"Think About It: Were You There When God Created the Earth?" (Prepare to Believe, part 2)

Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky

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.

Some of this will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative. For now these stories 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 to follow the road trip.

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This is my second post about the Creation Museum, a 75,000 sf pseudoscience exhibit hall and merchandise mall surrounded by botanical gardens, a zip line, and a petting zoo. The Creation Museum was opened in 2007 in Petersburg, Kentucky, about 20 minutes from Cincinnati, and a sister exhibit called the Ark Encounter is 45 minutes away. Both businesses are operated by a Young Earth Creationist group called Answers in Genesis, founded and still led by an Australian Christian fundamentalist named Ken Ham.

My previous post was an introduction to this short series on the Creation Museum, including the organization’s own description of their facility and their attitudes toward both science and history.

If I had watched the museum’s “plan your visit” video, I would have known to spare at least six hours for this stop. Even though I stayed more than four hours and walked through the gardens and main exhibit halls, I felt I missed a lot by skipping the live animal science demonstrations and of course the parenting classes.

The Creation Museum’s general strategy is to present fallacious timelines, animatronic-filled dioramas, spurious sediment charts, high production quality animated videos, and inscrutable cluster maps to an audience that is predisposed to believe it and reassured by the professionalism of the display and the calibrated mood music transitioning them from hall to hall.

The consensus among scientists, educators, and most other Christian groups is that the historical narrative presented by AIG at the Creation Museum is unsupported by facts and runs counter to any kind of credible scientific analysis of the world. Looking at some of the documents on their website reveals an attempt to replace widely accepted theories with their own knock-off brands, each opening a window into their vision of a young Earth.

I’ll share what I learned about a few interrelated topics: dinosaurs co-existing with humans; how Noah could fit all the animals on the ark, yes including dinosaurs; and evolution denial. An example of a knock-off theory invented to prop up some of this nonsense is called “baraminology,” which I’ll also try to explain.

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the event horizon

I entered through the Visitor’s Center and spent too long browsing the little gift shop there, not realizing this was only a drop compared to the unconscionable amount of merchandise available throughout the main exhibit building. But the books and souvenirs provided good representation of the museum’s well-defined identity in which Young Earth Creationism—which you might be tempted to pass off as a harmless, though colossal, error—is inextricably paired with discriminatory positions on social issues.

themes in Creation Museum merch, clockwise from the top: the theory of "kinds" instead of species; confusing nonsense about the timeline of human diversity; gender essentialism paired with Creator guilt; resisting the evidence for evolution; religious interference in women's reproductive rights; and hateful anti-LGBTQ sarcasm

Exiting through the back, I was guided along a path into the botanical gardens, or the Garden of Eden, I suppose. The theme music continued outside. To the right, there was a large stand of bamboo, some Japanese maple trees, and a generically Asian style bridge-and-pond set. This was cliché but felt pretty normal for a theme-park world gardens display.

The other side of the path was very different. A large area of tall grasses swayed mechanically under an artificial breeze. An assortment of vents released primordial steam not quite randomly enough to convince. Partially cloaked inside this lake of tall grasses were several small animatronic dinosaur skeletons wagging their tails. It became clear that the dinosaur thing was going to continue, but I still didn’t know why. I made my way around the gardens alongside several huge families and a few more friendly dinos. A little waterfall twinkled knowingly as I crossed a bridge on my way to the main exhibition hall.

My video doesn’t capture it that well, but the garden walk was mildly surreal. Indeed, the hegemonic history of the world enforced by the ruling class of liberal elites was about to be suspended. As I walked through the exhibits I describe in this series, a few times I wondered whether that little bridge back over to the gardens would be there when I returned.

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all kinds of stupid

The title of today’s post evokes that skunky sweet smell and that vanishing white path carrying into the ether some serious profundity lately observed: “Think about it: Were you there when God created the earth?”

This isn’t a quote from Pineapple Express. This challenge to “think about it” is found on the Creation Museum website. It continues from there,

No, but we have a book inspired by the Creator that tells us how He did it. If we start with God’s Word, dinosaurs living with humans—at least early on—makes sense. "(“About the Museum”)

In the false history narrative perpetrated by the Creation Museum, “Dinosaurs living with humans . . . makes sense.” Other content on the same page debunks the idea of a mass extinction millions of years ago because it conflicts with the Bible. That’s the whole argument, which includes such insurmountable rhetorical smackdowns as “Or did it?”

The world is apparently only 6,000 years old, and dinosaurs came into existence during the same 24-hour day humans did, but the museum developers do acknowledge that dinosaurs no longer exist. Their extinction, according to an unsourced explanation on the website, “could have happened any time after the two of each kind got off the Ark.”

