On May 28 in Petersburg, Ky., a new museum will open with the express purpose of wowing audiences into creationism. According to the Creation Museum website, the museum offers a “walk though history” which “brings the pages of the Bible to life.” The museum combines state-of-the-art design with your run-of-the-mill fundamentalism to create a $27 million spectacle in which visitors can see life-size dinosaur animatronics side-by-side with the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark, Moses and Paul teaching the masses, and even Martin Luther scolding Germans for their lack of knowledge of the Bible. The anachronisms aside, it appears to be a rather bewildering amalgamation of religion and science, the likes of which have never been seen before. The intention is clear: to show the secular, atheist evolutionists that fundamentalists are not only just as serious about their museums as they are, but also just as serious about their beliefs.
The New York times review of Creation Museum is generous and fair. Edward Rothstein notes the impressiveness of the museum’s technology and design, concluding: “For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.” I wish to use this opportunity to explain why I think this museum is a great mistake, and thereby address creationism itself as one of the greatest blunders in modern Christian history.
1. A museum replaces hard science with eye candy. Creationism is not taken seriously because it is incapable of explaining the vast majority of scientific evidence for (1) an old earth/universe and (2) evolution. Answers in Genesis (AiG), the group responsible for Creation Museum, has made the smart but telling move of building a museum instead of trying to defend its position. It’s smart because museums appeal to the masses, and the masses do not care about scientific evidence (or theology, for that matter). It’s telling because it is just another indication that creationism is built upon shallow “science” and shallow “theology,” depending instead upon special effects, animatronics, and life-like exhibits.
2. The wedding of religion and “science” in Creation Museum demonstrates that AiG has a lot more than scientific findings at stake in this debate. The new museum seamlessly weaves together exhibits on dinosaurs and Mt. St. Helens with displays of Eden, Moses, Paul, and Luther. On one level, this demonstrates that these are definitely fundamentalist Christians. But on another level, it shows what undergirds this whole mess. Creationists are so ardent about creationism because, in their minds, their faith depends upon it. It is not a reading of the scientific evidence that they are defending; it is in fact their entire belief-system which depends upon this unity of religion and science. If science can disprove the first few chapters of Genesis, then the entire house of cards falls to the ground, since the authority of Genesis is made to rest upon its scientific historicity. The motto of AiG makes this scientific source of authority very clear: “Upholding the Authority of the Bible from the Very First Verse.” When the authority of Scripture and the basis of Christianity itself is made to rest upon scientific confirmation, the only option then is for science to prove the account in Genesis as scientifically accurate. And when so much is at stake, a person will go to any length to ensure that their position cannot be undermined. That is why, in the end, I trust the atheist-evolutionist-with-an-agenda more the creationist-with-an-agenda. At least the evolutionist does not think the reliability of God depends upon her research.
3. The wedding of religion and “science” in Creation Museum demonstrates that AiG has a confused understanding of the relation between Scripture and science. Of course, this whole house of cards depends upon the prior assumption that the biblical text is a scientific text—in other words, that the source of the Bible’s authority is found in the correspondence between text and scientific history, between the words on the page and the reality established by modern science. It’s not enough to say that the Bible is a historical text. Christianity is a historical faith, and without the affirmation of at least one particular historical reality—viz. the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—the entire faith would be meaningless. But there is a qualitative distinction between the historicity of Christianity propounded universally by the church and the scientific historicity propounded by creationists.
Creationism thus rests upon a strange relation between Scripture and science, in which Scripture pre-determines the conclusions of science (since the Bible is inerrant in all matters, including modern science), but science confirms the authority of Scripture. Of course, since the Bible is assumed to be authoritative in all matters, science has no choice but to confirm the biblical texts. Science and Scripture are viewed as entirely complementary, in which no contradiction can possibly exist between the two, since Scripture is inerrant on all matters. On one hand, creationists believe that the Bible is the arbiter of what is true; that the Bible trumps any and all scientific evidence; that the Bible is the primary determination of all human knowledge. And yet, on the other hand, by elevating Scripture so highly—so high that it becomes an idol—creationists have in the end determined the Bible rather than allowed the Bible to determine them. Instead of letting the narrative of the gospel become their narrative, creationists have possessed and manipulated the biblical text so that it is now a scientific text. It is no longer the gospel of Jesus Christ but rather the scientific historicity of the biblical narratives which undergirds the Christian faith. Fundamentalism is thus a foundationalist faith: a faith whose foundation is Enlightenment scientism, not the love and grace of the triune God.
