, the
50,000-square-foot museum features animatronic dinosaurs, state-of-the-art
models and graphics, and a half-dozen staff scientists. It holds that the world
and the universe are but 6,000 years old and that baby dinosaurs rode in Noah's
Ark.

The $25 million Creation Museum stands much of modern science on its head and
might cause a paleontologist or three to rend their garments. But officials
expect to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors when the museum opens in
early 2007.

''Evolutionary Darwinists need to understand we are taking the dinosaurs back,"
said Kenneth Ham, president of Answers in Genesis-USA, which is building the
museum. ''This is a battle cry to recognize the science in the revealed truth of
God."

''Intelligent design," the theory that the machinery of life is so complex as to
require the hand -- subtle or not -- of an intelligent creator, has stolen the
media thunder of late. This week a trial continues in federal court in
Pennsylvania in which 11 parents accuse the Dover school board of violating the
separation of church and state by requiring high school biology teachers to read
a statement in class that intelligent design is an alternative explanation of
life's origins.

But by any measure, Young Earth Creationism -- which holds that the Bible is the
literal word of God and that he created the universe in seven days -- has a more
powerful hold on the beliefs of Americans than evolutionary theory or
intelligent design. That grip grows stronger by the year.

In polls taken last year, 45 percent of those surveyed said they believed that
God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago (or less) and that man
shares no common ancestor with the ape. Only 26 percent said they believed in
the central tenet of evolution, that all life descended from a single ancestor.

In the early 20th century, many creationist thinkers viewed Genesis as
metaphorical, accepting that the earth formed over hundreds of thousands, even
millions of years. But creationist leaders have taken a more literal line.

''The creationists have been very successful in persuading conservative
Christians to abandon any nonliteral interpretation of the Bible," said Ronald
Numbers, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of
''The Creationists."

To drive past the stegosaurus silhouettes at the gate to the parking lot at the
Creation Museum is to enter a creationist world in great ferment. Answers in
Genesis is one of about a half-dozen creationist organizations and museums --
each with its own headquarters, radio studio, and website -- and scholarly and
popular magazines.

Creationists believe man became mortal when God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden
6,000 years ago. Death did not exist before that.

''We admit we have an axiom: We have a book and it's the Bible and it's revealed
history," said Ham. ''Where the Bible teaches on science, we can trust it as the
word of God."

[This last sentence is a red herring.  The Bible cannot teach on science because
science relates to ideas that are testable (and falsifiable).  Science is not a
matter of faith.  I do not have to believe in quantum mechanics - or evolution
or the Lewis acid-base theory.  I can go out and test it for myself.]

[What evidence is there - aside from the text of the Bible - that dinosaurs and
humans ever lived at the same time?]

-----------------------------------

The timeless truth of creation

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist  |  October 2, 2005

HAVE YOU heard about Flying Spaghetti Monsterism? FSM is a four-month-old
''religion" founded on the belief that the universe was created by an invisible
flying clump of spaghetti and meatballs. This blob of pasta, FSM's ''followers"
say, uses its ''noodly appendage" to play an ongoing role in human affairs. For
example, it tampers with carbon-dating tests to make the planet seem older than
it is, so that any evidence of evolution is actually the work of the spaghetti
monster.

FSM was concocted in June by Bobby Henderson, a recent college graduate with a
degree in physics. When the Kansas Board of Education took up the question of
teaching intelligent design as an alternative to Darwinian evolution, Henderson
wrote an open letter (posted at www.venganza.org) demanding equal classroom time
for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism as well.

As religious spoofs go, it wasn't exactly Monty Python's ''Life of Brian," but
it was good for a chuckle or two. No doubt that was all the reaction that
Henderson was expecting. If so, he underestimated the eagerness of many
Darwinists to paint supporters of intelligent design as either moronic Bible
Belters or conniving religious fanatics. Henderson's ''religion" became a cult
hit, promoted on other websites and covered with relish in the press. The
Washington Post reprinted Henderson's letter verbatim. A New York Times story
was headlined, ''But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?"

At least Henderson couched his disdain for intelligent design in humor. Other
Darwinists, many steeped in ideological antipathy to religion, resort to insult
and invective.

''It is absolutely safe to say," the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, a leading
Darwinist, has written, ''that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in
evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane." Liz Craig, a member of
the board of Kansas Citizens for Science, summarized her public-relations
strategy in February: ''Portray them" -- intelligent design advocates -- ''in
the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists,
ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc."

Ironically, Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that there could be reasonable
challenges to his theory of natural selection -- including challenges from
religious quarters. According to the sociologist and historian Rodney Stark,
when ''The Origin of Species" first appeared in 1859, the Bishop of Oxford
published a review in which he acknowledged that natural selection was the
source of variations within species, but rejected Darwin's claim that evolution
could account for the appearance of different species in the first place. Darwin
read the review with interest, acknowledging in a letter that ''the bishop makes
a very telling case against me."

[ME: And in the almost 150 years since then, an enormous body of evidence has
developed that have reinforced and refined Darwin's ideas.  Citing Darwin's
doubts from ages ago does not undermine his ideas today.]

How things have changed. When John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee in 1925,
religious fundamentalists fought to keep evolution out of the classroom because
it was at odds with a literal reading of the Biblical creation story. Today,
Darwinian fundamentalists fight to keep the evidence of intelligent design in
the diversity of life on earth out of the classroom, because that would be at
odds with a strictly materialist view of the world. Eighty years ago, the
thought controllers wanted no Darwin; today's thought controllers want only
Darwin. In both cases, the dominant attitude is authoritarian and closed-minded
-- the opposite of the liberal spirit of inquiry on which good science depends.

[ME: No, the dominant attitude today is not closed minded - it is quite the
opposite.  Science welcomes new ideas every day, but they must be testable,
rational ideas.  ID is religion with a fig-leaf of cover.  It's proper place is
in a place of worship or a discussion of philosophy.]

As always, those who challenge the reigning orthodoxy face repercussions. In
April, the science journal Nature interviewed Caroline Crocker, a molecular
microbiologist at George Mason University. Because ''she mentioned intelligent
design while teaching her second-year cell-biology course . . . she has been
barred by her department from teaching both evolution and intelligent design."
Other skeptics of Darwinism choose to keep silent. When Nature approached
another researcher, he refused to speak for fear of hurting his chance to get
tenure.

If intelligent design proponents were peddling Biblical creationism, the
hostility aimed at them would make sense. But they aren't. Unlike creationism,
which denied the earth's ancient age or that biological forms could evolve over
time, intelligent design makes use of generally accepted scientific data and
agrees that falsification, not revelation, is the acid test of scientific
validity.

[ME: OK, fine.  But keep reading...]

In truth, intelligent design isn't a scientific theory but a restatement of a
timeless argument: that the regularity and laws of the natural world imply a
higher intelligence -- God, most people would say -- responsible for its
design. Intelligent design doesn't argue that evidence of design ends all
questions or disproves Darwin. It doesn't make a religious claim. It does say
that when such evidence appears, researchers should take it into account, and
that the weaknesses in Darwinian theory should be acknowledged as forthrightly
as the strengths. That isn't primitivism or Bible-thumping or flying
spaghetti. It's science.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

[ME: So which is it, Mr. Jacoby?  Is ID science or, "in truth, [ID] isn't a
scientific theory"?]