Dec 04 2007
John Scalzi’s Creation Museum Report
Novelist John Scalzi published a fantastic write-up of a tour at the Creation Museum. He promptly summarized the museum as “An epic load of horseshit,” after which he discusses both why it’s horseshit and why the museum is popular with those who can consume such horseshit:
”The Museum is casually trying to establish an equivalence between science and creationism by accrediting them both as legitimate “starting points” for any discussion of biology, geology and cosmology. This would cause any scientist worth his or her salt to have a positively cinematic spit take, because it’s horseshit, but if you don’t know any better (say, if you’ve been fed a line of crap your whole life along the lines of “science is just another religion”) it sounds perfectly reasonable. And so if you buy that, then the next room, filled with large posters that offer on equal footing the creationist and scientific takes on the creation of the universe and evolution, seems perfectly reasonable, too: Heck, we can both have our theories! They’re both okay. The problem with this is that creationism isn’t a theory, it’s an assertion, to wit: The entire universe was created in six days, the days are 24-hour days, the layout for the creation and for the early history of the planet and humanity is in the first chapter of Genesis and it is exactly right. Everything has to be made to conform to these assertions, which is why creationist attempts at science are generally so damn comical and refutable. “
Scalzi’s visit followed a “Drag Scalzi’s Ass to the Creation Museum” donation drive with proceeds going to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
One response so far
Whenever I hear about the discovery of some new dinosaur fossil, I always look at the pictures and try to figure out where the saddle would have gone.