{ a reflection on the creation museum, part III }

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.

{ a reflection on the creation museum, part II }

And now we come to the hermeneutical problem, the question of how one interprets a text or makes sense of the world.

Take for example the film, The God’s Must Be Crazy. To one group (the bushmen), the glass bottle is seen as a gift from the gods, even if its an evil gift. To them, the bottle did not so much bring out their worst qualities, but rather exercised an evil power over them that made them behave unnaturally. (Thus, to get rid of the bottle was to get rid of the evil that it had brought into the community.) On the other hand, to ‘modern man’, the bottle is merely a by-product from a consumer good. To them, the bottle has no divine power, does not influence how they act. The pilot that drops it out the airplane’s window in the beginning of the film gets rid of it not because it is evil, but because it is worthless.

Here, in a sense, we have two different hermeneutics (that of the bushmen and that of ‘modern man’) interacting with a single text (the coke bottle). Both communities make sense of the bottle in a way that is informed by their interaction with it. They both are forced, in a certain sense, to make sense of this object in their world. The pilot tosses it out his window because it’s worthless. And isn’t it? Isn’t it just a product of consumption, but not even that, a container for the product which is to be consumed? But the bushmen call it evil, and it makes us watching the movie laugh a bit, but wasn’t it? Didn’t its presence turn the community against itself?

To both sets of questions the answer is obviously “yes” and “no,” but that gets things a bit off-track. What is important here, is that here you have as much of an “objective” text as you can get: a glass bottle. And yet! And yet there is interpretation, both communities understand this bottle in two very different ways, what that bottle means is utterly different for those two groups. Neither one of them consciously looked at that bottle with a “method” or a “theory” in mind. But that’s not to say there isn’t a theory, a hermeneutic, it just means we’ve so internalized most of our perspectives that we don’t go around every day having to figure out what each little thing we interact with “really means.”

And that’s both good and bad. On one hand, it’s simply life, it’s just how we go about the day, and there’s not much changing that. You couldn’t really get on with living if you had to stop and examine your unconscious perspective at every turn. On the other, its some of these deeply internalized perspectives that get us into trouble, that make it hard to recognize our racism, or be able to see a Big Mac in a different light than just a quick meal, or to rethink what beauty really is. And this is why theologians, pastors, philosophers, artists, protestors, neighbors, and co-workers sometimes take up the task of getting us to look critically at some of our unexamined perspectives, our internalized hermeneutics.

And because there always is a hermeneutic, because we are ever and always (and for the most part subconsciously) interpreting the world, the question we finally arrive at is whether or not our hermeneutics are an attempt to see the world as God does. (Which is NOT to say, to have some grand objective perspective.)

So now, if we take the analogy from The God’s Must Be Crazy into Kentucky’s Creation Museum, the light on those shiny displays begins to look a bit different.

One of the most interesting things about the Creation Museum is that it wanted to say there are different (read: 2) ways to look at the physical “objective” world, but only one way to look at the Bible. As noted in the previous post, the two ways to make sense of the world are through God’s Word or through human reason. But doesn’t that sound like saying there are two ways to interpret a Coke bottle and only one way to interpret Shakespeare?

What they then went on to try to show was that human reason will lead you to evolution while scripture will lead you to modern evangelical creationism. So, a few things about that.

First, I guess we are left to conclude that all those godless scientist and philosophers (and let’s be honest, even supposedly “Christian” ones) before Darwin (read: for the majority of human history) just didn’t know how to use human reason properly, or weren’t using it at all, seeing that human reason didn’t even conceive of evolution till the 1800s. What was Thales using when he said the universe was made of water? Or Galileo when he said the sun was at the center of our solar system? Ouija boards? Chicken bones?

Second, but with the first, it’s funny how, for thousands of years, the Jewish people have had Genesis and have yet to come to the conclusion of the creationist. Being Christian seems pretty irrelevant here, right? It’s not as if there is a single mention of Christ in the theory, he’s pretty unimportant at this point I guess (funny, he wasn’t for John...). But lets give the theory a chance, maybe you need Jesus to really understand what Genesis actually means. I guess that would explain why the Catholics didn’t get it right for 1500 years? But Luther even missed the point. And Calvin. And Wesley. Well, I’m glad we finally have real Christians in the year 2000 that can actually hear the Good Word for what it is.

