Long Live the Creation Museum!
Published by Greg May 27th, 2007 in Education, Homeschooling, Creationism in the Classroom, Politics, Atheism and Religion, Commentary, Creationism, Science Education“Prepare to believe.”
This is the motto of the new Creation Museum, opening on 29 May 2007.
I am so happy that they are making a creation museum. Not because I am a creationist. I’m not a creationist. People who believe in creationism are doing something either mind numbingly stupid or moderately intelligent. A person who simply believes that the world is only a few thousands of years old, or who believes that species don’t arise through evolutionary processes essentially as understood by modern science, and so on, are doing (believing) something stupid. I’m prepared to accept at the moment PZ Myers’ assertion that creationists are not necessarily stupid. But I want to be clear about that. There is evidence that you will find more creationists at one end of the “stupid-smart” scale and non-creationists at the other end, just like there is evidence that a similar pattern exists for religiosity vs. atheism. However, I’ll accept that if all you know about a person is that they are a creationist, that does not necessarily indicate that they are a moron. Not necessarily.
But there are creationists who are actually doing something (somewhat) smart, if immoral.
The people who are doing something moderately intelligent do not necessarily believe in creationism, but they make a living pretending that they do and writing books about it and stuff. I don’t believe for a second that Behe, for instance, believes in so called Intelligent Design. I’m estimating that he is a smart guy and I’ve heard this from people who know him, and I know he has the training in science. Maybe he’s a con artist. Maybe he is afraid of god. But I think he does not believe the fare he is selling. But he’s selling something, and doing OK with it, gets to be famous, etc.
It’s like a guy I know in South Africa who has a rug store. I stop in at his rug store (he has good rugs, and I even bought one once) at intervals ranging from six months to two years, and I’ve been doing that for over a decade. The front of his store has a big sign, bigger than any other sign in his store, or any sign in any store in this very large shopping mall (roughly the size of the Mall of America, no kidding). The sign says “Going Out of Business… Everything on Sale” or words to that effect. Every time I see him I ask him how’s business, and he says “Not bad, can I interest you in a rug.”
Professional creationists are selling something, and doing it with a lie. But you already knew this. What people are now only slowly beginning to realize, however, is something much more interesting. Creationism is going out of business, and unlike the guy with the rug store, this is for real.
The Discovery Institute is losing its funding, and is becoming less and less effective in its efforts every month. This can be measured, felt, seen. We are palpably experiencing the demise of this once large, powerful, and scary institution.
If you think about what the laws and the courts would ultimately have to do to completely obviate from any legal perspective the teaching of any form of creationism in any public institution, and then look at what the courts have actually done, you can see that the ideal case law is in place. That job is completed. The case law protecting our children from the yahoos in public schools is rock solid. This protection is stronger than the protection Roe v Wade gives to the right to choose an abortion.
This is incredibly important. Before the last couple of court decisions, it was possible for creationist teachers to think they could get away with slipping creationism into their classrooms. Now, it is clear that teachers who try this put their districts, their schools, and their jobs at risk. I’m certain that this situation will deter creationists from entering the life sciences (and other fields) in K through 12 education. The effects of this will be more rapid than you might think. Individuals passing through the K through 12 education system will be better educated, and less likely to become adults who will answer the Harris Poll and other polls with statements like “A Magic Man Done it.”
Many of you reading this are thinking: “No, Laden has it wrong. You can’t change the minds of creationists. They learn this in the home. Etc. etc.” … but this is not true. Well, yes, it’s true for the core, the 18 to 35 percent, depending on what is being measured. But the truth is that many of those individuals are already in religious schools or being “home schooled” and are thus not part of this particular equation. There is at least a similar magnitude of the American citizenry who can or will change their minds, or indeed have changed their minds. I have seen this happen on numerous occasions. That creationists are born that way and/or can’t ever change is a dangerous urban myth. Before you assume that this is true, please consider the evidence supporting this idea (there is very little) and consider the possibility that believing that a cause is hopeless is the first step towards failure. If you care, please don’t accept this myth uncritically.
I have been teaching college introductory evolutionary biology courses of one form or another, as a Teaching Fellow or an instructor, for 22 years. I can tell you this: The percentage of students who express creationist beliefs to me or my teaching staff has gone from a few percent (the percentage of kids accepted to colleges who are creationists is much smaller than the general population) a couple of decades ago to very near zero today. Most of this change has been in the last five or six years. It probably helps that many who have blindly fallen into lockstep with the right wing have become disillusioned with that philosophy and related moral majority thinking, thanks to nearly 8 years of having a blundering fool representing them in the White House.
The end is not near. But it is not too far off, perhaps in sight. The end of creationism as a mainstream belief will happen quickly, as a “sea change,” once certain scales have been tipped. It will be a pleasure to see this happen here in the US as it has happened elsewhere.
This is why I am glad to have the creation museum built now. It would not be built, say, a decade from now, from lack of funding and interest, and were it built a decade ago it would have been annoying and maybe ever so slightly effective.
But now, it is important. It is important to preserve this period of American history, or more exactly, the history of our (perhaps unique, or at least extreme) American propensity to believe the strangest things, to have the strangest practices. There are museums and institutes dedicated to alien abduction, to the study of bigfoot, to the yoyo and the hula-hoop, to white supremacy, to pin-ball, and to Cadillac convertibles. The creation museum will fit in nicely with this panoply of the irrelevant, the parade of oddities, this historical warehouse of the weird.
Long live the creation museum.
15 Responses to “Long Live the Creation Museum!”
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Well, Behe just collected $20K for an expert witness report in the California ‘credit for creationist biology courses’ suit. And that doesn’t count what he’ll collect if he testifies. So you may be right about him.