Any time.

Here’s the entire “explanation” on the museum’s website, which includes a photo of one of their many creepy animatronic dioramas. Thanks to the hyperrealistic execution of this walk through (more recent than you knew) time, I also learned that teens during the age of the dinosaurs wore linen blouses with drawstring necklines, and that bangs were in. But I guess since dinosaurs could have gone extinct at any time . . .

The wording is strained—”the two of each kind”—by the need to include their idea of “kinds.” Kinds are the anti-evolutionist’s lame answer to the question of how all of today’s species could have been crammed into Noah’s ark. Aside from reminding us that the dinosaurs on the ark would surely have been babies (cute!) and that “the average size of a dinosaur is actually the size of a sheep,” the Creation Museum uses science-museum-like displays in serious-looking darkened exhibit halls to present the alt-science theory of “kinds.”

An article written by one of the museum’s employees explains it, beginning with the reason for throwing out the (apparently too tricky) term “species”:

A species is a man-made term used in the modern classification system. And frankly, the word species is difficult to define, whether one is a creationist or not! (“Zonkeys, Ligers, and Wolfphins, Oh My!”)

We are reminded numerous times that kind is the word used in Genesis. But wait, we’re also told that it was actually the Hebrew word min. No matter now, forget you heard about the whole Bible translation thing, because here a new field of science has been justified by the fact that the word “kind” found in whatever English translation of the Bible they’re using is not the word “species” used by English-speaking evolutionary biologists.

Betting everything on single-word-level arguments about a text received in translation from an ancient language does not seem wise. In modern Czech, the word “druh” apparently translates to both “species” and “kind.” The Dutch word for species is “soort(en).” Though this kind vs. species argument is a stupidly shaky foundation, pretending to have discredited one word licenses the rejection or reckless revision of entire fields of biological and evolutionary science.

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baraminology

Instead of commonly accepted taxonomies and phylogenetic trees explaining the classification and evolution of life, I’ve learned that Young Earth Creationists use their own parallel system called baraminology. In 1941, a creationist named Frank Marsh invented the word baramin from the Hebrew words bara, which means created, and min, which means kind. According to this unnecessary new line of thought, baramins are the “kinds” of animals God first created, and two of each kind were mind-controlled by God to walk to the ark when the time came (this logistical matter is also covered somewhere in the Creation Museum literature).

But it’s not as simple as replacing one word with another to satisfy some misguided attempt at originalism. A report from the National Center for Science Education explains that the pseudoscience of baraminology is also called “discontinuity systematics” by some of its own theorists. This name sheds more light on the reason for inventing their own system:

The basic idea behind discontinuity systematics is that there are boundaries in the history of life that cannot be crossed. The aim is to find the "discontinuities" in the history of life, or the limits of common ancestry (ReMine 1993).

Locating alleged gaps in the ancestral record opens the door to a rejection of evolution. The uncrossable boundaries that require this rogue system of biological classification are the separate creation events mentioned in Genesis and references to specially created animals in various places throughout the Bible. Since they avow that the biblical record must outweigh any other principles, animal ancestry cannot be discovered beyond those animal kinds named in, or in some cases interpolated from, the Bible. Admitting a common ancestor for all life on earth would negate the YEC historical narrative according to which God plunked down a fully formed set of flora and fauna from the first Hobby Lobby the apparent kinds.

Over the years practitioners of YEC “science” have invented some of their own methods to accommodate this untenable hyper-literal interpretation of the Bible. One of these is a software they call BDIST, the results of which are readily tossed if they don’t comply with their belief system.

In conditions where it did not return results favorable to baraminologists, other criteria are applied to achieve the desired result. This was the case for humans and primates (Robinson and Cavanaugh 1998a) where BDIST did not show a separation. Instead, the authors employed ad hoc "ecological criteria" to achieve separate baramins.

The NCSE report on baraminology sums up the disparity between its veneer and its value as follows:

Despite its use of computer software and flashy statistical graphics, the practice of baraminology amounts to little more than a parroting of scientific investigations into phylogenetics.

The supremacy of the biblical criteria is explicitly admitted to . . . in their guidebook to baraminology, so all their claims of "objectivity" notwithstanding, the results will never stray very far from a literal reading of biblical texts. (Gishlick)

These statements capture the m.o. of the Creation Museum generally, where one example of chicanery is explained by another one until a false world has been constructed with just enough verisimilitude—and animatronics—for the believers to keep believing.

