My family attended the recent grand opening of the Answers in Genesis and I saw what I expected to see: closed minded propagandists who don’t want any challenge to their narrow view of origins. But they weren’t in the Museum.
My family
attended the recent grand opening of the Answers in Genesis and I saw
what I expected to see: closed minded propagandists who don’t want any
challenge to their narrow view of origins. But they weren’t in the
Museum.
So we drove
past the protesters and into a museum whose exhibits constantly
reference both sides of the creation/evolution debate.
While my boys
ran around on a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark and pretended to
sword-fight a T-Rex, their mother and I read the displays on ice ages,
species development, and differing understandings of radiometric
dating.
The planetarium
inspired awe at the vastness of the universe, bringing to mind the
Psalmist’s question “What is man that you are mindful of him?” while
answering it as the New Testament does: with the Incarnation and
atonement of the Redeemer-Ruler of the cosmos.
I was
pleasantly surprised that the planetarium exhibit acknowledges problems
caused for any biblical historical timeline by the time it takes
starlight to reach our field of vision.
I was
furthermore surprised that the exhibit didn’t take a dogmatic stance on
any one of the possible creationist answers to the problem: whether the
concept of starlight created already in transit or Russell Humphreys’
theory of the question resolved by relativity of space and time or any
of the others.
In fact,
scientific humility marked the museum, in a way not typical of some
other attempts at creation science. The Museum exhibits make clear a
conviction that, hermeneutically and theologically, a relatively
“young” universe makes the best sense of the biblical data. The Museum
exhibits provide possible scientific explanations of how this biblical
authority can be scientifically explained but they do not confuse the
authority of Scripture with the derivative and revisable authority of
any scientific theory.
Now, I am a
six-day creationist of the oldest sort. But I haven’t always been.
There was a time when Hugh Ross’s day/age theory of origins seemed
somewhat plausible and when the restoration model, the old “gap”
theory, seemed even more possible.
I came to a
more traditional creationist approach through my studies in biblical
eschatology, ironically enough, dealing with texts such as Romans
8:18-23 and Isaiah 11:1-10.
Even if I
agreed with my old-earth creationist friends, I would be happy to walk
with my children through this museum, if for no other reason than to
show them how some Christians understand Genesis.
Frankly, even
if I were a Darwinist, I would think I would have no more reason to be
angered by this exhibit than by a New Age museum arguing for the Gaia
hypothesis of earth as a living organism or by an Eastern religion’s
museum arguing for a universe with no beginning and no end.
Speaking of
Darwinism, it was everywhere and fairly presented. In virtually every
exhibit the information included both the Darwinist-materialist
explanation for the scientific data along with how the same data are
interpreted by the Museum’s biblical creationist grid.
I can only wish
the same sense of epistemic humility were found in the protesters
standing with placards outside the Museum’s gates or in a plane flying
overhead with a banner reading “Thou shalt not lie.”
Inside the
Museum, I was asked by a reporter to respond to the Darwinist
protesters’ charge that I was “confusing” my children by bringing them
into a museum that presents a markedly different view of cosmic history
than that found in secular science textbooks.
I am
dumbfounded that groups with names such as “Free Inquiry” could believe
that seeing viewpoints at variance with approved orthodoxy, whether
religious or materialist, is “confusing.” After all, weren’t the Big
Bang and natural selection “confusing” to a previous generation of
schoolchildren?
It is
remarkable that no Christian has ever asked me if I am “confusing” my
children by taking them, as I did later this weekend, to the
Cincinnati-area aquarium with exhibits everywhere assuming only a
Darwinist/naturalist understanding of the origins of aquatic life. Most
conservative Christians I know want their children to understand
Darwin’s account of human evolution, and a fair representation of it,
precisely so they will not be mystified by it later.
One would think
the secularist free-thinkers would want everyone to see the creationist
account of origins, for the very sake of the contrast with what they
would see as a more viable model. I can even understand Darwinist
ridicule of a narrative that is so strikingly at odds with the current
scientific consensus. What I cannot understand is the attempt to
suppress the debate itself, whether through attempted zoning
regulations or through noisy planes overhead on opening day.
I suspect, in the end, that the humility of the Creation Museum’s presentation is precisely what worries some Darwinists.
The Creation
Museum exhibits offer very little triumphalism. The exhibits quite
often ask the questions “what if” and “could it be.”
The exhibits
honestly acknowledge that every viewpoint rests on some authority, with
this viewpoint interpreting the data through the authority of divine
revelation. The Museum designers also seem to understand that the
debate with Darwinism will not be won ultimately with brute facts, but
with an alternative narrative, a narrative that rings truer than the
Darwinist story of a nature accidentally, but perpetually red in tooth
and claw.
As we drove out
of the museum gates, my boys asked me about the protesters outside:
“What are they yelling about?” My wife and I gave a thumbnail
explanation of Darwinism, and it dawned on me that the problem for the
protesters is not that they are scientifically wrong. The problem is
that they hold a view of the world that is sad and hopelessly violent.
I don’t pray,
first of all, that they will be convinced by scientific arguments,
whether those of young-earth creationists or Intelligent Design
theorists.
I pray that the
Darwinist protesters become like the little children they see before
them, with their snow cones and dinosaur balloons.
I pray the
protesters see not just the truth but the beauty of a world in which
scientifically impossible things happen: lions eat straw like an ox,
the world is saved in an ark, people come back from the dead, camels
pass through needles’ eyes and old men are born again.