by Chris Hedges
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism1
In the middle of the lobby of the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, tumbles a 20-foot waterfall. Two life-size figures of children with long, black hair and wearing buckskin clothes play in the stream a few feet from two towering Tyrannosaurus rex models that move and roar. The museum has a scale model of Noah’s ark, which shows how dinosaurs fit into the three levels of the vessel, along with other species such as horses, giraffes, hippopotamuses, penguins and bears. It boasts an elaborate display of the Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve, naked but strategically positioned not to show it, swim in a river as dinosaurs and giant lizards roam the banks. Before Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, museum visitors are informed, all of the dinosaurs were peaceable plant eaters. The evidence, they are told, is found in Genesis 1:30, in which God gives “green herb” to every creature to eat. There were no predators. Only after Adam and Eve sinned and were cast out of paradise did the dinosaurs start to eat flesh. And Adam’s sin is a key component of the belief system, for in the eyes of many creationists, in order for Jesus’ death to be meaningful it had to atone for that sin.
The museum has a theater equipped with seats that shake and gadgets that spray mist at the audience as the story of God’s six-day creation of the world unfolds on the screen and the sound system rocks the auditorium. There are 30-foot-high walls that represent the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, floors that resemble rocks embedded with fossils, and rooms where a “Christian” paleontologist counters the claims of an “evolutionist” paleontologist. It has the appearance of a real science museum, complete with a planetarium, a gift shop, and plaques on the wall with quotes from creationist “scientists” who have the title “Doctor” conspicuously before their names. It has charts, time lines, and graphs with facts and figures. It is meant to be interactive, to create, like Universal Studios, a contrived reality with an array of costly animatronic men and women, as well as looming dinosaurs. It is part of the drive to make real a non-reality-based world, a world of miracles and magic.
“We take as our philosophy that the whole museum will prove that God’s word is true,” says Jean Ampt, who leads the tour through the museum.
The danger of creationism is not that it allows followers to retreat into a world of certainty and magic—which it does—but that it allows all facts to be accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained ideology. Creationism removes the follower from the rational, reality-based world. Signs, miracles, and wonders occur not only in the daily life of Christians, but also in history, science, medicine and logic. This belief system becomes the basis for understanding the world, and random facts or data are collected and made to fit into the belief system. If facts can’t be made to fit, they are discarded or treated as misguided opinions. When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard by which to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of the events of the day, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text.
The museum illustrates the movement’s marriage of primitive intolerance with the modern tools of technology, mass communication, sophisticated fund-raising and political organization. Totalitarian systems usually start as propaganda movements that ostensibly teach people to “believe what they want,” but that opening gambit is a ruse. This insistence on the primacy of personal opinion regardless of facts destabilizes and destroys the primacy of all fact. This process leads inevitably to the big lie. Facts are useful only if they bolster the message. The use of mass-marketing techniques to persuade rather than brainwash allows millions of followers to accept the toxic totalitarian line, having been tricked into believing it’s their own. Ironically, at the outset the movement seemingly encourages people to think “independently” or “courageously.” It presents its ideology of creationism, repackaged as “intelligent design,” as an alternative to Darwinian theories of evolution. The power of these non-reality-based movements is that they appeal to our deepest-held, most primitive prejudices, our classism, sexism, racism—perversions based on fear of complexity or change. So the propaganda contains much of what we already yearn to believe. Its subversive message is that it’s OK to believe what we want, to believe lies.
In the promulgation of the totalitarian belief system, at first we are told we all have a right to an opinion, in short, a right to believe anything. Soon, under the iron control of an empowered totalitarian movement, facts become worthless, kept or discarded according to an ideological litmus test. Lies become true. And once the totalitarians are in power, facts are ruthlessly manipulated or kept hidden to support the lie. Hannah Arendt called the principle behind this process “nihilistic relativism.” The goal of creationism is not to offer an alternative. Its goal is the destruction of the core values of the open society—the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to advocate for change and to accept that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable.
The museum will cost an estimated $25 million. It is the work of Ken Ham, a schoolteacher, one of the country’s leading creationists. Other creationist museums are going up in Arkansas, Texas, California, Tennessee and Florida. The museum is part of a massive push to teach creationism in schools, championed by a vast Christian publishing and filmmaking industry that seeks to rewrite the past and make it conform to the Bible. The front lines of the culture wars are the classrooms, and the battle is one reality-based educators are slowly losing. Twenty states are considering changing the way evolution is taught in order to include creationism or intelligent design.2 Intelligent design has been the code word of the movement since the Supreme Court ruled in the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard case that creationism cannot be taught in public schools. Intelligent design argues that the slow process of evolution could not have produced something as complex as the living cell. Rather, life was created by an “intelligent agent,” one the proponents of intelligent design are careful to specify is unknown, in order to skirt the judicial ban on creationism. Several states, including Pennsylvania, now have state education charters requiring that students be taught the evidence “both for and against” evolution—although there is no scientific evidence against it. And many Americans buy into the myth. When asked for their views on human origins, only 13 percent of respondents in a 2004 Gallup poll said life arose from the strictly natural process of evolution. More than 38 percent believed God guided evolution, and 45 percent said the Genesis account of creation was a true story.3 Courses on intelligent design have been taught at the universities of Minnesota, Georgia, New Mexico and Iowa State, along with Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon, not to mention Christian universities that teach all science through the prism of the Bible.
When Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was published in 1830–1833, it challenged the prevailing views of how Earth had been formed. Lyell questioned the assumption that unique catastrophes or supernatural events—such as Noah’s flood—shaped Earth’s surface. He wrote that a once tumultuous period of change had slowed to today’s calmer, more leisurely pace. The date of the Earth’s sudden creation, up until then, had been widely accepted as 4004 BC based on the creation story in Genesis. When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, his findings further eroded the biblical account of creation. Lyell’s and Darwin’s works were catastrophic for biblical literalists. Evolution and natural selection shattered the comfortable worldview of many Christians, who saw themselves as created in the image of God. Evolution reduced the human race to the status of a species, one descended from primates. The scientific accounts of creation and the origin of species became in the eyes of fundamen
talist believers the materialist foundation for the human race’s moral and cultural decline. It dethroned Christians from their self-constructed platform of moral and ethical superiority. It challenged the belief that God intervenes in human affairs to protect and guide believers. The ideological pillars of literalist Christianity, which viewed the universe as revolving around and serving the interests of anointed Christians, were destroyed.
Literalist Christians believe that death did not exist before Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden for disobeying God. Death and suffering were introduced by God as a punishment for living in a sinful, fallen world. Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion, however, atoned for Adam’s sin and made possible a return to a deathless paradise. But if the Darwinian account of evolution is correct, then death and suffering were always and always will be a part of human existence. Evolution implicitly challenges the possibility of miracles, the Second Coming of Christ, the Resurrection, and an apocalyptic end to human existence in which the saved are lifted up into heaven. For believers who have found in the certitude of Christian fundamentalism a shelter from despair, a despair that threatens to consume them again if they return to a reality-based world, evolution is terrifying. The miracles they insist they see performed around them, the presence of the guiding, comforting hand of God in their lives, the notion that there is a divine destiny specially preordained for them, crumbles into dust under the cold glare of evolution. Evolution posits what they fear most: a morally neutral universe. It obliterates the fantastic constructs of their belief system. And the steady efforts by creationists to erode the authority of evolution and discredit Darwin are, because of all this, unrelenting and fierce.
“Unlike the animals, mammals included, man is an immortal being who will live somewhere forever,”4 reads a passage in Biology: God’s Living Creation, a creationist textbook popular in Christian high schools. Human beings are discussed in isolation from other mammals, and brief passages interrupt the chapters with headings such as “The Wonders of the Human Hand.” “Only an omnipotent and all-wise God could have designed and created the human hand,”5 students read. Computers can never think, students are told, because “No machine will ever know satisfaction at discovering God’s truth.”6 The textbook, with an index of scripture references, states that “according to the laws of probability, the probability that evolution occurred is essentially zero. Yet, evolutionists believe sincerely that it did somehow happen. We marvel at their faith in the impossible.”7
Creationist publications such as this one blame Darwin for spawning most of the evils of modernity including racism,8 apartheid,9 Stalinism,10 the Holocaust11 and the Rwandan genocide.12 It was evolution, the textbook states, that “exploded into a worldwide philosophy of ‘kill or be killed’ as expressed by Adolf Hitler and the proponents of the religion of Communism.”13 Darwin is usually presented as mentally unbalanced and sadistic. An article put out by the California-based Institute for Creation Research is typical: “Was Charles Darwin Psychotic? A Study of His Mental Health.”14 Believers are told that Darwin, and all evolutionists, were behind the genocides unleashed by all modern tyrants from Hitler and Stalin to Pol Pot.15 And Christians must be prepared for battle, for war, against satanic forces that lie incubating within America’s secular, evolutionist, materialistic, godless society, forces getting ready to begin a new round of mass exterminations, this time of American Christians.16
Darwin, students learn, suffered from deep depression, alienation and constant illness and physical pain once he defied God and published his work. He could not escape divine wrath. “He lost all interest in the higher things of life, the things about man that can only be explained by his being a creature made in the image of God,” the textbook reads. “He lost his love for poetry, music, and literature, and, of course, he could not pray.”17