So where does this reading of the Bible come from (besides from Jesus, obviously)? While I don’t want to go into the whole convoluted history (oh, and is there ever one!), I do want to point out a little contradiction at the heart of it all. Namely, while modern evangelical creationism wants to completely denounce human reason as a starting point for thinking about the world, and concomitantly, denounce the godless human sciences that human reason has spawned, it is holding up science as the yardstick by which to judge the truthfulness of the Bible. Let me try to make that clearer.

You would be amazed at the science this place put on display. There were so many displays, TVs, graphs, and words long enough to rival the German language, that anyone who wasn’t completely skeptical or didn’t have a background in science would have been pretty convinced if merely for the sake of being unable to refute it. Example: “Humans have come in contact with lots of animals , like crocodiles and coelacanths, but they aren’t buried with humans.” Of course, coelacanths...those um, yeah, sure, that’s a good point...I think...what the eff is a coelacanth? I won’t even go into the floating forests...

I guess that was a bit beside the point, though it kind of goes back to my point in the previous post about having to appear “valid,” which is a concept that matters very much here. For the creationist, the Genesis account has to be read as a scientific account to be true, for it to be a valid text. The only way for Genesis to be meaningful is for it to be scientific at heart. Any other reading would leave you having to rely on the godless evolutionary scientists for an account of how the universe came into existence. Or so the claim goes.

So I hope the contradiction has become clear: Creationism denounces science while saying that the truth of Genesis lies its scientific reading. Reading Genesis as an a scientific account is not then, the rejection of human reason, it is the unwitting idolization of it, or at least, of our current social and epistemological perspective and what we mean by “truth.”

When did scripture become more a story about us and less a story about God?

And while creationists may not want to say that scientific creationism is all that the Genesis story is, the tenacity with which creationism is defended and propagated in conservative evangelical circles makes it difficult for me to see how the scientific reading is not, at the end of the day, what they hold to be the most important, the most in need of defending and vocalizing. If the beauty of the Genesis story and the mysteries it reveal about God are not wholly lost or disregarded in scientific creationism, they are definitely in need of renewed emphasis.

{ a reflection on the creation museum, part I }

The brown state signs indicating that we were indeed approaching Kentucky’s “Answers in Genesis, Creation Museum” caught me a bit off-guard, not because it wasn’t our plan to go, but because of my overly comic expectations of a “museum” in someone’s doublewide with accompanying lawn-sculptures of grazing T-Rexs and Adam and Even hand-feeding velociraptors. I didn’t foresee state road signs.

But validity comes in a certain package.

And so, after exiting the highway, we drove through the gate in the stone wall with the sculpted metal triceratops atop it, were directed in the parking lot by a state trooper, and then walked up to the huge glass-fronted crescent of the anything-but-a-double-wide Creation Museum. The price-tag was legitimate too, $26 per person (w/tax). But my girl-friend and I, rounding out a pretty fantastic road-trip, decided it would be worth it, if only (and likely only) for the priceless memories.

I should probably put my theological cards on the table at this point. I have lots of them (you collect them like baseball cards at seminary, I even have a few signed). But to the one that seems most pertinent: I do not ascribe to modern evangelical ‘creationism’ - the belief that the Genesis narrative is the literal scientific account of the creation of the universe, fall, and flood. I say “seems most pertinent,” because this opinion rests ultimately on a certain hermeneutic, which is a fancy word for the theory or method behind how you read a text, or how you make sense of the world. I am purposefully avoiding the word “interpretation,” because one of the claims typically (but not always) made by proponents of creationism is that they are not interpreting, but just reading what is there - that, they say, is their only “method.” I’ll come back to this in the second post.

So, in all honesty, I went in knowing that upon leaving, my mind would not be changed on the matter. That is not to say I didn’t think I might learn something, but what I learned ended up being more frustrating and disheartening than edifying (and in a much deeper and different sense - I hope - than an “academic elite” might be thought to feel in view of the beliefs of the “common Christian.”) Let me explain.

