Transmission

I recently came into possession of an advance copy of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. It’s by A.J. Jacobs, a secular Jew, who spends an entire year trying to obey every commandment in the Bible. It’s startlingly entertaining and thought-provoking; Jacobs doesn’t set out to trash religion and, although he remains an agnostic at the end, he ends up being quite changed by the experience. It’s a worthwhile read.

At one point in his travels, he visited the newly opened Creation Museum. I’m including his reflections:

I told my friend Ivan – a good Catholic – that I was considering visiting a creationist museum and he let out a loud groan. “Those people give Christianity a bad name.”

I understand what he’s saying. It’s the way many Jews feel when we see a billboard announcing Rabbi Menachem Schneerson as the Messiah. Or the way many gay men feel when they see a Rip Taylor tossing a handful of confetti. It’s kind of embarrassing. Like Ivan, I’ve always taken evolution to be a cold, hard truth. As indisputable as the fact that the sun is hot or that Charles Darwin married his first cousin (the latter of which I learned in the encyclopedia and can’t get out of my head).

But creationism is Biblical literalism at its purist, so I need to check it out. I researched various creationist hotspots – both Jewish and Christian – and found a handful of possibilities. But nothing came close to Answers in Genesis. This is the $25 million, soon-to-open Kentucky-based museum – the Louvre for those who believe God made Adam less than 6000 years go from dust – started by an Australian evangelical named Ken Ham.

AiG is still under contstruction, which is fine by me. There’s something appropriate about seeing the creation of a creationist museum. So I flew down to Cincinnati, a few miles from the site.

A half hour later, I pull up to the museum – a low building with thick yellow columns perched on a gentle Kentucky hill. In the parking lot, I spot a bumper sticker of a Jesus fish gobbling up a Darwin fish.

I’m greeted by the publicist Mark Looy, a gray-haired man with a gentle, schoolteacher voice who guides me to a door that lets us into the lobby. It is, in a word, awesome.

The place is still deep in construction. Hard hats everywhere, the smell of sawdust, the whine of drills. But even in its unfished state, you can tell this is going to send the media into a Michael-Jackson-rial-like frenzy.

The first thing I see is a life-sized diorama of an Edenic scene. There’s a waterfall, a stream, and weeping-willow trees. An animatronic caramel-skinned cavegirl giggles and cocks her head to look straight at me, which is odd and impressive and disturbing all at once. She’s playing awfully close to a fierce-looking, razor-toothed dinosaur. Don’t worry, Mark tells me. In the beginning, humans and dinosaurs lived together in harmony. The scary incisors are for coconuts and fruit, just like pandas’ teeth.

When AiG opens, they expect thousands of visitors. And they’ll probably get them – polls say that as many as 50% of Americans believe in creationism. Not intelligent design. We’re talking strict, the-earth-is-less-than 10,000 years old creationism. (The creationists I met scoffed at Intelligent Design, which says the world was designed by a superior being, but not necessarily in seven literal days. The creationists think of it as some sort of nebulous theological mumbo jumbo).

Mark introduces me to Ken, the founder of AiG. Ken is wiry and energetic 56-year-old with a red Van Dykish beard. He quizzes me about my last book, the one about reading the encyclopedia, and I end up telling him about my ill-fated appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I was stumped by the question “What is an erythrocyte?”

“It’s a red blood cell,” says Ken.

He’s right. I’m thrown off-guard. A creationist who trumps me in science knowledge – that’s unexpected and unsettling.

Ken was born to religious parents in Queensland, Australia, and still has a thick Aussie accent despite his 20 years in America. We start walking through the rooms. “The guy who designed the museum also designed the Jaws exhibit at the Universal theme park,” Ken says. And it shows. The place is professional. We stroll past more than a dozen robotic dinosaurs. A statue of Eve with her flowing hair placed conveniently over her pert breasts. A partly-built ark. A room with a circular slope like the Guggenheim, a subtle reminder of man’s fall from Paradise. A theater with sprinklers to simulate the flood. A huge crocodile (a prop from the movie Crocodile Dundee). The future home of a talking Virgin Mary robot. A medieval castle-themed bookstore. Medieval? Because the dragons of medieval times were actually still-living dinosaurs.

