History Book of the Universe (Prepare to Believe, part 5)
Creation Museum, Petersburg, KY
Thanks for visiting Narrative Nation!
This is where I’ll collect some thoughts and images from my exploration of places with emotional significance for many Americans. Stops include Civil War and Revolutionary War sites and museums; Underground Railroad sites; state parks and historic homes; historical associations; and memorabilia and gun shops. To get a better sense of the narratives attached to historic places and the events and people they might commemorate, I look at the signage, collect the literature, and talk to visitors, staff, guides, and rangers. And of course, I mine the gift shops! Other places such as a Christian theme park, a convenience store, and a gun show help me consider how ideas about history influence current American fascinations, conspiracy theories, and cultural conflicts.
Some of this will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: White Supremacist Revisions of the American Narrative. For now these are drafts to help me think about what I’m seeing and hearing. If you’re new, you might want to start at the beginning of my road trip, or you might want to start at the beginning of this six-part Creation Museum series.
In previous posts about the Creation Museum, I looked at the Young Earth sect’s dinos-are-dragons pseudoscience train wreck and their argument against evolution generally. I’m not sure if I got anywhere. But we did see some of the ways this contingent props up transparently fallacious talking points in order to preserve a “competing worldview” and reject some of the most universally understood science.
This story works around to what can only be described as a disaster (but not the kind of disaster that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, because we’ve learned from Answers in Genesis that it never happened). Here I look at more mythologizing of the historical narrative and begin to think about how such an anti-evidence, anti-science, and anti-truth environment contributes to the far right’s attack on American public education.
After this, check out the companion post, “Something Terrible is Coming,” a collection of annotated photos and videos related to these Creation Museum stories. Also — a photo of Ken Ham’s parents and a 90-second video of their life sized Methuselah animatronic, both just in time for the scary season.
An Infallible Argument
In one of his YouTube videos, Creation Museum founder Ken Ham takes exception to scientists and theologians who incorporate evolution into Christian thinking. Ham advertises he will “give an analysis of the claims” made by Christians who believe in an “old” universe. In this video he targets scientist Francis Collins (a leader of the Human Genome Project and an avowed Christian); New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N. T. Wright; and the philosophy professor and Christian apologist William Lane Craig.
For the full effect, you can watch some of this bonkers 9-minute video before reading my comments.
Ham begins with his general complaint: many recognized scientists and Christian leaders ignore the literal description in Genesis and believe instead that the world is billions of years old. He leads us into his critique by showing a video of Collins and Wright performing a song that reconciles Christianity with modern science:
Genesis,
Earth and Heaven in a cosmic kiss,
Evolution must have been like this . . .
Ham goes on a roll while playing this video, pausing it a few times for one of his characteristic mic-drop reminders to “think about” his own irrelevant arguments. Says Ham,
Where’d they get the idea of evolution from? They didn’t get it from the Bible. Think about that. They got it from outside the Bible, and they’re imposing it on the Bible.
Since evolution—like the word “species” I discussed in a previous post—is not explicitly explained in the Bible, any ideas that include it are wrong.
Continuing with Collins and Wright’s song:
Oh I believe in Genesis,
How He made it all
Fourteen billion years ago.
Ham can’t abide this and stops the video again. But his response to these lyrics is a wondrous example of the reasoning behind a lot of the Creation Museum stuff:
He made it all 14 billion years ago? Where’d they get that from? You know, they’re not that old. I mean, the only way you would know how old the universe is, is if you were there to see it start. And there’s only one who was there to see it start. . . and He recorded for us in His word that He made everything in six days. And they’re ordinary days.
They got it from man’s beliefs about the past—man, who wasn’t there.
The song is humorously put to the tune of The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” but I’m not sure Ham can afford to notice this without having a stroke.
Dragged out next for Ham’s devastating exposé is the well-known Christian apologist William Lane Craig. Watching another interview video, Ham catches Craig acknowledging that his own beliefs about the age of the universe align with “mainstream science.” That confession, in Ham’s world, is a major self-own for any purported true Christian.
Though Ham gets a little carried away here, it’s essential that his followers understand the full import of the problem he so astutely identifies:
Actually, do you realize what he’s really doing? He’s taking man’s word literally and God’s word allegorically. He should be judging man’s word with God’s word!
Holy hot takes, Ham! I can’t imagine how anyone could respond to this. This type of rhetorical and interpretive error on Craig’s part is said to be “leading generations astray” as part of “a pandemic in the Church.”
Craig’s observation that the Bible never explicitly provides an age for the universe is eternally silenced by a mind-boggling Ham salad. I’ll admit I can’t follow this convoluted claim about why the Bible does not—and would not want to—state the age of the universe. You may need to read this more than once:
Because, you see, if the Bible did state that, then it wouldn’t be infallible. Because, you see, God’s written word was completed about 2000 years ago, so if the Bible said that the universe was 6000 years old back then, now it’d be 8,000 years old. In 2000 more years, it’d be 10,000 years old. So the Bible doesn’t say how old the Earth is. (5:23-)
Wait what? Even a “young” Earth will get older in the YEC worldview, right? Let’s say—and this is just for argument’s sake—but let’s imagine the Earth, however old it is now, could be expected to get older at the pace of roughly one year per year. I’m not a planetary geologist, so don’t everybody pile on, but those figures should work as a placeholder until we can really figure this thing out. So even if the earth is only 6000 years old now, in 500 years it would be 6500 years old. Or, even if it’s 6000 years old now, then it would have been about 4000 years old when the New Testament was written, and it would still be 6000 years old now like Ham wants it to be. We can agree on that much. Or no?