After passing a few glass cases that pose some ‘interesting conundrums’, meant to get you thinking about how the world really came to be, you come to the first main exhibit. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to correctly refer to most of these exhibits because the museum provides no online map of their facility and their website either overlooked mentioning a good number of sections (those focused primarily on witnessing), or simply lumped them into the “Natural Selection is not Evolution” exhibit. True to form, the museum here utilizes a common evangelical witnessing tactic: the bait-and-switch. The museum first publicly presents itself as solely addressing the scientific validity of “biblical history,” and then, once you’ve paid your $26, presents Scripture as the key not only to the Earth’s past, but to your personal salvation. And it is the goal of this first exhibit, and the next several, to drive this latter point home.

The question put to you in this first room is simple: God’s Word or human reason? Here is where hermeneutics come into play. The question they are posing is whether you use God’s Word (the Bible) or human reason to make sense of the world, of how it got here and why it is the way it is. And here lies the root of the problem of modern evangelical creationism, a root that lies hidden because what good, self-respecting Christian would question for a moment that he or she should begin with anything but God’s Word? The problem is two-fold. First, the unnecessary and deleterious bifurcation of faith and reason. Second, the assumed and unquestionable (and thus hidden) biblical hermeneutic of modern creationism. I hope to shed some light on the first part of this problem in this first post (of hopefully three).

First, allocating faith and reason to their own separate realms in which to operate has a long history and has had both theological and political implications. What is pertinent here is that, in the modern era, the division meant that any and all public discourse had to be conducted on rational grounds without appeals to faith. With that, faith communities (or at least, talk about their faith) were forced, to some degree, out of the public sphere, since their justifications were not universal to all mankind. You had (publicly) “pure reason” and (privately) “pure faith.”

But what has taken place over the last few decades, especially in America, is that those faith communities are now demanding their voices be heard and legitimized by those very powers they feel have tried to silence them in political matters. Hence in both the US and the Middle East, many religious conservatives lash out against governmental powers that do not acknowledge or appeal to religion in public debate or policy. But what often happens, and what results in “liberals” calling foul, is that while “conservatives” want to influence public policy, they argue from a faith that belongs to them alone.

Truth cannot have a foot in each. A house divided cannot stand.

But the division is illusory.

The limits of reason do not show it ultimately defective, but, in the eyes of faith, are the opening for speaking of God. And speaking of God will, at times, turn what we thought was reasonable on its head, and blessedly so. But in the end, what is holy is the fulfillment, not the rejection, of what is natural, including our “reason.”

So, back to the exhibit. That simple question (“God’s Word or human reason?”) can be seen as arising from the exorcism of reason from faith in an attempt to keep faith “pure,” undefiled. The house can’t be divided if you kick-out the competition. What was missed though, is that “human reason” isn’t competition.

But because human reason is set in stark competition with faith, because it’s set against that which is held most dear, it’s rejected. “Human reason” becomes an enemy; it is the theoretical name for the tangible political and social ostracism that is externally enforced upon (and unknowingly internally perpetuated within) modern evangelical Christianity. If you are a more conservative Christian, the scales are already tipped in the first exhibit’s ability to draw up those feelings (however slight) of victimization from which the rest of the museum is prepared to vindicate you.

The question, loaded as such, plays on a common human response. Victimization makes us all the more prepared, if not eager, to denounce anything which bears the oppressor’s name. Now, if you think this too abstract, that most people wouldn’t reject it simply because it’s called “reason” since they aren’t familiar with that history, let me say two things. First, as a reminder, it is put in contrast and thereby competition with Scripture. Secondly, “human reason” is displayed as the creator and sustainer of evolutionary theory.

For the Creation museum, there is no third way. You are either the righteous victim (who holds fast to Scripture) or the godless oppressor (who counts it as straw). And if we know ourselves well enough, we might be able to acknowledge that we love being the victim. The problem with the museum isn’t that it knows this and is exploiting it, but that it is, in itself, the unwitting manifestation and legitimization of it.

The first exhibit reveals and encapsulates the self-assertion of a faith community that it is not irrelevant, that it will not abide victimization (even while harnessing it to spur on the troops), that it too can legitimately speak in the public sphere . . . as is made evident by that shiny facade that just screams “validity.”