Knowing that gentle readers want to hear our views on the museum after our having visited it--some for the opportunity to take issue with us, we will strive to oblige.
First, we mention that above all we were glad to see two good friends who are valued museum employees, and we know others who work there as well whom we did not see. We have utter respect for the Christian faith, ethics, and professionalism of all these people. We also enjoyed meeting a senior executive of the organization with whom we had previously shared some correspondence, and we look forward to a pleasant and productive relationship with him in the future. If we knew other employees, we probably would feel the same way about them too. If we have a criticism of the message conveyed by the museum or other AIG acts of communication, it in no way reflects on our sense of Christian siblinghood with any of these folk.
Second, we stress the degree to which we agree with the message of AIG. We agree that atheistic Darwinism is epistemologically unwarranted and socially deleterious (translation for that gentle reader who sometimes complains about the diction of this blog: there's no good reason to believe that everything exists without a creator, and believing in no creator makes it hard to have a good life). We believe that the biblical view of a God who creates all that exists for the purpose of human habitation on earth is the most coherent explanation of all of human knowledge and experience. We believe that this message needs to be spoken to our culture in a way that is clear, forthright and appealing.
Third, and not unexpectedly, we register the judgment that the Creation Museum, like everything that we've seen of AIG, is thoroughly the expression of the views and vision of the organization's founder, Ken Ham. We first heard Ham in the early 90s, when he first came to Cincinnati. The museum is the three-dimensional, multimedia realization of the same message that he delivered on the CCU campus on that occasion. The museum would not exist in the form it does if he had not singlemindedly pursued the precise point of view that he was articulating when he first came to the United States.
All that having been said, our day in the museum confirmed what has been our objection to Ham's message since we first heard it: it unfairly and inaccurately mischaracterizes the issue as a choice between atheistic Darwinism and young-earth creationism. In so doing, Ham does more than commit a logical error. His rhetoric and argumentation that follow as a consequence of this false choice have various effects, none of which are in our SWNIDish opinion good effects:
- By presenting only two points of view and excluding all others, notably the variety of approaches that can broadly be labeled "old-earth creationism," Ham at best marginalizes and at worst vilifies people whose commitment to the Christian Scriptures is no less than his, and whose understanding of those same Scriptures arguably exceeds his.
- By presenting only two points of view and excluding all others, Ham pushes people who are sincerely convinced that converging lines of evidence argue for an old earth and an old universe to conclude that they can never believe the Christian message.
- To support his conclusions, Ham and his associates assert various conjectures as characteristic of a biblical view even though at best they have nothing to do with what the Bible says. Rhetorically they tend to identify these conjectures as what the Bible actually says. Some of these conjectures create additional problems in biblical interpretation, which in turn Ham must address with additional conjectures. And so Ham constructs a house of cards no less difficult to sustain than the very view he opposes, and having little to do with what the Bible actually says to boot.
Those three effects of the AIG/Creation Museum message are of deep concern to our SWNIDish self. We care deeply about Christian unity, about evangelism, and about respecting the authority of the Bible by speaking where the Bible speaks and being silent where the Bible is silent. If that makes us a Campbellite, then we are proud (modestly, of course) to be labeled such. We hope it makes us just a Christian, which is what a Campbellite is supposed to say in such circumstances. If Christians who don't think of themselves as Campbellites agree that these are important commitments, then we are again pleased, declaring such folk crypto-Campbellites if they aren't offended by such.
But in any case, these are not matters that we can take lightly.
We took substantial electronic notes during our brief visit to the Creation Museum. We confess that we don't have the time and energy to assemble a thorough critique of what we saw, let alone to examine the printed and video material that AIG produces to articulate the details of Ken Ham's position (and of those who have found common cause with him). We do, however, think it lies within our means to serve up some specific observations about specific details from time to time. To make the experience manageable both to write and to read, we'll do it occasionally, as our whim warrants and our time allows.
Today, we offer this observation, somewhat off topic: to our eye the museum was full of visitors, but one of our friends who works at the museum described the attendance as relatively low compared to most recent days. This bodes well for the museum's financial solvency, something about which we expressed skepticism in the past.
We note, however, that the Thursday crowd was composed largely of elderly white folk who looked very ... well ... churchy (and there's nothing wrong with that, most particularly as SWNID aspires to be an elderly white folk someday and will likely be judged churchy by many). There were some families present, and these looked like ... well ... Christian home schoolers (and there's nothing wrong with that either, as anyone would be glad to have children as evidently bright, orderly and well groomed as these were).
This was a weekday, and folks with honest jobs or corporate (government or private) school schedules aren't going to be at the Creation Museum on a weekday. But we wonder nevertheless whether the Creation Museum will convey its message, which is overtly evangelistic, to people who haven't been evangelized already. SWNID has much experience with Christians organizing large, appealing events or experiences to offer to the public as a means of communicating some aspect of the Christian message, or even simply as a means of providing a nonthreatening point of contact between the church and the unchurched. We've seen often how such efforts soon reach only people who are already convinced of the truth of the message and striving to live by it. To put it more simply, Christians often put a lot of effort into an outreach event and end up preaching to the choir.
Is that the effect of the Creation Museum?
If so, it's our hope that Christians will process the message so as not to exclude what the museum does exclude: that there are biblically faithful, intellectually coherent points of view besides young earth creationism, and people who hold those views aren't The Enemy. But they'll have to do that on their own. The museum wasn't designed to help them think that thought.
It's also our hope that other Christians can get an alternative word to those who have heard of the museum, taken its binary choice as valid and decided thereby that they must dismiss Christian claims. It seems to us that the best means of getting that alternative word to the public is not to build another museum. It's probably not to spend our efforts criticizing AIG, either. But it does matter that Christians engage the world of science (and philosophy of science) in a way that makes clear that the Christian view of God is coherent with what we know from science, even more so than other worldviews/metanarratives/religions/philosophies.
And so we commend those so engaged.
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