That is a steep price. I wonder what his regular speaker fees are?
The problem with us real scientists is that there are too many of us. Supply and demand … I”m lucky if I get over a couple hundred bucks to talk, and no one I know of from the scientific community gets fees to testify in this sort of thing, as far as I know.
Greg,
If evolution proponents really want to convince the creationists, we’re going to need to get more scientists who are devout Christians to speak out publicly about the issue like Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Owen Gingerich. The reason why evolution is such a hot button issue in this country is because it’s been so closely tied to atheism. The average person doesn’t understand the difference between efficient causes (the purview of science) and final causes (the purview of religion) to use Aristotle’s terminology. Accepting the legitimacy of evolution as a mechanism is not incompatible with belief in divine purpose. That’s the message creationists need to hear, and it needs to come from fellow Christians or they won’t listen.
It’s no mere coincidence that those holding Creationist beliefs also hold denialist beliefs on other subjects, such as global warming or stem cell research (I don’t mean those who may have cogent arguments against such things, but, rather, they dismiss them out of hand as part of some evil liberal conspiracy). One of the first anti-evolutionists I met was a local leader of the John Birch Society; Christian Reconstructionists, Fox News pundits, and six-fingered Republican legislators generally belong to this group.
Chrimson:
I have to respectfully but strongly disagree. There are two reasons for this. First, having a version of science that has a role for god (even if only as supervisor or archetect or even more vague) is incorrect and a violation of current case law. Second, there is nothing actually wrong with being associated with atheism.
Saying that science’ association with atheism is counter productive is like saying that, say, NBC needs to stop showing sitcoms with African American in them in order to appease the southern white supremacist audience (or whatever). There is nothing more wrong with an association with atheism (real or perceived) than there is an association with, say, jews, blacks, women, gays, or any other group.,
Most people just don’t get this for various reasons, and I have some idea why but still have a hard time figuring it … but atheists are not the nigger of the world, and statements that it is reasonable to disassociate with atheism are as prejudiced as saying that Greenspan was a great fed because he’s a Jew, don’t let a black guy marry your white sister but it’s great for them to be on the High School basketball team or anybody who looks arab should be assumed to be a terrorist until otherwise proven.
The people who have a problem with atheism … they are the ones with the problem. They need to either get with the program of acceptance, personal liberty, and mutual respect that they probably demand for themselves or keep their mouths quite shut, as do most white supremacists and anti Semites, etc., most of the time.
So yes, I agree that this strategy may appease some, but it is n fact deeply immoral to follow such a strategy.
Chrim: Sorry, I should add this: I agree with you that prominent and well spoken Christians and other religious people should speak out in favor of good science.
I’m not interested in “help” from Christians who will tell us the science is the science except for this or that little bit (like “god started it all” or “god has a guiding hand” or “everything is as evolutionary biology says except for humans…” etc.) Such christians can … well, they can bite my ass. This is so deeply offensive. It’s like a christian saying to a jew: Your religion is fine as long as you accept Jesus as your messiah, and atone for your ancestors murderer of him… etc.” … perhaps even more offensive!)
But christians or other religious people who talk about how science is science (without qualification) and religion is something different (whatever they want to say about that) can be helpful to the scientific community.
“Accepting the legitimacy of evolution as a mechanism is not incompatible with belief in divine purpose.”
Accepting that Ra was only the Sun was tantamount to the idea of one god, an idea that Moses co-opted from the desert people during his fearful sojourn in the desert as he fled murder charges–that one god of the desert people–named “Yahoo” or s/th like that,threaded neatly with the popular idea of ( name that Egyptian King who was ruling at the time for a hundo…) that the sun was the only god and the giver of life( he wasn’t wrong: without the sun we would be little lifeless ice cycles right now)
Too bad it has taken several thousand years for that idea to take hold, and I fear it will take even longer to get rid of–but that is the pace that the God people take: thousands of years of social manipulation, lies, debunked lies, and new lies….
So I don’t see the use of melding evolution with the debunked god, because it feeds the thousand year truth stopper fire.
My take on God in science: Let’s assume for the moment that God is real, and is responsible for what we call reality. Okay, fine. …Now what? How does that knowledge advance us one iota in the quest for the next great antibiotic, or cure for cancer, or Alzheimers? How does saying that God moves the electrons in their orbits allow us to achieve the next shrinkage in semiconductor scale? How does insisting the Earth is fixed in the center of the Universe help in the exploration of space, other than to totally screw up our calculations on gravitation and orbital trajectories?
In short, science is about opening up avenues of debate, while religion is about shutting down those conversations with a self-satisfied “Amen.”
Tom: Well put.
How exactly would it be against case law for a science teacher to give a simple explanation of the differences between efficient and final causes, and to state that science is about the examination of efficient causes? A discussion of purpose is not science (since it lacks falsifiability) and therefore has no place in a science class. Evolution is a mechanism and individual beliefs about the purpose or lack thereof behind it are irrelevant to its scientific study. Science and theology are different domains and reason and faith are separate (but many would argue complementary) ways of knowing. There’s no way to prove or disprove whether a supernatural Creator played any role in evolution so that whole discussion falls into the realm of theology. I fail to see how it is so offensive to you to say that science is science and people are free to believe whatever they wish to about purpose.
Crimson: Your comment defies my ability to comprehend. Maybe it is too early in the morning.
I agree with Crimson. By definition God stands outside the material world in space and time so is excluded from scientific study. Does this mean that God doesn’t exist? It is at best subjectivity and at worse hubris to believe that since I cannot measure something it cannot exist. I suppose that scientists must leave God to the theologians…but we should always keep in mind that in focusing on the trees we might miss the forest.