Vanity Fair reviews the Creation Museum

[The Night Owl]

Roll Over, Charles Darwin!
On the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s masterwork, the author visits Kentucky’s Creation Museum, which has been battling science and reason since 2007. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark: it’s a breathtakingly literal march through Genesis, without any hint of soul. Plus: Paul Bettany photographs the Creation Museum.

By A.A. Gill | Photographs by Paul Bettany | February 2010

It’s not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about. They could, though, if they were the bragging sort, brag about a quaint old optician’s shop that will make you a new pair of spectacles in an hour—by chance I am both shortsighted and had an hour to spare. As the nice lady gave my new lenses a polish, I asked her if she thought the eye was such a complicated and mysterious structure that it could have been created only in one inspired, farsighted moment by God and not by the blind trial and error of natural selection. “That kind of makes sense,” she smiled. But then, Galileo invented a refracting telescope and the church locked him up for pointing out that, as he learned by observing the rest of the solar system, the earth isn’t the center of the universe. Do you think that glasses might be the work of the Devil? She smiled again. “Would you like a hard or a soft case with that, sir?”

Perhaps the biggest thing the citizens of the “Queen of the West” have to tell a tall tale about is the Creation Museum. Twenty minutes outside of town, just over the Kentucky border, it was placed here with prayerful care to be accessible and available to the greatest number of American pilgrims coming by road, presumably in surreys with fringes on top. Build it and they will come. November was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—last February the 200th anniversary of the birth of its author—so now seems like a good time to see what the world looks like without the benefit of science. Or spectacles. Although both these anniversaries seemed to pass without ever troubling most Americans—there were precious few commemorations, TV specials, or pop-up books—it’s not that you don’t care about where you came from; it’s that our collective origin is a trip-wire issue, a knuckle-dragging skeleton in the closet. If you want to get through a class, a dinner, a long-haul flight in peace, it’s best not to go there. This is one argument that refuses to evolve.

I took Paul Bettany, the actor who plays Charles Darwin in the new film Creation, along with me to photograph the museum. He has played crazed and murderous apostates in films the devout ban themselves from seeing—in Legion, also out this month, Bettany stars as the archangel Michael, who defies a vengeful God hell-bent on destroying mankind. He once played a Wimbledon champion. Here in Nowheresville, Kentucky, tennis is considered a game for Europeans and other sexual deviants. I can’t imagine what they think of English actors.

...

Just off a motorway, in a barren and uninspiring piece of scrub, the museum is impressively incongruous, a righteously modernist building resting in landscaped gardens filled with dinosaur topiaries. It cost $27 million and was completed in 2007. It answers the famous question about what God could have done if he had had money. This is it. Oddly, it is a conspicuously and emphatically secular construction. There is no religious symbolism. No crosses. No stained glass. No spiral campanile. It has borrowed the empirical vernacular of the enemy to wrap the literal interpretation of Genesis in the façade of a liberal art gallery or library. It is the Lamb dressed in wolf’s clothing.

...

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/creation-museum-201002

"Ripley's Believe It."

[DumbAss Tanker]

Here in Nowheresville, Kentucky, tennis is considered a game for Europeans and other sexual deviants.

Even Kentuckians get a few things right.

 

[Chris_]

"Vanity Fair"......the liberals idea of "peer review"........

doc

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

"Vanity Fair"......the liberals idea of "peer review"........

doc

Yes, well, his peers reviewed and they think he would just look FABULOUS in that little chiffon number with the cream colored florals.

[Chris_]

Yes, well, his peers reviewed and they think he would just look FABULOUS in that little chiffon number with the cream colored florals.

Don't forget the mauve platform pumps.........

doc

[The Night Owl]

"Vanity Fair"......the liberals idea of "peer review"........

doc

Do you think the material in the Creation Museum merits scientific peer review?

[Chris_]

Do you think the material in the Creation Museum merits scientific peer review?

Since I didn't know that it even existed, I couldn't say.......

doc

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

Since I didn't know that it even existed, I couldn't say.......

doc

I think it's a young earther enterprise.

[MrsSmith]

Do you think the material in the Creation Museum merits scientific peer review?

Science is no where near understanding what God did during Creation.  Maybe, someday, with enough work, it may get close.

[The Night Owl]

Science is no where near understanding what God did during Creation.  Maybe, someday, with enough work, it may get close.

If you were an educator and had to choose between sending students on a field trip to either the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science or the Creation Museum, which would you choose?

