Tag Archives: creation-museum

Creating an absurdity

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I see that mouthy atheists are to blame for the spread of creationism. ROTFL. * chortle immoderately * etc

Well, so it says in the Guardian special on the rise of creationism.

They also claim that the aggression of the new atheists is helping them. They paint Dawkins as a “recruiting sergeant” for creationism because he links evolutionary thinking with atheism. “He has been a real help to the ministry, ” says Randall Hardy.
Creationists argue that the new atheists are fuelling the dogmatism; Richard Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford and a theistic evolutionary, last week threw that accusation back at them. “Creationists totally misunderstand the Bible,” he said. “Genesis is in the business of story, myth, poetry, metaphor. They [creationists and atheists] feed off one another. The debate has an unreality about it. Those of us who are not fundamentalists can’t find a place.”

Thus, even the relatively sane Bishop of Oxford puts atheism and creationism in the same conceptual “fundamentalist” box. And the full-blown creationist believes that -people who believe in God think they can’t believe in evolution, just because Dawkins links evolutionary thinking with atheism,

That is giving Dawkins much more influence than he can possibly dream of having. I refuse to believe that most people have even the vaguest ideas about evolution. Nor that more than a tiny minority of the population have ever read the God Delusion or even watched a Dawkins tv programme. (You would think that, almost by definition, people stupid enough to believe in creationism are too stupid to read erudite books or watch demanding tv)

Indeed, even the article undercuts the implications that there are grounds for this “Blame atheists for creationism” viewpoint.

Almost all Christians used to go along with the idea that Genesis was a bit suspect on dates, and that the six days of the Bible were metaphorical, with each day representing a vast geological age. The majority of Anglicans, theistic evolutionists who have no difficulty in believing in a Darwinian God, would still abide by that. But the publication in 1961 of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb’s The Genesis Flood, which set out to give a scientific demonstration of the literal truth of the Bible, emboldened those who refused to accept evolution.

1961? Dawkins was 20 then. I’m pretty certain this predates The God Delusion by a few decades. Well, Wikipedia informs me that the God Delusion was published in 2006.

What on earth was fuelling creationism in the intervening decades, then, if noisy atheists are to blame now?

Or are we to start dating the “New Atheism” in creationist terms, so that we are to accept not only that dinosaurs walked with men but that an undergraduate Dawkins managed to spark the rise in creationism with his strident atheist complaints?

This article does provide creationist “answers” to two questions that have long baffled me.

  • Question: Why didn’t Noah take all the dinosaurs into the ark if humans and dinoasurs were all happily living together?
    Answer:

    Creationists, who argue that the world was created no more than 10,000 years ago, believe dinosaurs and man co-existed in the pre-Flood period (they date the Flood to around 1,600 years after the creation), that there were dinosaurs on the ark, but that they were eventually wiped out by the changes in climate which followed the Flood.

    Ah, it wasn’t that Noah just didn’t like dinosaurs. (Mentally upscale the conceptual size of ark needed, from one the size of France to one the size of Asia) He did his level best to save them but somehow they proved unable to survive in a changed environment. (Oh, you mean, like evolutionary processes?)

  • Question 2:
    What have creationists got against the biological sciences that they don’t have against mathematics or physics or geography?

    Answer:
    It seems that biology is nothing special. They are indeed just as willing to abandon all sciences where they conflict with the Bible.

    …..virtually all existing science has to be rewritten – and the creationists are ready to do the rewriting. The speed of light, Rosevear argues, used to be 300 times faster than it is now – necessary for creationists to explain cosmology and the distance of other solar systems from our own; the great cataclysm of the Flood explains the formation of sedimentary rock and the distribution of fossils; …

The Guardian writer either assumes that almost any reader will see the creationists as self-evident nutters or he lacks the most basic information-processing skills. For example, he uncritically reports “findings” from all those surveys (e.g for Theos :-)) that supposedly show that sizeable minorities of the population are creationists.

And his naivety seems incomprehensible when he says this:

British creationism is surprisingly independent from the far bigger, better funded, more vocal, highly politicised movement in the US, where creationists and intelligent design organisations (often a front for Christian creationists) are fighting perpetual legal battles to get creationist teaching into the classrooms of state schools.

The Portsmouth Genesis Expo may be a saggy old cloth cat to the Cincinnati Creation Museum’s roaring lion. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t manifestations of the same species, seen once in tragedy (Creation Museum) ; the second time in farce (Genesis Expo).

If I had to choose between whether to blame “The New Atheism” or the media (who present the opinions of lunatics as if they have some validity, in a “two sides to every argument” distortion of the concept of balance) for the rise of creationist lunacy, I know where I’d lay most of the blame.

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A theme (park) develops

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As the curator of an office desk biscuit wrapping museum, how pleased was I by Charlie Brooker’s latest Guardian piece and the comments it brought in? (Rhetorical question. The answer is “inordinately.”)

Charlie Brooker was saying that the Lapland Museum that opened and closed recently was his kind of visitor attraction, unlike the slick delights of Disneyland or Alton Towers.

“Santa’s gone home. Santa’s fucking dead.” As theme park slogans go, it’s a winner.

That wasn’t the official slogan. The staff were reducing to yelling it at reporters. This attraction seems to have been a muddy field with a billboard, a couple of Christmas lights and a four hour queue to spend another £10 (on top of the £25 admission) to get your picture taken with Santa.

