By Marc Jampole
Secular humanist
that I am, I couldn’t contain a squeaky chortle of glee when reading that the Creation Museum in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati is in financial distress.
Attendance is down more than 30% from its opening
year of 2007. It’s having trouble raising the $20 million it needs to build a
giant Noah’s Ark theme park.
The Creation Museum
uses interactive exhibits to brainwash children and uneducated adults to
believe that the Earth was formed by a conscious deity about 6,000 years ago
and that humans and dinosaurs once inhabited the same ecosystem at the same
time. The museum, whose theme line is
“Prepare to believe,” was built by a ministry called Answers in Genesis,
founded, like the Murdoch right-wing media empire, in Australia.
The museum blames
the bad economy for the slowdown in business. Of course the museum operates
with one hand tied behind its back, since no public school classes are allowed
to send field trips there because it would run counter to the Supreme Court
decision that keeps religion outside the classroom. Imagine how well the
Creation Museum would be doing if could get on the public school field trip
gravy train.
I’m wondering if the
problem isn’t that it has to face brutal competition. I’m not talking about from
Disney and Universal Studios, which are dedicated to the religion of
consumerism. I mean competition from the other museums that want us to believe
in an unscientific and false view of the physical world. After all, there are now 16 museums in the United States dedicated to the false notion ofcreationism, including:
You’d think there
would be plenty of paying customers for everyone, what with a recent Gallup
poll showing that 46% of all Americans believe that a god created humans in
their current form, while another 32% think that whatever the process of
evolution, it got a good nudge from a deity. That’s an enormous target market.
The creationist
museum is a very much a phenomenon of the South. Of the 16 museums dedicated to
creationism, 11 are in the South, with 3 in attraction-rich Florida and 4 deep
in the heart of all things conservative, Texas.
Yet, despite the
fact that Gallup found only 15% of the population endorsing the scientific view
that humans evolved with the intervention of a deity, museums that advocate
Darwinism, such as the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West
Side of Manhattan (4 million visitors a year) and the Carnegie Museum of
Natural History in Pittsburgh (1.3 million visitors a year), draw more people.
No creationist museum comes close to these numbers. It’s probably because those
damn yankees stole all the best
dinosaur specimens.
To believe that a
god created us is harmless enough until it is used to defend pollution-causing
activities or war. I also have no problem with building institutions full of
pretty pictures and exhibits dedicated to religious contemplation and then
charging people an entrance fee to see. Maybe it works a little better when the
entry fees are voluntary donations, which has been the game for the Catholic
Church for about 2,000 years.
What I find
pernicious to the intellectual health of the collective body of the American
people is to pass off this nature-centric religion as science, which is what
all these museums attempt to do. In one way or another, they all use facts and
what they call analysis to provide what they call scientific proof of the
intervention of a god in the creation or development of human beings. To ask
the “god” question is inherently unscientific (which is why calling the Higgs
boson a “god particle” is so unfortunate). Science exists outside the world of
gods, because it is based solely on observation and not a priori theories of
existence. Science looks for consistent rules that exist through time and does
not care who or what created the rules, just how they work.
Thus, it’s their
pretentions to science that make these creation museums unethical.