דינוזאורים בתיבת נח והפונדמנטליזם הנוצרי באמריקה.
מוזיאון הבריאתנות.
http://blog.wired.com/tableofmalcontents/2007/05/adam_and_eve_in.html
כתבה בניו יורק טיימס:
PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic
Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid
the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be
like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise
of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther
into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of
by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a
burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs
cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring
companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost
welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.
What
is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs
are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn't
care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are
usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this
really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the
traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat,
with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.
For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky
International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world
just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs
are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a
little calm in the days after the fall.
It also serves as a vivid
introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created
by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of
extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus,
celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution
gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated
as gospel.
Outside the museum scientists may assert that the
universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of
animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life's
diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside
the museum the Earth
is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and
Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man's fall.
It
is a measure of the museum's daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once
considered major challenges to belief in the Bible's creation story —
are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious
authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the
giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum
teaches, are no older than Noah's flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the
ark.
So dinosaur skeletons and brightly colored mineral
crystals and images of the Grand Canyon are here, as are life-size
dioramas showing paleontologists digging in mock earth, Moses and Paul
teaching their doctrines, Martin Luther chastising the church to return
to ure, Adam and Eve guiltily standing near skinned animals,
covering their nakedness, and a supposedly full-size reproduction of a
section of Noah's ark.
There are 52 videos in the museum, one
showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St.
Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah's
flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a
special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke
the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God's glory while
exploring the nature of galaxies.
Whether you are willing to
grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are
drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square
feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who,
like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry's
views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he
designed the ''Jaws'' and ''King Kong'' attractions at Universal Studios in
Florida.
For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe
shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent
invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this
museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as
it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural
selection.
The Creation Museum actually stands the natural
history museum on its head. Natural history museums developed out of
the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were
made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization.
The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its
seeming chaos with the principles of human reason. And Darwin's theory
— which gave life a compelling order in time as well as space — became
central to its purpose. Put on display was the prehistory of
civilization, seeming to allude not just to the evolution of species
but also cultures (which is why ''primitive'' cultures were long part of
its domain). The natural history museum is a hall of human origins.
The
Creation Museum has a similar interest in dramatizing origins, but sees
natural history as divine history. And now that many museums have also
become temples to various American ethnic and sociological groups, why
not a museum for the millions who believe that the Earth is less than
6,000 years old and was created in six days?
Mark Looy, a
founder of Answers in Genesis with its president, Ken Ham, said the
ministry expected perhaps 250,000 visitors during the museum's first
year. In preparation Mr. Ham for 13 years has been overseeing 350
seminars annually about the truths of Genesis, which have been drawing
thousands of acolytes. The organization's magazine has 50,000
subscribers. The museum also says that it has 9,000 charter members and
international contributors who have left the institution free of debt.
But
for a visitor steeped in the scientific world view, the impact of the
museum is a disorienting mix of faith and reason, the exotic and the
familiar. Nature here is not ''red in tooth and claw,'' as Tennyson
asserted. In fact at first it seems almost as genteel as Eden's
dinosaurs. We learn that chameleons, for example, change colors not
because that serves as a survival mechanism, but ''to 'talk' to other
chameleons, to show off their mood, and to adjust to heat and light.''
Meanwhile a remarkable fossil of a perch devouring a herring found in
Wyoming offers ''silent testimony to God's worldwide judgment,'' not
because it shows a predator and prey, but because the two perished —
somehow getting preserved in stone — during Noah's flood. Nearly all
fossils, the museum asserts, are relics of that divine retribution.
The
heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the
fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that
tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely
creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of
war, childbirth, death — the wages of primal sin. Then come the
biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah's ark and the
flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.
The
other catastrophe, in the museum's view, is of more recent vintage: the
abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story
of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment
philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry
believes this is a slippery slope.
Start accepting evolution or
an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball,
labeled ''Millions of Years,'' that is shown smashing the ground at the
foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a
model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral
dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are
told, looking at pornography.
But given the museum's unwavering
insistence on belief in the literal truth of biblical accounts, it is
strange that so much energy is put into demonstrating their scientific
coherence with discussions of erosion or interstellar space. Are such
justifications required to convince the skeptical or reassure the
believer?
In the museum's portrayal, creationists and
secularists view the same facts, but come up with differing
interpretations, perhaps the way Ptolemaic astronomers in the 16th
century saw the Earth at the center of the universe, where Copernicans
began to place the sun. But one problem is that scientific activity
presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging
laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are
themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery
slope as well, even affecting these analyses?
But for debates, a
visitor goes elsewhere. The Creation Museum offers an alternate world
that has its fascinations, even for a skeptic wary of the effect of so
many unanswered assertions. He leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging
from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness
and extravagant peculiarities.
The Creation Museum opens Monday at 2800 Bullittsburg Church Road, Petersburg, Ky.; (888) 582-4253.
הלינק לכתבה בלינק הקודם. לא רציתי להביאו כאן כי הוא ארוך מדי והיה מגדיל את החלון - משהו שאני שונא.
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שומר פיו ולשונו - שומר מצרות נפשו
