For some definition of “museum”, that is– A.A. Gill went to the Creation Museum in Kentucky and wrote about it. I’ve read plenty of other reviews of the museum, but this one has its own delightfully wonderful scathing tone. Some highlights:
The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do. This place doesn’t just take on evolution—it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.
It’s hard to tell from the article how much, if any, Gill is, but it’s clear that this is one of those things that offends some of the more rationally-inclined theists.
[Creationism] starts with the definitive answer, and all the questions have to be made to fit under it. That’s tough. Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker. Scientists have all this cool equipment and stuff. They’ve got all these “lenses” and things. They can see shit that’s invisible. And they stayed on at school past 14. Science has given itself millions of years, eons, to play with, but the righteous have got to get the whole lot in, home and dry, in less than 6,000 years, using just a pitchfork and a loud voice. It’s like playing speed chess against a computer and a thousand people with Nobel Prizes.
On Noah’s Ark:
When the waters abated, the animals got off, stretched, and walked around the world eating one another’s children. I’m not making this up. Nobody’s making this up. This is what happened.
On the Garden of Eden:
There’s nothing to do. No hunting, no mating, no nesting, no getting better, no getting worse. Just the infinite drip, drip, drip of bliss. Things that weren’t in the Garden of Eden at its planting but came later as part of the fruit-knowledge-shame-punishment plea bargain—poison weeds, carnivores, carrion eaters, fear, and thorns—are of great concern to creationists. A fossil with thorns is proof that it must have been made after the fall from Eden, because Genesis is quite specific about Eden’s being un-sharp and blunt, or, you might say, dull and pointless.
It’s much shorter than most of the other tour reviews I’ve read– I suspect that the author skipped a large portion of the museum, possibly for sanity-preservation purposes. Still, it’s a good read, and the bewildered snark brought a smile to my face in the midst of a week containing almost nothing but terrible news.