[Chris_]

If you were an educator and had to choose between sending students on a field trip to either the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science or the Creation Museum, which would you choose?

Why not send them to both? That way the students would be able to learn about creationism and the religion of evolution.

Frankly, I don't know much about the Creation Museum, but it seems that it has ties to Answers in Genesis. Considering the subject matter of the museum and its affiliation with AiG I can completely understand why someone who is trying very hard to be an atheist would have trouble with it.

What is really strange to me is that a lot of the folks that I've dealt with who are against institutions like the Creation Museum claim to be against them partially because they say the institutions try to take evidence and twist it to fit the institutions' beliefs. I say it's strange because the folks who say this are generally the same ones who are devout followers of the coming ice age...I mean Global Warming...I mean Global Climate change.

[MrsSmith]

If you were an educator and had to choose between sending students on a field trip to either the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science or the Creation Museum, which would you choose?

If I were an educator, and foolish enough to work in a public school, I'd be fired for showing my students both sides of the debate.  The evidence for the origins of life and TToE are so overwhelming that students must never be given any information that disagrees.   


 If, on the other hand, I worked at a private Christian school, we'd do exactly as Chuck suggested and see both.  That way, my students could evaluate both the positives and problems with our current best-attempt scientific beliefs.  I would also make sure my students understand exactly how foolish some beliefs of only decades ago now seem, so they have a better chance of understanding our current foolish beliefs.  Unlike our leftist educational establishments, Christian education enjoys much greater freedom of thought.

[The Night Owl]

If, on the other hand, I worked at a private Christian school, we'd do exactly as Chuck suggested and see both. 

I'm asking you to say which museum you would choose if you had to choose only one.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Honestly covering both in a bio class is entirely do-able, since the Creation part would only take about ten minutes to say everything there was to say about it, since there really isn't any theory or proof to it, it's entirely a matter of faith.  Most of what passes for teaching about it boils down to either promoting a particular religion or picking holes in the so-called theory of evolution.  Faults or missing elements in the predominant scientific theory should certainly be fully covered in teaching about it, but they don't prove any other particular theory.
Creation isn't unique to Christianity or Evangelical Christianity, every religion has some form of creation story.  Teaching only the Judeo-Christian version would be promotion of a particular religion over others, and public schools can't go down that road.
I'd send them to the Museum of Natural History, and if I were free to do so, tell them that there were alternate interpretations to what they were seeing, including that a higher Power had chosen to make it that way, and it was up to them to see and decide for themselves.

[jinxmchue]

Whoever wrote that for VF has diarrhea of the mind.

[The Night Owl]

Whoever wrote that for VF has diarrhea of the mind.

Really? So, Noah's ark seem plausible to you?

[Carl]

Really? So, Noah's ark seem plausible to you?

As much as hair and feathers suddenly appearing out of nowhere via new and never seen before genetic material eons after the original and unknown spontanious generation of organic life is.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Whoever wrote that for VF has diarrhea of the mind.

It's pretty typical of their Manhattan-centric mincing and prancing style, the rag is sort of like People as rewritten by The New Yorker staff with their panties in a knot.

[jinxmchue]

Really? So, Noah's ark seem plausible to you?

Fifty years ago, men walking on the moon didn't seem plausible to many.

Humans created amazing things in ancient times.  Stonehenge, the pyramids, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Great Wall of China.  Why is a big boat so implausible to you?

[MrsSmith]

I'm asking you to say which museum you would choose if you had to choose only one.

We wouldn't go to just one.  It would have to be both, or neither.  Only the leftist educators must resort to one-way teaching...or brainwashing.   

[bkg]

TNO's on a rampage again, I see.

BTW - Big Bang isn't a theory - it's a hypothesis. doesn't meet the scientific requriements for a theory since it can't be tested...

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

BTW - Big Bang isn't a theory - it's a hypothesis. doesn't meet the scientific requriements for a theory since it can't be tested...

Actually, I got this thing going in my garage but the wife says it'll disturb the neighbors.

[The Night Owl]

We wouldn't go to just one.  It would have to be both, or neither.  Only the leftist educators must resort to one-way teaching...or brainwashing.  

Let's say there's only enough money in the budget for a trip to one museum. You would deny the students an opportunity to go to one museum because they can't go to two?

[MrsSmith]

Let's say there's only enough money in the budget for a trip to one museum. You would deny the students an opportunity to go to one museum because they can't go to two?

Yes, we'd do something else with the money...or we'd have a fund raiser.    It's not as though they can't learn both sides of the debate without making expensive trips.