Once the Creation museum had driven the wedge as far as possible between human reason and God’s Word, once its audience was convinced that a science devoid of scripture led inevitably to the blasphemous claims of Galileo, I mean Darwin, the next logical step (or rather, evangelical step, since we’re not relying on logical human reason anymore) was to make evident what a world devoid of scripture inevitably leads to.
Just outside the next exhibit, standing at the gates of hell, you’re confronted with a sobering picture. A man stands with a dirtied shovel beside a newly filled grave; the tombstone simply reads “God is Dead.” (Isn’t that a bit ambiguous though? Is he supposed to be burying Nietzsche or God? And would it be presumptive of me to think that most people in the museum wouldn’t make that connection with the former?) Further up the cemetery hill, four other tombstones dot the lawn: “Truth,” “God’s Word,” “Genesis,” a then, finally, a lone cross atop the peak. (It is interesting to note that all of this is in a little alcove devoted to denouncing Charles Templeton...)
So this is the world we are about to enter, the world where truth is dead, where God’s Word and Genesis and Jesus are all dead (and that’s redundant in more ways than one). Having come from the stark bifurcation of faith and reason, you have no other conclusion to make than that the hellacious reality you are about to experience is a glimpse into the world of human reason. The world left to Darwin (or Charles Templeton?).
What does this non-world look like? How do you represent a world that God has left because it has left God? Well, you apparently make it look - and sound - like the fear-filled upper- and middle-class nightmares of the inner-city. The Creation Museum wants you to know that the best picture we have of a world devoid of God and scripture is the inner-city. The walls, graffitied and plastered with newspaper clippings of atrocities and murders and homosexuals, are lit only in red as the sirens scream through the overhead speakers. God is obviously not to be found here. For this is what happens to a world that believes in evolution...?
What effect does this room have, besides the obvious perpetuation of upper- and middle-class fears of poor people, of equating wealth and security with blessing and godliness, of making an absurd connection between evolution and poverty? Well, as if those aren’t bad enough, it enacts (both in the sense of performing and, more importantly here, of authorizing or imposing) a distance between the museum goer and the exhibit.
No one who can afford a $26 ticket will identify with this world. This is the “godless world” that most of us only come into contact with, with car doors locked and rolling stops, or when it is safely brought into our homes on the nightly news report. The exhibit’s dramatization elicits a intense, if only subconscious, “thank God this isn’t me” (ref. Luke 18:11).
I’m not sure what the intent of this room is. I have a hard time believing that fear is not at the root of this display, intended both for the Christian (creationist) and non-Christian (evolutionist) museum goer. For the former, it elicits a fear of “back-sliding,” of the world they will surely enter, a world seen only in crime reports and nightmares, if they give up on the Word of God, that is, if they start to give into evolutionism. For the latter, the message is similar: this is the world you are both moving towards and bringing into being yourself in your rejection of the (scientific) truth of Scripture. It asks of the evolutionists, “Is this the world you want? Don’t you see what a rejection of (our reading of) Scripture makes of the world!?”
(I do not think it to be taking this exhibit too far to make this connection. Its express purpose is to represent a world that has refused to start with scripture in making sense of itself. But the veil is thin. This “scriptureless-hell” comes right on the heals of the bifurcation of human reason and God’s Word, where the former leads inevitably to evolution and the latter to creationism. And then there is the graveyard where Genesis is buried just beneath the cross. The sequence is in plain sight: If you reject the creationism inherent in God’s Word, you are left with nothing but evolution; and all of scripture and all of God is thereby dead to you; and this now, this unholy (inner-) city is the world you will create and inhabit.)
Upon leaving the inner-city (the “World Without Scripture”) you are able to relax as you now find yourself in the familiar - and blessedly quiet - suburbs. The sirens and screaming fade and the red lights are but a dim glow behind you now as you walk onto the lawn of a quaint ranch-style home that has been constructed against the far wall. This is the “Home Without Scripture.”
In every window, a TV plays a looped video, each TV portraying a particular consequence of a home life devoid of God’s Word (and again, the connection isn’t hard to make, a home that has rejected creationism). One shows a teenage girl in her room, crying on the phone to her friend because she has found out she is pregnant (which makes you wonder if you are still in the godless world, where new, God-given life is a burden and a curse, rather than a blessing...). Another shows two women gossiping at the kitchen table while the husband is in the next room watching the game and drinking a beer (I wouldn’t suppose that the implied division of gender roles is what they meant to point out as sinful; maybe it’s just that they’re not doing what they should be doing in their given spheres...).
