Mike James: Drama of creationism

June 25, 2009 09:45 pm

— For all I know, the earth really was created in six days, just as it says in Genesis.
To accept the notion of an omnipotent God is to accept that anything is possible.
But that doesn’t mean I have any reason to believe that the Almighty squeezed together the world from the nothingness of space, planted the trees and populated it with animals and humans, all by Saturday night.
The subject came to mind this week when I read a story about a group of paleontologists who visited the Creation Museum to see for themselves how it markets its young-earth theory — and casts them as the bad guys in a cosmic drama.
Young Earth creationism is the term for the theory that the Biblical account in Genesis is literally true.
The museum, located in Petersburg, near Cincinnati, goes to great lengths to depict humans and dinosaurs coexisting. Movie theaters, dioramas, life-size animatronic dinosaurs, all the trappings of a modern natural history museum.
And if that’s what you already believe, chances are you’ll be impressed.
I’ve not visited the museum, but I have to admit I’m impressed anyway. Not that I’m persuaded to buy into the young-Earth theory, just astonished at the scale of the exhibits based on sham science, the sophistry of the creationist apologists.
By the way, if the Flat-Earth Society ever opened a museum, I would not feel obliged to go there before stating unequivocally that we are living on a globe.
Scientists overwhelmingly subscribe to the evolutionary theory, of course. It’s not a belief, not a creed, but an understanding of a body of knowledge gathered and analyzed over the years.
To believe the young-Earth model, you have to believe God not only worked his six-day wonder while planting overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution.
In other words, if He did do the entire job in six days, he crafted his creation in such a way as to persuade the careful observer that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. And when he created dinosaurs and people within days of each other he made it appear that the saurians preceded humans by 65 million years.
You never knew God was such a trickster, did you?
Well, I don’t think so. I respect Him far too much to believe He would stoop to such a ruse.
The museum, like young-Earth proponents in general, draw a false dichotomy between science and religion: scientists, because they seek rational explanations, must reject any belief in divinity.
To be sure, many scientists are non-believers, but their religious standing has no bearing on their field of study.
The theory of evolution does not postulate that there is or is not a divine being. It simply ignores it. Religion is outside science.
Many, including a surprising number in the scientific community, would agree that the existence of God and His role in human affairs is of utmost importance to their ultimate fate.
But to science, the divine is supremely irrelevant.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.