Science Talk

Jason Spaceman · Guest

A writer for Skeptic magazine recently paid a visit to AiG's
creation "museum":

From the article:
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Those of us who take a guilty pleasure in quackery of all kinds will be
wont to keep this Creationist oddity on board the ark of museology, despite
it's illegitimacy. As long as we know what it's about, we can enjoy its
aesthetic and even its peculiar logic. Said Looy: "An independent marketing
group out of Indiana says that a 'sizable minority' of visitors to the
museum will be skeptics, atheists, and non-Christians. Our museum is going
to be even more evangelical than what we intended two or three years ago."
And this rhetorical melodrama will of course make the museum visits all
that much more fun for me and my twisted ilk.

When I think, however, of the young children who are unprepared to
critically assess the museum, my sense of humor fades. It is one thing to
offer alternative histories, but to link huge branches of science with
moral corruption is not going to be good for the cultivation of
open-minded, curious citizenry. The socially conservative political stance
of the museum is prevalent in almost every exhibit, but the coup de grace
is the "Culture in Crisis" exhibit. Here the museum gives us a "natural
history" of the breakdown of the American family. Visitors are invited to
look through three windows of a contemporary American home. Videos loop to
show two young boys looking at porn on the computer and experimenting with
drugs. Another window shows a young girl crying, surrounded by abortion
pamphlets. And finally the parents are shown arguing. A recreated church
facade stands at the other end of the room, but the foundation of the
church has been damaged by a large wrecking-ball labeled "millions of
years." The signage explains that the cause of all this misery is our move
away from Genesis and toward the scientific ideas of geology and evolution.
Ideas about an old earth make people feel small and insignificant, so
naturally they do drugs and have abortions.

It is sad to imagine what kind of attitude people will have toward science
and the empirical study of nature when they have been raised to believe
that such studies cause nihilism and immorality. I guess the dinosaurs
really are on the ark with us. Let's hope they're vegetarian after all.
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Read it at http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-05-23.html

J. Spaceman

George · Guest

"Jason Spaceman" <notreally@jspaceman.homelinux.org> wrote in message
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