Eugene Parnell

So for a couple years now, I have been following the controversial opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati). My good friend Sean Miller, director of the John Erickson Museum of Art, proposed that I do a show for one of the museum’s location-variable galleries, that would somehow take in the phenomenon of alternative natural histories via Biblical literalism. Sean is a pretty brave guy, and while I have been keen on the project, the prospect of vexing the famously well-armed and bellicose security staff at the museum has put me off it for a bit. Besides, funding seems to have run dry.

Well, now Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill has a scathing review (hat tip to Pharyngula). He does the dirty work so you don’t have to. There’s even a slideshow with lots of pictures.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do.

The fundamental problem here is that the “museum” simply has it backwards. Real science begins with evidence and moves out in all directions, looking for the most appropriate explanation for the evidence. Religious dogma works the other way around, beginning with the explanation and cherry-picking evidence to bolster it. It’s like the difference between a murder investigation and a prosecutor’s case at a murder trial.

What is truly awe-inspiring about the museum is the task it sets itself: to rationalize a story, written 3,000 years ago, without allowing for any metaphoric or symbolic wiggle room. There’s no poetic license. This is a no-parable zone. It starts with the definitive answer, and all the questions have to be made to fit under it. That’s tough. Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker.

I find the whole thing fascinating from a distance, and rather amusing, truth be told, except for the fact that millions of dollars are being raked in by theocratic con-man Ken Ham and his band of Christian Taliban, while actual science museums are starving for money and shutting down. And we wonder why all the good jobs are going to China.

I am continually fascinated by people who want to rewrite the history of the natural world to suit their own predjudices. I still would like to do some work around this topic, but most of what I have come up with so far seems like pointless parody (how can you parody something as absurd as this?) or Borat-style guerilla comedy of uncomfortable situations. What I am looking for is a way to transcend both.