As we step among the animatronic Roman Centurian and the currently-headless giraffe, I ask Ken the questions he’s been asked 1000 times.

If Adam and Eve gave birth to two boys Cain and Abel, how did Cain and Abel have kids?

“That’s an easy one. Adam and Eve didn’t just have Cain and Abel. It says in Genesis 5:4 that Adam had ‘other sons and daughters.’”

When it says ‘day,’ does that mean a literal 24-hour day?

“Yes. You’ve got to back to the original word in Hebrew, which is ‘yom.’ It’s the same word that’s used for a 24-hour day. If you don’t take that to mean ‘day,’ it’s a slippery slope.”

What about scientific dating that says the world is millions of years old?

“Ninety percent of age-dating methods are faulty.”

Which version to you use?

“Usually the King James. But you have to be careful with translations.”

Ken explains that, for instance, many versions say “the rabbit chews its cut” (Leviticus 11:6). “The skeptics say the rabbit doesn’t chew its cut. But you look at the original language, it says ‘the rabbit re-eats its food.’ And look at what a rabbit does. It excretes rabbit pellets and then eats the pellets. The Bible is correct.”

We walk into a room with a brick wall covered with menacing-looking graffiti. This room is devoted to modern ills, among them drugs and racism. “There is only one race, the human race,” says Ken.

The creationists are surprisingly liberal on race matters. Racial intermarriage is considered just fine. In fact, they think Darwin’s theory can lead to racism because minorities are sometimes seen as evolutionary lowers forms of homo sapiens. They are also progressive on Darfur. On other topics – including abortion and gay marriage – they are down-the-line conservatives.

We pass a dinosaur with a saddle on it. This display was mocked by my own magazine – Esquire – which called it a dressage dinosaur because of the English saddle. Ken downplays it. “It’s just a novelty. Just something for the kids.” He ushers me through. “This way, AJ.” (Thats one thing I notice: They say “AJ” here a lot. It seems common among certain types of religious people to say your name all the time. It makes me think of God’s first words to Moses, which were “Moses! Moses!”, but it’s probably unrelated).

Speaking of dinosaurs, if they really were on the ark, how did Noah squeeze them all in?

“He put them in when they were younger and smaller. The equivalent of teenagers.”

I later bought a paperback at the AiG bookstore called Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study, which spends 300 pages outlining the brilliant engineering that made the boat possible. There are chapters on the ventilation system, on-board exercise for the animals and the myth of explosive manure gases.

The book is beautifully argued – and I don’t believe a syllable of it. Which I know is counter to my quest. I had told Mark I was coming in with an open mind, but while down here, I realize my mind won’t open that far. I can understand being open to the existence of God and the beauty of rituals and the benefits of prayer. but the existence of a juvenile brontosaurus on the ark? And an earth that’s barely older than Paul Newman? I have to go with 99 percent of scientists on this one.

Of course, the creationists cite plenty of scientific evidence of their own. Or more precisely, they interpret the same evidence as being proof of creation. Mark told me about a T-Rex bone in Montana that broke open and had blood vessels. No way that could be millions of years old.

The article Esquire ran was called “Greetings from Idiot America” and it was very funny. But I have to disagree with the headline. The AiG folks aren’t idiots. And despite a British news show that scored its segment with Deliverance-style banjo music, they aren’t hillbillies. Everyone I met had a full set of well-orthodontured teeth and blinked at regular intervals. I can’t prove it, but I’d wager there’s no difference in the average IQ of creationists and evolutionists.

The thing is, their faith in the literal Bible is so strong, they will squeeze and distort all data to fit the Genesis account. In fact, you have to be quite sharp to be a leading creationist. The mental gymnastics can be astonishing.

Consider AiG’s resident astrophysicist, Jason Lisle. Mark introduced me to him proudly. “A real, live PhD who believes in creationism. Here he is, in 3-D.”

Jason has meticulously parted hair, looks a bit like Paul Rubens, and is sweet in an unforced way. He tells me it wasn’t easy being a creationist PhD student. He had to stay closeted about his beliefs and write for the AiG magazine under a pseudonym.

Now here’s the interesting part: like mainstream scientists, he thinks the universe is billions of light years big. But if it’s that big, and only 6000 years old, the light rays from distant stars wouldn’t have time to travel to earth. Shouldn’t the night sky be black?

“That’s a tough one,” he says. “But it’s not a killer.” There are several possibilities.

1. The speed of light may not have always been 186,000 miles per second. Perhaps it was faster when the universe began.

2. The time zone analogy. “You can leave Kentucky and arrive at Ohio at 4pm. In the same way, there may be something to continuous time zones in space.”

3. Something called gravitational time dilation. I didn’t quite understand it, but it had to do with our galaxy having a special place in the universe.

After Jason the astrophysicist, I’m brought across the hall to meet another creationist named Carl Kerby. Carl is a big guy – turns out his dad was a pro wrestler. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and gives off a casual, feet-on-the-desk vibe. His specialty: He is creationist museum’s resident expert on pop culture. Carl monitors movies and TV shows for subtle, or not so-subtle, pro-evolution content so that he can alert fellow creationists to the danger.

On his lift: Finding Nemo (namely, the line “Give it up old man, you can’t fight evolution, I was built for speed.”). And Gilligan’s Island (they use the word ‘prehistoric’ twice in one episode; “There’s no such thing as prehistoric,” Carl says). Other violators include Bugs Bunny, Lilo & Stitch, Bob the Builder and The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

“It used to be my favorite move,” he says of Limpet. “And then I played it for my family, and 13 minutes in, there was a nerdy science guy who pulls down a chart and starts talking about how fish were our ancestors. I had to stop the movie and talk to my family and explain.”

Of course, when it comes to secular entertainment, creationism’s enemy number one is Inherit the Wind, about the famous Scopes Monkey trial. It debuted as a play in 1955, and was later turned into a Spencer Tracy movie. And Carl – along with all his colleagues – insists that it’s wildly unfair to Christians.

When I got hom, I rented the movie and compared it to the actual court transcripts. And I have to say… the movie is wildly unfair to Christians. Or at least to this strain of Christianity.

William Jennings Bryan – a deeply religious three-time Democratic presidential nominee who was the prosecuting attorney for the anti-evolution folks – was turned into a total buffoon named Matthew Harrison Brady, played by Frederic March. Brady is a pot-bellied glutton. In one scene, he’s gorging on fried chicken out of a basket… in the courtroom.

The film recreates the famous showdown over the Bible between Bryan and the brilliant Chicago Lawyer Clarence Darrow. It’s a good scene. But if you read the court transcript, it was actually a more interesting and subtle confrontation.

For instance, here’s the dialogue from the movie:

Darrow: Do you believe every word of the Bible is true?

Bryan: Yes. Every word is literally true.

And here’s the corresponding real exchange:

Darrow: Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?

Bryan: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively; for instance, “Ye are the salt of the earth.” I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God’s people.”

Like creationists today, he admits there is some figurative language in the Bible, even if most of it should be taken as literally true.

And he had wit: “I believe [the Bible] was inspired by the Almighty, and He may have used language that could be understood at that time, instead of using language that could not be understood until Darrow was born. [laughter and applause].”

Not bad, you know?

As I said, I still believe in evolution. There’s nothing that will change that, even if they found Noah’s Year-At-a-Glance calendar on a pristinely preserved ark. And yes, I know there’s artistic license and all that. But it does seem odd to me that this movie – which is supposed to be a champion for the truth – distorted the truth so much. Why do that? Especially when you have reality on your side.

I spend my last half hour at AiG in the book shop. I flip through dinosaur books for kids, a Far Side-like cartoon book about the Fallen World, biology books, and theology books. I spend several minutes skimming an astronomy book called Dismantling the Big Bang, whcih aims to expose the philosophical weaknesses of said theory.

It makes me think of AiG’s resident astronomer Jason. Before I left, he wanted to make clear that he’s not a geocentrist – he doesn’t believe the earth is the center of the universe. “Does ayone anymore?” I asked. He said, yes, there’s a group called Biblical astronomers – they believe the earth is stationary because the Bible says the earth “shall never be moved.” (Psalm 93:1). Jason considers them an embarassment.

That was something I hadn’t expected: Moderate creationists who view other creationists as too extreme. But it will turn out to be one of this year’s big lessons: Moderation is a relative term.

Posted by: Isaac | Tags: creation, reading list