Protestant evangelicals, like every decent reader of Scripture, allow their reading of the Bible to be controlled by prior theological commitments. No one is free from this; no one reads the Bible with completely new eyes unaffected by confessional commitments. If anyone says that he or she is reading the Bible without any baggage getting in the way, they are lying. Protestant evangelicals read John 6 and the Synoptic institutions of the Lord’s Supper in light of a prior theological rejection of Catholic transubstantiation, even those evangelicals who have no idea what transubstantiation is; they are still reading Scripture as part of an interpretive community, i.e., within a particular tradition of interpretation. Similarly, evangelical fundamentalists read Gen. 1-3 in light of a prior theological rejection of modern liberal theology and scientific atheism—the former is represented well by a person like Rudolf Bultmann and the latter by someone like Richard Dawkins; the former says that science forces us to re-interpret or discard certain passages while the latter says that science forces us to discard religion altogether. Creationists try to respond to these two threats by subordinating science to the Bible such that the Bible determines what must be true, and science is then brought on the scene in order to corroborate what they “find” in Scripture.
A couple things are worth pointing out here. First, the three general positions—modern liberalism, scientific atheism, and fundamentalism—all share one basic commitment to Enlightenment scientific rationality. Modern liberalism thinks that we can “de-mythologize” on the basis of modern science; scientific atheism thinks that we can bury God once and for all on the basis of modern science; and fundamentalism thinks that we can confirm and support Christian faith on the basis of modern science. All three of these positions share faith in a particular god: the god of scientism, the god of Enlightenment rationality.
Second, creationism has the ironic effect of subordinating the Bible to science even while trying to subordinate science to the Bible. By making science the necessary means of ratifying the truth of Scripture, science becomes the master of the text instead of its servant. In the end, fundamentalism commits two major errors, which seem to be contradictory but end up being complementary: (1) manipulating science according to the biblical text (so that science does not have the freedom to differ from the Bible), and (2) manipulating the Bible according to science (so that the authority of the Bible rests upon the confirmation of modern science, but of course this science has already been pre-determined by the biblical text).
Fundamentalism thus establishes a vicious circle that denies the freedom of science and Scripture to stand over against one another. Science is not free to confirm evolution, nor is Scripture free to disaffirm scientism. The reason for this wedding of science and religion is not because the text affirms this wedding (no one can possibly find modern science prefigured in the pages of the Bible), but because fundamentalism depends upon this wedding. In face of the challenges of modern liberalism and scientific atheism, fundamentalism felt and feels a real threat to its faith. In response, fundamentalism decided to fight fire with fire—viz. to fight the fire of atheistic modern science with the fire of a “biblical” modern science.
It’s worth noting that Catholicism felt the same threat in the late 19th century, and the First Vatican Council was a loud denunciation of modernism. Whereas Catholicism, at the time at least, rejected modernism altogether, fundamentalism responded to the same threats as Vatican I by using modernism to confirm a pre-modern Christianity. Catholicism at Vat I rejected modernity; evangelical fundamentalism, however, is deeply modern through and through, not only because Protestantism itself is a modern form of Christianity, but because fundamentalism accepts the basic modern priority of Enlightenment rationality which Catholicism was keen to denounce (though it was also mistaken in going the opposite direction, creating a pre-modern enclave within a decidedly modern world). Fundamentalism is thus cut from the same cloth as liberalism and atheism; they are all modern, rooted in modern science, but fundamentalism intends to uphold the faith through modernism whereas the other two either radically qualify it or discard it altogether.
All this is to say, the three options of liberalism, atheism, and fundamentalism are all wrong, and more or less for the same reason: each subordinates the Bible to modernity, to Enlightenment rationality, to the scientistic god of the “present evil age” (to use Paul’s phrase). Creationists think they are supporting Christian faith, but they are in fact undermining it, manipulating and conforming it to the mold of modernism. They think they are preserving and affirming the biblical text, but they are in fact perverting it. They think they are challenging the gods of this age, but they are in fact bowing down and worshiping them. They think they are denouncing the Babylonian captivity of the academy, but they are in fact encouraging the Babylonian captivity of the church.
4. Finally, the Creation Museum is a poor witness to the gospel. Inevitably, people are going to ask why people who claim to be Bible-believing Christians felt justified in spending $27 million when that money could have gone a long way in providing food, medicine, and clothing for many people around the world. Certainly, that is a question that should be aimed at Christians all over the world, and not simply to AiG. But the Creation Museum is a rather ostentatious display that intends to attract attention, so it seems only fair to direct the ethical question toward these fundamentalists who apparently think that defending their form of pseudo-science is worth the expense. Regardless of its technological merits, I cannot shake the conclusion that this museum is an ethical as well as intellectual failure on all counts.
Update: See the Salon article, “Inside the Creation Museum,” for more about this fascinating new tourist trap. H/T to Johnny Ramirez
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