Blinded By Creation Science
The Creation & Earth History Museum in Santee is a trip 6,000 years in the making.
Story and photos by Shaun Doniger

The Creation Tree: If you use the word "True" enough times, it makes it true.

While there are indeed many unneeded coincidences and explanations to bemoan in George Lucas’ expansion of the Star Wars universe in his three prequels to the original films, there is little doubt that the worst atrocity of the lot is the scientific explanation for the Force – midichlorians, microorganisms in the blood responsible for a Jedi’s ability to wield the Force. In “The Empire Strikes Back,” Yoda explained the Force to Luke (and to all of us) as life-created energy that “surrounds us, and binds us.” Luminous beings were we! Not the crude matter that we can see and perceive in the everyday world. In short, the Force was a spiritual, living power that one could summon when “calm, at peace [and] passive” that empowered the user with the ability to achieve almost supernatural feats.

That ended when Qui-Gon Jinn announced in “The Phantom Menace” that young Anakin Skywalker had the natural aptitude required of a Jedi because his midichlorian count was abnormally high, according to his hand-held Force detector. With that single, simple explanation, the entire mysticism of the Force was completely sucked out of the series forever. Was Yoda a great Jedi master because of hundreds of years spent meditating and honing his control of this natural energy? Nope! Turns out, he just had more of these microscopic bugs in his cells than most anyone else.

This is a good example of how science and religion don’t mix well, and certainly a point where science – when used to try and explain or justify the ‘reality’ of a belief – ends up just ruining things more than it helps. In the Star Wars universe, it could at least be argued that this ‘science’ does serve to prove a legitimate, detectable phenomenon; you don’t need faith to believe in the Force when you can just detect it with a pocket-sized sensor. In our universe, however, if you’re going to try to use science to prove that the Grand Canyon was carved out in a matter of days by the Biblical account of the Great Flood, it presents a whole host of new difficulties.

Yet this is exactly what the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee is attempting to do, amongst making other claims that science supports many of the stories and events in the Bible.

Most, if not all of us, are readily familiar with the Christian story of creation as told in the book of Genesis: God created the universe and everything in it in six days and rested on seventh day, which is presumably why the Post Office is closed on Sundays to this day. The rest of the story is basic Sunday School 101: Adam & Eve, the first man and woman created, lived in the Garden of Eden until they ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge at the behest of a talking snake. This led to their expulsion from paradise on earth, mortality, pain during childbirth, cold sores, splinters, ingrown toenails and virtually all other Earthly inconveniences we experience today. Later, God decided He’d had it with this first draft of creation and sent a great flood to destroy everything in the world. Noah built an Ark to take two of every animal aboard to ride out God’s wrath, and emerged 40 days later when the waters subsided. (You can draw your own conclusions as to the question of inbreeding that must have taken place by the human and animal Flood survivors.)

Dinosaurs on the Ark: This image may in fact raise more questions than it answers.

In Cahoots: Another fine example of the museum bending the logic until it breaks, paralleling Adolf Hitler and Sigmund Freud.

They’re nice stories, and they serve their purpose of illustrating God’s greatness and mercy (and often uncontrollable rage) as well as providing a basic outline of the origins of the world. Where most branches of Christianity break with some of the fringe fundamentalist groups is that most of them accept the accounts in Genesis as just that – stories. The Christians running the Creation Museum not only want you to believe that these stories are literally true, but go so far as to claim they have the science to back it up.

I was intrigued.

Being no more than an armchair scholar myself, with a shitload of college credits that somehow don’t yet add up to a degree, I decided to take a tour of my local Creation Museum with a real scientist: Arnie Schoenberg, professor of Anthropology at San Diego City College. Professor Schoenberg was kind enough to spare a few hours on a perfectly good Saturday to tour the museum with me to provide a scientific counter-point of sorts for some of the more controversial ideas presented in the museum, chief among them the claim that the universe and it’s contents were created no more than 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. This, more than any other idea put forth by the creationists, elicits the most cocking of heads from skeptics.

“Humans as a species cannot grasp deep time. We can think in terms of 10 years or 100 years – 200 years maybe, but we start to get into 1000 years, and then go exponentially; ten thousand, a million, ten million, a billion...it’s too creepy for us.” Schoenberg’s explanation for preference of a short time scale may not be far off, as the overall tone of the museum is meant to be welcoming and inviting, and seems to be geared towards making people feel comfortable with these beliefs. Certainly, living in a world that is estimated by science to be over 4.5 billion years old, randomly orbiting around a star in a universe that is estimated to be over 13.5 billion years old, can make you feel a little insignificant.

To the non-believer, though, not all aspects of the museum are warm and fuzzy. Upon entering the museum, you encounter a barrage of attacks against everything you thought you knew about astronomy, geology, anthropology and pretty much most all science in general. One of the first plaques in the “Day 1” room in the museum – a wall-to-ceiling mural of stars and heavenly bodies tastefully lit by black lights – reads, “while the evolutionary view can interpret the evidence with some success, the creationist interpretation is always better. This is not surprising, for this is what the Bible says!”