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competing worldviews

Rather than acknowledge that their effort to deny evolution is part of their larger crusade to dismantle much of modern science, the Creation Museum invests in a narrative about “competing worldviews.”

After passing through a large space that included animatronic dinosaurs and human ‘tweens along with an ice cream shop and a bookstore dedicated to dragons, I entered a small theater where this 3-minute film was playing on a loop:

The film says “two competing worldviews” provide different reasons for all the world’s “ugliness and brokenness.”

First, the “naturalistic worldview” says there is no creator and that “death and suffering have always been a part of the picture.” Next, the “biblical worldview tells us that God created a perfect world wrecked by man’s sin.”

The film claims that the naturalistic—meaning scientific—worldview believes suffering has “always” been present on earth; this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of that worldview, in which life on earth, to say nothing of human life, has existed for little more than 10% of the Earth’s approximate age.

The claim that “both sides use the same evidence” is also false. The YEC “scientists” cherry-pick evidence and set up systems designed to avoid connecting inconvenient data.

The film ends with an attempt to minimize their rejection of credible science:

Many people believe this creates a war between science and faith. But in reality, this is a clash between two worldviews that have much to say about our past, our present, and our future.”

The rhetorical maneuvering throughout the narrative shows some anxiety about openly rejecting science in the 21st century. They don’t want to be described as anti-science, so they present it as a struggle between supposedly equally valid worldviews or “sides.” But for people with any kind of science literacy, there’s no comparison.

In one of numerous gift shops at the Creation Museum, I picked up about ten little booklets that explain their “science.” These two address the age of the earth:

One of these booklets explicitly connects the discovery of information about the true age of the Earth with the supposed “downfall of the Christian West.” Apparently, readers need to know why “most people today” believe the Earth is millions “and even billions” of years old because of “today’s culture wars.” I guess they’ll need to know this stuff to overthrow their secular overlords.

In the other booklet sampled here, the evidence is . . . not evidence:

Yes, dinosaurs (like the ones above) lived with humans (as this museum display shows) and did not die out millions of years ago.

Confirmation from such things as numerous dragon legends, red blood cells discovered in a T. rex bone—and many more—challenge the secular idea that dinosaurs died out 60-65 million years before man appeared.

So let it be written.

#facts

“and many more”

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so what?

The story told in this place that rather boldly appropriates the term “museum” is obviously far from accurate. I could go on and on (and of course I will, in the next post!), but I also want to say why it matters beyond the rubbernecking attraction of this science and history train wreck.

When the museum opened more than fifteen years ago, scientists and educators were concerned that it would be detrimental to science education, while other Christian groups protested that elevating this kind of belief system undermined the general credibility of organized religion. The museum continues to receive millions of visitors a year at $50 each, so the message is appealing and being spread at least to some extent.

It’s hard to know how many Americans believe this stuff, and also how much of it they believe. Questions arise about which of the numerous tenets espoused by an extreme group the like AIG must be accepted in order to qualify someone as a Young Earth Creationist, a smaller subset of creationists—one example is whether the days of creation described in Genesis are standard 24-hour periods. Estimates of Young Earth Creationists in 2019 ranged from 20 million to 100 million people, depending on how many questions were asked and where the bar was set.

Even at the low end, it’s a lot of people, and they are only one part of a continuum of far right conservative Christians active not only in the spiritual life of the nation, but also in its sociopolitical dimensions. When the creationist science movement was started in the early 20th century, the rejection of evolutionary science was part of a larger conservative American fear of communism, Marxism, socialism, and a general loss of so-called traditional morals. These theories were all designed to tear down the structures of a god-fearing nation.

I’ll want to read more about this, but it seems that the features of a natural world in which evolution is real—including competition and struggle for survival—were feared to produce similar immoral proclivities in the human society that would embrace this kind of scientific theory. Denying the theory of evolution in favor of strict adherence to sentences in the Bible was a way to protect society from ideas perceived as dangerous, such as socialism. The problem with socialism was its assumption that man’s ills were caused by man’s social order and could be corrected by man’s resistance. The Bible, of course, taught original sin with God’s salvation as the only escape.

This retrograde approach to knowledge is apparent today when we see school curriculum censored and healthcare denied based on fear of an expanded understanding of the natural world. As ultra-conservative Christians looking to turn back decades of social change team up with white supremacists looking to do the same, the power and the threat of white Christian nationalism grows rapidly. The anti-science agenda is connected to it, and this month’s efforts to cancel Florida’s AP psychology course is only one small example of the problems they’re already causing.

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next up:

A look at how Creation Museum founder Ken Ham connects his organization’s mission with some of the far right’s trigger concepts like “indoctrination”: