Comfort and the Creation Museum

The two sites I linked to yesterday, Ray Comfort's "Atheist Central" blog and the home page of the Creation Museum, each represent two different but related strands of the current worldview-evangelism critique of evolution.

Comfort's postings, which are often nowadays about the foolishness of evolution, partake of what might be called a low-road approach. He will, for example, cherry-pick some random bit of evolutionary data, quote it out of context, and then basically state, "Now, who in their right mind would believe this? It just goes to show how idiotic/delusional atheists [i.e., anyone who believes in evolution] are." Call it aragumentum ad incredulitatum: because Mr. Comfort finds it personally unlikely that, say, the "Ardi" fossils represent an ancestral homonid species, it must therefore be foolhardy for anyone to think so.

I call this the "low road" because it's basically the same tack taken by generations of anti-evolutionists: erect and knock down a straw man figure of what scientists actually assert. Such a tactic invites (and receives) derision from people who affirm evolution (or, at least, from people who dislike shoddy rhetorical tricks); Comfort's "comments" section sizzles with the acid of his detractors.

The Creation Museum, by contrast, largely eschews such low road tactics. Established and maintained by Answers in Genesis, the Museum taps into the same repertoire of display conventions that people use to identify and invest trust in mainstream natural history museums. Indeed, the Museum, which features work by a former Universal Pictures Theme Park designer, combines the glitziest features of a discovery center and a theme park. It's edutainment with a Biblical twist.

And--to be frank--it's impressive as all get-out. Evangelical culture features an array of alternate-universe versions of mainstream (secular) cultural products. There's evangelical rap, evangelical historical romance novels, and evangelical superhero shows on TV (you haven't lived until you've seen Bibleman). Most of these are, well, faintly embarrassing, akin to watching the nerdy kid in school (and I speak as a nerd myself) trying to act like the cool guy and not quite getting it right.

The Creation Museum shatters this stereotype. In terms of the slickness of its design, marketing, and execution, the Museum rivals any secular edutainment I've yet encountered. A ton of talent and effort (and money) went into the place, and it shows. From the exquisitely detailed life-size tableaux of scenes, to the multiple films shown in big-screen auditoriums, to the planetarium show, to scenes of animatronic dinosaurs, to the well-stocked fossil displays--the Museum delivers on its promise of just-like-secular culture family fun.

Well, "just like secular culture"--with the glaring difference of the overtly creationist worldview. The dinosaurs cavort with Adam and Eve's young children (not Cain and Abel but other ones). The tableaux features scenes drawn from Genesis. The films explain how, for example, dragon legends from around the globe substantiate the recent history of dinosaurs living alongside humans. The planetarium hints at elaborate explanations of how light from galaxies billions of light-years away can possibly reach earth. The fossils are accompanied with captions that explain the rock layer (not the age) from which they came, specifying some time in the last few thousand years (rather than millions of years) as the date of fossilization. The Museum is not shy about its anti-evolutionist stance.

Yet the Museum displays, its main walk-through, and its multimedia features all steer clear of the dismissive attack that characterizes Comfort's blog postings. Instead, the first part of the Museum devotes itself to a relatively even-handed examination of why people might believe in evolution versus creationism.

More tomorrow,

JF