The last sentence quoted may contain the least allowable use of the word “so” I’ve ever seen. So let it be written. I can’t stop reading it: this is the quicksand of science denial. And maybe the problem is me not understanding the definition of “infallible.” Is Ham telling us that events recorded in the Bible are not subject to the continuation of time? And would that apply to all topics, or just this dating issue that holds the entire fantasy together? Is the text of the Bible—defined by Ham himself as God’s word received and recorded by man—not understood as a physical document that ages? Ham does say it was “completed” 2000 years ago, but does this combination of completion and infallibility inoculate the events mentioned inside it against the passing of time?
Like Huck Finn when the Widow Douglas tries to explain spiritual gifts, this was too many for me. A convention of philosophers, mathematicians, and linguists could be sequestered for two years without producing a logical paraphrase of these ideas.
But for the “Answers in Genesis” audience, it’s kind of bulletproof in that way. If it really can’t be understood, then it’s hard for many people to dispute. This is how fake science—from this stuff to white supremacist “race realism” to the tragically distorted information about Covid-19 and vaccines generally—undermines American society. These confusing parallel narratives have a lot of sticking power in an emperor’s-new-clothes kind of way, where the desire to be part of a particular community convinces people to ignore what’s so observably, physically true. In this case, that the planet is pretty fucking “old.”
“only a few hours, at most”
The Creation Museum also takes responsibility for educating visitors on more immediate concerns. This set of signs is posted in the Adam and Eve/Dinosaur Jungle hallway at the Creation Museum. Visitors walk through several life-size dioramas showing the first couple in a variety of activities, often with a romantic vibe, and always within view of a small dinosaur.
The signs on the top row demonstrate what foolish ideas have taken root and also the way passages from Genesis are deployed to support the young earth argument.
Before man’s Fall, animals were vegetarians. In a “very good” creation, no animal would die, so there were no carnivores. All the beasts of the earth . . . ate only plants.
We know all the animals used to be vegetarians because we have to believe they were because Genesis says there was no such thing as death before the Fall of Man.
And how do we know that it “would require only a few hours, at most” for Adam to name all these plant-eating animals? Well, because that’s the only acceptable answer. Adam had to work that fast because millions of years worth of stuff happened in a few “ordinary days.” That’s the founding legend all the other stories have to align with.
I like to imagine Adam zinging around like a tachyon particle, naming the entire world and then mansplaining his accomplishments to Eve.
Oh Adam, how did you ever manage to name all these plants and all these animals by yourself?
Well, Eve, it’s a (god)complex thing you probably wouldn’t understand, but it only took me a few hours. At most. Now quit asking questions and carry that naked little ass over here.
Insufferable. No wonder she was happy to go along with the first snake that ever said a real word to her.
But of course the YEC crowd has no particular stake in the idea of vegetarian animals. This only serves to head off some of the more obvious problems with their claim that man was created at the same time as all the land animals.
However, the second pair of signs reinforces traditional gender roles and the expectation of marriage, laying the groundwork for some of the more openly prejudiced viewpoints seen in the museum’s other exhibits and merchandise. Again glibly presenting controversial claims as nothing but a few quick nature facts, the Creation Museum makes its divisive and prejudiced foundation clear enough.
“leading generations astray”: the YEC Homeschoolers
Ken Ham trolling clips of credentialed scientists and serious theologians would not be terribly important if his superstupid behavior was contained on YouTube. But it is not contained. An arsenal of Young Earth Creationist materials is sold to homeschoolers at the Creation Museum and online.
This creates a genuine threat, not only to the children whose opportunity for a reality-based education is being stolen from them by their misguided parents, but to the rest of a society into which these children will be released as adults, parents, and professionals capable of influencing our institutions.
I’m posting one shelf of their homeschooling materials here, and I’ve shared photos in the companion Creation Museum photo gallery. This photo shows how the subjects of the formative K-12 education years, such as chemistry and ecology, are replaced by their own versions constructing an alternate reality. Titles include Intro to Forensic Science: From a Biblical Worldview andThe Riot and the Dance: Foundational Biology. It’s literally “science fiction.” An American history text calledThe Pilgrim’s Progress promises nothing but the best excuses—matter of fact, God’s own excuses—for Christian settler colonialism. I’m not sure if they’ve produced signature versions of the basic maths yet, but they might need to if we’re ever going to work out some of Ken Ham’s ideas about the age of the Earth. And of course, they have a book called Introduction to Logic.
Wonders of the American landscape such as the Grand Canyon are re-explained through the flood narrative. To teach about animal life, they sell alt-world knock-offs of the Kratt Brothers and Crocodile Hunter series. If these poor kids escape with their minds intact, they could be expert world-builders for fantasy games. Every part of life on the old Earth is replaced by its young Earth shadow paper cutout.
