Apt142’s Blog

The Creation Museum openned recently in Kentucky. If you haven’t heard about, you’ve been living under a rock. The general premise of the museum is that genesis should be taken literally. From there the museum proceeds to bring up all sorts of explanations and scenerios backing this concept up. They believe that the Earth is less than 6000 years old. And God is actively transforming animals.

It’s sort of like science except they decided to start over. They’re saying, we don’t like the conclusions so, we’re going back, forgetting everything and trying to reason it all out from the get go. We believe $facts to be true. So, we’ll start there and re-reason it all out.

You know what? That’s fine. That might even be good. See, if a house is built on a poor foundation, it needs to be knocked down in order to be rebuilt better and bigger. Until that happens, no further advancements can be made. However, I don’t think that the scientific community up until now has really been all that flawed. Sure, they’ve made a few mistakes over the years. You can’t get it all right the first go around now can you?

The problem with science, if this really is one, is that we’ve gotten to a point where most of our sciences are pretty in depth. There aren’t very many discoveries these days that the general population won’t find difficult to understand. Some of our discoveries take college degrees to even come to a point where you can begin to understand them and why they are important. Take the theory of relativity for example.

I’d guess the average person could tell you that it is important. They might be able to tell you the guy that made it popular. But, don’t ask them to tell you what it is. You can’t blame them for not knowing. It doesn’t effect their taxes, their gas prices, their personal security or their job performance (barring the physicists out there).

Taken from that perspective, I can sort of understand the Creationists. They want to simplify things down. Get back to discovering things that “make sense” to them. The only problem is that they are lazy about it. They come up with the conclusions and the “facts” but don’t bother to verify and do the follow up research. They, in practice, discourage examination of the facts.

If I went there an said to them, “Hey, how come the creation time is measured in days when the sun wasn’t created until the middle of the week? It’s the basis on how we count days isn’t it?” I bet I wouldn’t get a snappy answer that was based on anything but self referential material. “The bible says so” is great for questions like “Is it morally right to steal?” But, it’s not good for questions outside it’s scope. It’s not the source of all knowledge. It’s insulting to the faith to think so.

We have the capacity to reason and fact check. We, presuming belief, were given this ability by God. God has not commanded “Though shalt not think!” Quite the contrary when you look at many of the bible’s stories. There are many righteous men of God depicted who had great intellect and wisdom. Take David and Solomon for instance.

If it was meant to be the source of all knowledge, don’t you think God would have slipped in a few recipes for nuclear weapons right before Revelations? Or maybe he would have hinted at what exactly germs are. They aren’t in there for a very good reason. It is not meant to be the book of all knowledge. It’s meant to be a book about how to run your life in a moral, responsible way.

So, why don’t the creationists treat it that way? The blatant attempt at intellectual suicide is quite disturbing to me.