Charlie Brooker runs with the idea of crap attractions, like the Norfolk’s Collector’s World:

It consisted of room upon room of bizarre, apparently unrelated artefacts. There was a “Pink Room” dedicated to Barbara Cartland, a telephone museum, a collection of antique cars, some sort of hideous-sounding “gynaecological chair”, and best of all, a hall filled solely with memorabilia relating to the actor Liza Goddard, which apparently included pullovers and a mug she’d once drunk out of. Exhilarating and frightening in equal measure, I’d imagine, especially if you’re Liza Goddard yourself.

The commenters could put this half-hearted attempt to create a really rubbish day-out in the shade though.
Step forward:

  • Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick: “home of the first pencil!”
  • Noel Edmonds theme park, called Crinkly Bottom
  • Barometer world
  • Prairie Dog Town, Kansas
  • Cheeseworld in Southern Australia
  • Diggerland, “basically a glorified pit with mini JCBs you can play on, and big JCBs you can look at.”
  • Musée du Jambon in La Roche en Ardenne. (A ham museum)
  • ‘The Mosquito Museum in Sweden
  • The Bakelite Museum in Somerset
  • The Penis Museum in Iceland
  • The Drinking Water Museum
  • The Museum of Salt and Pepper Shakers, Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Unsurprisingly, the Creation Museum gets quite a few mentions. For being rubbish, quite apart from its ludicrous content. Another more appealing comedy Christian theme park was visited by Babykangaroo

This is my favourite of all hilariously bad theme parks: Tierra Santa in Buenos Aires
http://www.tierrasanta-bsas.com.ar/galeria.html
A 10-metre high Jesus is resurrected every half hour and you get to view a waxwork show of the story of “Creation” involving mechanical animals. The rest of the time you hang around “Jerusalem” waiting for Jesus to do that thing again, whilst planes fly scarily low over head as it’s right next to the airport.
Bloody brilliant. I highly recommend a visit.

Obviously, if the word kitsch didn’t exist, something like it would have to be invented just to describe this single attraction.

I don’t know why, but the museum visited by kbfrome appeals to me the most:

….I defy anyone to better The Pilchard Experience, the museum about pilchards in Cornwall somewhere. Three of the shittest hours of my life. And my parents were entranced by every aspect of it

(Don’t book your visit, though. Distressingly, the Pilchard Experience is no more. It’s closed. I googled it. Although Cornwall seems to have plenty of other pilchard-themed attractions)

jemimapiddledick said:

I always fancied a visit to McLeod Cuckoo Land. A theme park based on the 70´s horse riding cowboy law enforcer. Alas, it was just a VIZ creation.
Shame.

Minor Update

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The Church of England’s Darwin site, as predicted in my last post is there now. Do I have uncanny psychic powers or what?

In this context, the BBC discussed the rise of creationism in the UK, reminding me of something I’d taken for granted for so long that I’d even forgotten it. Darwin’s portrait is on our £10 notes. 🙂

But in Britain, where a portrait of Darwin appears on the back of the £10 note, his theory of life evolving from primitive to complex structures by means of natural selection appears to be unchallenged orthodoxy.
Not so, say those on both sides of the creationist divide – a point amply proved by the existence of the Genesis Expo museum, to date Britain’s only creationist museum.

This laughingly-titled “museum” claims

The old National Provincial Bank on Portsmouth Hard is now home to CSM’s Genesis Exhibition, the first of its kind in the UK on this scale.

“On this scale”? The site of a former bank? That’s not a very large scale. It’s bigger than the average living room but nowhere near as big as the average open-plan office. And I suspect that the words “the only UK creation museum on any scale” might have the virtue of being a bit more accurate. (What am I thinking? Accuracy, creation museum? In the same sentence?)

There’s a giant 20 foot model of a dinosaur, called Boris, in a faux-affectionate way that might be taken as an ironic comment on London’s Tory mayor if it had originated from a more progressive source.

Plus there is the Genesis Expo.

This consists of 12 dioramas and a clutch of real fossilised dinosaur eggs.

What? This museum’s exhibits could be outclassed by the average primary school’s Parents’ Evening display. It’s not going to be much competition for the Natural History Museum in the scope of its exhibits. Nor, it seems in the quality of its content:

The topics covered include –
* The impossibility of life forming from chemicals.
* Chinese calligraphy refers back to Genesis.
* The present day forms remain unchanged from their fossil counterparts.
* Geological sediments are laid down rapidly.
* A study of genetics shows that all humanity came from one man and one woman.
* and many other subjects.

I don’t know about the”many other subjects”, but I think that list makes it 100% “made-up stuff.”

And, what a treat, it seems that the Expo is online, saving the tedious trek to Portsmouth Hard to see it. As you might expect, the Expo turns out to be unutterably dull as well as stupid. But there is still an evil joy to be found in the fact that it’s provided by a site called www.genesisexpo.co.uk which sounds a mite seedy.

There are also many books and videos on display for sale. Each has been selected to be of good quality and approved in that the creation information it contains is generally conforming to the views held by the CSM Council

Phew, that’s a relief. I was a bit worried that some of these books and videos might put forward other non-CSM-accredited creationist views. Then what would I have to believe? My brain hurts………