About that Kentucky “creation” museum
As many may know, I blog about the issue of evolution and creation — under the general heading of evolutionary creationism and in fact I correspond with several other bloggers about the subject. I’ve also done some work for a book by a former professor of mine (buy it at Amazon.com!
(Which reminds me: I actually have to finish a few more diagrams for his next book!)
Anyhow, one of the bloggers I keep in periodic touch with offers a link to this amusing anecdote about a trip to that creationist museum in Kentucky. I thought this excerpt was by far one of the most interesting passages in the account:
The creationist version of “catastrophic” plate tectonics was most amusing. Apparently the continents moved really rapidly during the Flood. The creationists apparently think the Precambrian supercontinent of Rodinia was the pre-Flood world. The Late Paleozoic supercontinent of Pangea then forms under water early in the Flood. After the “fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened” Pangea breaks up under water. Somehow the earth and life survived the enormous amount of energy released during this one-year planetary resurfacing.
That got my brain in gear, and I remembered something else I had read a while back:
Producing a billion years of radioactive decay in a “Creation week” [e.g. God or Satan acting to make the Earth “appear” old, when in fact it is young] or year-long flood would have produced a billion years worth of heat from radioactive decay as well. This would pretty much vaporize the earth. Since the earth apparently has not been vaporized recently, we can be confident that the accelerated decay did not occur
The main problem I tend to have with Young Earth Creationists (and the distinction is important: I am a creationist too, in that I believe in a personal and present Creator God who, with and in Christ, ordained and sustained the development of design-reflecting life in the world) is a certain hypocrisy that infuses their arguments. In one breath, they lambaste those who disagree with them for not obeying the strict literal words of the Bible. And yet in the next breath concoct fanciful, whimsical, and wild theories about “what actually happened” in Earth’s geological and biological history…theories that have no basis at all in Scripture.
Then in the next breath, they lambaste scientists for having only the wisdom of men, in all its folly…and yet their own “wisdom” does not come from the Word of God directly, but from their own mind in a twisted, convoluted attempt to make the square peg of the geological and biological history of the world fit into the round hole of a narrow, hyper-literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2. And as the examples above illustrate, the contorted theories they come up with have gaping holes in them, sufficient as to drive a planet through.
Has anyone else noticed this? Or is it just me?