Children being raised by YEC adherents are being, as the Creation Museum’s signs say, “prepare[d] to believe” through this curriculum, but they’re also being “prepared to be unprepared” for college and, really, for serious adult conversation. For obvious reasons, the preference among these adherents is for homeschooling or education at unregulated private religious schools. At the primarily open-access state college where I’ve taught in the English department for 20 years, I periodically have some students who were reared in this environment or by other anti-science, anti-intellectual factions. Whether or not they have a good hold on the mechanics needed for college work (sentence grammar and general reading and math skills), I’ve observed an astounding ignorance of the world in some cases. And that’s exactly what’s required to preserve the counter-factual big ideas of such communities. Of course some of these students are trying to escape all of this through the public education system. Both scenarios demonstrate the problem the children of these families experience.
Homeschooling is certainly not wrong. Some of the best prepared and strongest critical thinkers I’ve had in class have been homeschooled. It’s also sometimes necessary for students who can’t successfully integrate into the available schools for whatever reason. But homeschooling can be a way for unqualified parents adhering to unsubstantiated fringe fantasies to pull their children out of the public school system and raise them inside a delusion. These kids need some kind of social protection, and one way is to publicize the problems with this thinking and not minimize the dangers.
A very direct way to protect children from being “prepared to believe” in myths and legends instead of historical and scientific truths (and consequently being unprepared for their role as reasonable voters) is to protect our public schools from the current wave of far right activists and astroturfing “moms” working around the clock to undermine, defund, and dismantle public schools.
choosing distrust
Earlier this month I attended the Freedom to Teach conference at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida, sponsored by Duke University’s History Department and Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center. The keynote speaker was the historian Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains. MacLean’s talk connected the history of the libertarian long-game for control of the nation to the current attacks on public education. Her research shows that the people who seek to “enchain democracy” by hijacking government, advancing corporate schemes, and suppressing the vote are the same people organizing widespread attacks on public schools. Creating distrust in public institutions and mainstream worldviews is a core strategy of the far right’s culture war.
MacLean shared a quotation from the radical right’s poster boy for sowing chaos, an exceedingly annoying guy who manages to show up in my feed every day. Christopher Rufo—Manhattan Institute fellow, Hillsdale College employee, and a leader of the 2023 New College takeover in Florida—said “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust.” This is an open call for disinformation: widespread distrust is not the result of an honest examination of the schools, but the game plan of a program entirely uncommitted to the facts. On the Hillsdale College Imprimis site, Rufo lays out his general objective in more detail: “laying siege to the institutions.”
What could work better in the service of that project than convincing a group of children that even the most generally accepted components of the world narrative taught in school—such as the processes of evolution on an old planet—are dramatically incorrect? While an organization like Answers in Genesis may not have the destruction of public schools explicitly on their agenda (and I’m not sure they don’t), at any rate their own cause assists the far right’s goal of institutional distrust.
Most of the materials in the Creation Museum focus on establishing an impossible timeline and shoring it up with convoluted, nonsensical narratives. But the organization’s default positions of intolerance and social regression pop up routinely enough.
This poster, presented like a chalkboard school lesson, casts Young Earth Creationism in a battle against the fortifications of mainstream secularists. It’s not limited to a dispute over the age of the earth. This sign, with its castles and cannons, invokes some of the most common “culture wars” grievances:
Thankfully, some Christians fight against the humanistic thinking in our culture, such as abortion, pornography, and homosexual behavior, but these efforts will ultimately fall short since naturalism’s sandy foundation remains untouched.
This is not only a complaint about the freedoms of contemporary society, but an indictment of those Christians who do not engage enough in the culture wars. On the “solutions” side of the board, the call to dismantle mainstream culture is more explicit:
Rather than compromising with evolutionary ideas, a concerted effort must be made to destroy the foundational beliefs of the opposing worldview. . . . Without that foundation, the symptoms of naturalistic thinking cannot stand.
This sounds a lot like Rufo’s clarion call for conservatives to play their part in “laying siege to institutions,” here described as destroying the opposing worldview. Moms For Liberty describes its members as “happy warriors.”
As MacLean explains in her book, coalitions of independently motivated interest groups create “a framework that is mutually reinforcing.” The Universal School Choice movement touted by Rufo is the means to achieve a decades-long end of the far right, the dismantling of American public schools. This has yielded an explosion of charter schools with transparently non-egalitarian missions like the so-called “classical academies,” along with voucher programs diverting public school funding into small church-run schools and a variety of other unaccountable entities. Answers in Genesis homeschoolers and adherents are part of this dangerous coalition.
One of our Constitution’s most grievous omissions is the failure to guarantee every citizen an equal education. The quality and freedom of our public schools and colleges is always a work in progress, and always on shaky ground. At the Freedom to Teach meeting of educators, activists, and journalists this month, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight, director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrmen Center and the one of conference organizers, described the public school system as “the most democratic institution we’ve ever created” in spite of its faltering progress towards equality. It needs protection now more than ever.