So, the Bible is right because it says it’s right. It doesn’t matter what evidence or dating methods suggest, it all has to square with the Scriptures or it simply cannot be true. So, creation ‘science’ assumes that its conclusions are already foregone; it’s the evidence that must somehow be made to fit the claim. This is like taking a jigsaw puzzle that’s supposed to make a picture of a flower, and trying to force the pieces together to make it look like a windmill instead.

Even casual fans of science know that this is completely the opposite of how real scientific method works; you do start with a hypothesis, or a guess, as to what you think the outcome will be, but as the evidence begins to help the overall picture take shape you may have to revise or altogether abandon the hypothesis. If your hypothesis can’t be disproved, it becomes a theory.

It is this malleability of science, its ability and acceptance to revise itself as new evidence comes to light, that that creationists use to bolster their claim that the Bible contains infallible truth while science is just left guessing in the dark. Yet Schoenberg asserts that, “science is not about the truth. It’s not. It’s not even trying for the truth. It’s trying to disprove…and that’s frustrating for people, [they] don’t like that.”

In its explanation of the ‘truth’ however, the creationist’s ‘scientific’ theory at times is extremely confusing. For example, the museum acknowledges that continental drift – the shifting of the continental plates – is definitely something that happens. However, to fit the theory in their proposed timescale of just a few thousand years, they purport that at one time the plates that formed the original, single continent of Pangaea must have had to move apart very fast to get to their current positions today. They also accept that the universe is immeasurably large – billions of light years across – yet their explanation for how light from distant stars can be seen on earth relies on the idea that ‘during the creation period, the velocity of light could have been nearly infinite’ – in short, the speed of light used to be a lot faster than it is today, too.

The Breaking of Science: The broken beakers and ruined Newton's Cradle says it all - science has no place in our schools!

Even things that seem old (rocks, for example) are explained to have been designed that way by God. This “functional maturity” or “apparent age” thus confuses modern methods of dating, as God just made things to look – and radiometrically date – a lot older than they really are. Whether this subterfuge is some trick of God to fool scientists, or merely to give Earth that ‘lived-in’ look, is not clearly addressed by the museum.

If it could be accepted that God’s days might be a little longer than this – maybe even millions of years – you could reasonably argue that God is in fact responsible for the processes of evolution. Schoenberg offers, “you could have a god that sets all these things in motion, and no scientist is really arguing against that… They don’t have a way to prove or disprove it either way, so scientists don’t touch it because it’s not a testable hypothesis.”

Also, it’s a little ham-fisted to try and limit God to just six days of creation. If you’re God, and you have no beginning and no end, what difference is there between one day and a million years? Why, with all the fascinating and complex cellular structures that make up a human being, do we have to imagine God scooping up some clay and forming it into Adam, and later pulling out one of his ribs to fashion Eve as a female playmate for him? (The false belief that men have fewer ribs than women is still pervasive to this day.) I think it a more elegant explanation to give God the billions of years we estimate the universe to have existed to compose His creation; He really would have had to take His time to get it just right.

In an effort to display some form of detached journalistic objectivity, I have tried to refrain from using words like ‘absurd’ or ‘preposterous’ when describing the museum’s content and the philosophy of the creationists. But, when near the end of the tour I was confronted with the “Hall of Evolutionists” where a portrait of Adolph Hitler hangs alongside those of Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin, and an illustration of an “Evolutionary Tree” that links belief in evolution with communism, pornography, homosexuality and – as you may have already guessed – even chauvinism, it seems likely that ‘bat-shit crazy’ wouldn’t be an entirely unreasonable modifier. Since the museum itself dishes out fairly harsh criticism to opposing theories (and even competing religions), I can’t feel too guilty about any subtle bias this article may reveal.

As I was putting this article together, a friend pointed out that there are ultimately only two kinds of people who are ever going to visit the creation museum – people who already believe, and people who are never going to believe, and might just go ironically to mock or scorn the exhibit. An astute observation, I feel, and with that in mind I don’t recommend visiting the museum to anyone who isn’t already a true believer. For skeptics, there is little to gain in knocking down other’s beliefs – wildly outrageous though they may be – and certainly no mirth in enduring the heavy-handed onslaught the museum takes in attempting to deprogram visitors of everything they thought they understood

Failing To Get It: As Schoenberg predicted, the most outlandish, garish display in the whole museum is the weakest and least comprehensible arguement. Note the cobwebs on the faucet from 'good mutations.'

about how the world works. It’s like playing a game with somebody who is obviously cheating, or refusing to play by the rules (like refusing to pay you rent when they land on your Boardwalk with a hotel). It’s an intellectually suffocating experience, and though your belief in reason may not be broken, you do leave feeling as though you’ve been the victim of some kind of brutal psychological abuse.

Though the good professor and I left the museum somewhat shaken (though not spiritually stirred), we agreed it was nothing a good episode of Nova couldn’t cure. But despite the convoluted logic and total abandonment of rational scientific principles, there is a certain bent comfort in the beliefs of the creationists that the cold, harsh world of empirical science cannot provide. As Schoenberg summarizes, “this is telling you you’re part of a plan… They’ve got a community, their past and their future is going to be determined and resolved and [they are given] identity. That’s nice. To have your past, present and future solidified…who wouldn’t want that?”