And yet, coming from the modern age, the fundamentalists cannot discount science. They employ jargon, methods and data that appear like science to make an argument for creationism. They have created research and scholarly institutions designed to parallel legitimate scientific organizations. They pump out articles in self-published journals to provide “evidence” that homosexuals can be cured, that global warming is a myth, that abortion can cause breast cancer, that something they call “postabortion syndrome” leads to deep depression and suicide, and that abstinence-only education is an effective form of birth control. Bogus and unsubstantiated claims, all in the service of the ideology, are dressed up to look scientific. This pseudoscience seeps into the public debate, disseminated by a nervous media anxious to give both sides of every argument. Those with contempt for facts and truth, for honest research and inquiry, are given the same platform as those who deal in a world of reality, fact and rationality. The movement’s leaders dress up this ideology as scientific to discredit real science. They have created a “fundamentalist science.” They cannot return to the pre-Darwinian innocence that let their predecessors believe the Bible alone was enough. They need, in the midst of their flight from reality, to be reassured that science—science not contaminated by secular humanists and nonbelievers—is on their side. In this they are a distinctly modern movement. They need the imprint of science and scholarship to legitimize myth. This is a characteristic they share with all modern totalitarian movements, which work hard to co-opt the disciplines of law, science, medicine and scholarship to give to their primitive and superstitious belief systems, systems that allow the rulers to dictate reality and truth, a modern veneer. The “paraprofessional” organizations formed by the Christian Right—organizations of teachers, journalists, doctors, lawyers and scientists—mimic the activities of traditional professional groups (groups in which the focus really is the profession and not the faith). They seek to challenge the legitimacy and power of these traditional organizations. The duplication of the structures and methods employed by the nontotalitarian world, as Arendt wrote, “proved extremely fruitful in the work of undermining actively existing institutions and in the ‘decomposition of the status quo,’ which totalitarian organizations invariably prefer to an open show of force.”18
The Creation Museum presents the creationist argument that Adam and Eve were human beings and that God created everything on the earth in six 24-hour days. Adherents to this worldview do not believe that the earth has existed for millions of years or that the first living cell appeared 3.5 billion years ago or that the dinosaurs roamed the planet for 160 million years before becoming extinct, their reign ending abruptly. They scoff at the notion that the dinosaurs could, as biologists suggest, be the ancestors of birds. Instead, they embrace a strict 6,000-year chronology of the Bible. Men and dinosaurs coexisted and were created during the same six-day cycle, wholly and fully evolved. When the biblical flood covered the earth, dinosaurs, along with other species, were sheltered on Noah’s ark. The rest of the dinosaurs were drowned in the flood, and this, as the museum’s exhibits explain, accounts for the vast tracts of fossilized dinosaur bones. Animals on the ark, including the dinosaurs, repopulated after disembarking, but environmental changes meant that the dinosaurs could not adapt and died off. The biblical accounts of sea monsters, leviathans and behemoths are, according to the museum’s displays, references to dinosaurs. They do not give credence to the concept of the big bang because Genesis states that God created waters and Earth on the third day, and the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day. It is a story hardly more credible than the fantasy of a child, but it fulfills a powerful emotional need.
“The Bible tells us that God created all of the land animals on the sixth day of creation,” a brochure from the museum reads. “As dinosaurs were land animals, they must have been made on this day, alongside Adam and Eve, who were also created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24–31). If God designed and created dinosaurs, they would have been fully functional, designed to do what they were created for, and would have been 100 percent dinosaur. This fits exactly with the evidence from the fossil record.”
The museum devo
tes much of its space to trumpeting what it insists are discrepancies in the scientific search for the origins of life. The dearth of fossil ancestors for major life-forms after the “Cambrian explosion” about 550 million years ago, for example, is used by creationists to discredit evolution, although science furnishes a range of persuasive explanations for the paucity of fossils—for example, that primitive life-forms before the Cambrian period lacked hard body parts that could have been fossilized. The fact that we have any fossils of larger life-forms is an amazing piece of luck, since they can exist only in quite specific geologic conditions. But all this is used against science. And a mantra of creationists, one the museum guide repeats a few times, is: “God is not a God of gaps.”
The creationists act and look like scientists. They couch their language in the jargon of science. They say they can disprove the theory of evolution with facts and evidence. They talk of research and data. It is not enough these days to argue that God wrote the story of Creation and therefore it is true. The movement needs the veneer of science. This is the goal of the museum. Science will prove the biblical account of creation and the literal interpretation of the Bible. Creationism must be defended in a scientific manner, with scientific conclusions disproving the “theory” of evolution and supporting the words of the Bible. Once the “science” of creationism is accepted, the Bible reigns as the undisputed word of God and the sole arbiter of truth. Leaders who interpret the Bible must be obeyed. Creationism is a key part of a system aimed at building a society that relinquishes the capacity to examine itself.
Museum displays say there is no proof that fossils are millions of years old. Evolution, in the hands of creationists, becomes just another unsubstantiated story about the past since “no scientist was there to see the dinosaurs live through this supposed dinosaur age.”