Parenthetical comments aside, a charitable reading would say this particular exhibit is meant to convict the museum goer, to bring to light just how their own home life is in need of a more solid scriptural foundation. It is meant ask, possibly, “Is this your home? Does any of this look familiar?” Perhaps this exhibit is meant to open up space for acknowledgment, for confession and repentance.
I have a hard time with this reading, not in relation to the museum’s intent, but in regards to what this display actually accomplishes. Coming out of hell, out of the scripture-less world of the inner-city, the museum goer is in no position to identify with manifestations of sin. In fact, the horrors of the inner-city have had the complete opposite effect of catalyzing, and thereby ensuring, a disconnect between exhibit and viewer.
One comes to the home with that self-same distance he or she learned, or was given, in hell. The TVs in the “broken home exhibit” do not confront viewers with images they are willing to call their own, but rather the TVs proximity to hell has subjected them to demon possession, and so they flicker forth damnable shame.
In sum, one does not approach the house with the willingness or ability to humbly call it their own; instead, one approaches it as a voyeuristic god, consumed in idle pity and glad that he, at least, is above the fray.
And so, the visitor walks on and comes to the witnessing room, the room that asks, “You have seen the world without God’s Word, is it yours? You have seen the home without God’s Word, is it yours? Now look into your own heart, is God’s Word absent there too?” Again, where there might have been space for conviction, confession, repentance, I fear there is only self-justification: “No, that is not my world! No, that is not my home! Surely, I have been blessed to have Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior - he who has kept me and mine (the one’s I choose to call mine) pure and holy.”
And so salvation is brought to share the same truth value as creationism. Just as the Genesis account of creation is mere scientific fact, a story that tells us something about the world but nothing about God, so too is salvation a thing in the world, another fact among facts. It is something that is assertable and verifiable in propositional form: “I am saved.” There is nothing (at this point) about this statement which makes it any different from “Bananas are yellow.” It is a quality God gives you, like blue eyes. So really, to ask how you could be a struggling Christian would be as nonsensical as asking how you could be bad at having blue eyes.
The Truth is no longer an identity we grow into (the Life), or a path we walk (the Way), but merely a formula we assent to that holds certain obligations over us. “If I believe in Christ then I need to go to church and be a good person” is no more significant that concluding from the belief in mathematics that when I add 2 and 2, I need to get 4.
Standing in this room that is meant to witness to the glory and mystery of salvation, one stands still in the shadows of those tombstones (which read “God’s Word,” “Genesis,” “Truth”). The shadows stretch even here, and here are darkest - for the hells that we have seen so far have been forsaken not by God, but by us alone; whereas here, here the shadow of death seeks to claim the only thing we know to call hope.
But unaware of the shadows that linger still, and with the assurance of holiness and salvation in hand (fully within one’s grasp, no doubt, and so why mourn the loss of hope?), one then goes on to learn the science of creation, the fall of humanity and the no less scientific results of sin in the world (appearance of carnivores, bacteria, venom, and poisons), and finally the flood and the world’s subsequent geological and biological changes.
Where there are gaps that would push science too far (that is, where imagination - or manipulation - couldn’t provide a believable answer), one is assured that all things are possible with God (for example, the excessively rapid evolution of horses after the flood that would seemingly make it impossible to have any generational coherence for using the word “horse”). The science is shoddy, but vague and confusing enough to be convincing, and surely no one would want to say such things are not possible with God.
I don’t think there is any use debating creationism on scientific terms. Each side will accuse the other of faulty science, and most often, the creationist is armed with more tidbits of (pseudo-) science which most of us who don’t have a scientific background will be unable to adequately refute (and even those who do are seldom heeded). The ground where discussion and dialogue need to take place is what it means to call Scripture "true." The question goes back to hermeneutics, of what it means to call something meaningful, and where and how that meaning might be found.
And it precisely because creationism robs Scripture of so much meaning, flattening it out to a series of propositions about the world, that I think such conversations need to happen - and maybe happen in a less aggressive way than I have been able to manage here, but happen nonetheless. So I leave it here, for what its worth.
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