by A. J. Jacobs
I don't tell huge lies. My lies aren't of the "I don't remember that meeting, Senator" variety, or even the "I spent time in jail with my friend Leonard" variety. They're little lies. White lies. Half-truths. Sugarcoating.
I'm such an experienced liar, I once edited an article for Esquire on the art of the "noncommittal compliment." When your friend makes a movie that is just dreadful, what do you say? I gave a bunch of options, like "You've done it again!" or "I loved the credits!"
I've always thought that this sort of truth hedging was necessary in human relations. Without little lies, chaos would erupt. Marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered. I've seen Liar Liar with Jim Carrey. I know how it works.
But if you take the Bible strictly, it says to avoid lying on all occasions. It says this several times. (A relevant detour: Some scholars argue that the commandment "You shall not bear false witness" should be interpreted more narrowly--it originally applied only to lying under oath. Unfortunately for liars, there are heaps of other passages banning deceit of any kind, including Proverbs 6:17, which calls "the lying tongue" an "abomination.")
In his book Why the Ten Commandments Matter, conservative Florida minister D. James Kennedy says my little white lies are, in fact, sins. Think of it this way: You have a date with a friend, but you just want to stay home and watch TV. You don't want to hurt her feelings, so you say you're sick. The friend comes over with a pot of chicken soup and finds you healthy. She can never trust you again. Just tell her the truth in the first place, says Dr. Kennedy.
So at the very least, I should cut back on lying. I decide to do this in stages. My first mission is to stop telling lies to my son, then move on from there. I lie to Jasper all the time, especially at meals. One classic is this: "Just one more bite," I'll say. He'll take a bite. Then I'll say "OK, just one more bite." And so on.
Mind you, he's equally as deceitful. He's allowed to watch TV only when eating, so he'll try to stretch the dinner out for hours. He'll put a string bean halfway into his mouth and just dangle it there like a Marlboro Light.
I'll say "Eat, Jasper."
And then he'll gum it for a bit before stopping and getting back to the business of watching Dora explore.
My question is: Does the parent-child relationship have to be one of dishonesty? Perhaps there's something to transparent parenting.
I start it this morning. Jasper wants a bagel for breakfast. So I ask Julie where she put the bagels.
"We're out," she says. "Just give him an English muffin and tell him that it's a bagel."
Julie says she did it yesterday, and he didn't know the difference.
So I give him a whole wheat Thomas' English muffin.
"Bagel?" he asks, pointing to the English muffin.
"Actually, it's not a bagel. It's an English muffin."
He looks confused.
"It's still very good. But it's not a bagel."
As it registers that he isn't getting a bagel, his expression turns from confusion to anger to rage. He looks like someone has just circumcised him again.
"Bagel! Bagel!"
"We don't have bagels. We'll get bagels tomorrow."
Within about a minute, this has escalated into a full-blown tantrum. I'm still amazed that kids can live out cliches quite as precisely as they do. When throwing tantrums, Jasper will get down on his stomach and pound the floor with his fists and feet like he's a character in a Peanuts cartoon.
"What's going on here?" asks Julie. As you might have guessed, I had to tell the truth.
There are probably long-term advantages to being completely honest with your kid (he'll know he can't have his way all the time, for one thing. He'll trust you for another). But there are severe short-term disadvantages.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. --GENESIS 1:1
Day 40. When I told my friend Ivan--a good Catholic--that I was considering visiting a creationist museum, he let out a loud groan. "Those people give Christianity a bad name."
I understand what he's saying. It's the way many Jews feel when we see a billboard proclaiming Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson as the Messiah. Or the way many gay men feel when they see Rip Taylor tossing a handful of confetti. It's kind of embarrassing. Like Ivan, I've always taken evolution to be a cold, hard truth. As indisputable as the fact that the sun is hot or that Charles Darwin married his first cousin (the latter of which I learned in the encyclopedia and can't get out of my head).
But creationism is biblical literalism at its purest, so I need to check it out. I researched various creationist hot spots--both Jewish and Christian--and found a handful of possibilities. But nothing came close to a huge structure perched on a gentle Kentucky hill. There lies the Creation Museum, the Louvre for those who believe God made Adam less than six thousand years ago from dust. Its founders are an evangelical group called Answers in Genesis. (A note on timing: I'll be talking more with evangelicals--both conservative and liberal--in month nine when my New Testament portion begins; but since creationism is so tied to the Old Testament's Genesis, I'm doing it early.)
The Creation Museum is still under construction--it's slated to open after my year ends--which is fine by me. There's something appropriate about seeing the creation of a creationist museum. So I fly down to Cincinnati, a few miles from the site.
At the airport, I realize once again how deeply biblical symbolism has seeped into every nook in my brain. As I exit, I see a strange FAA sign that warns ominously: "Don't Look Back." It doesn't say how you'd be punished if you do--I'm guessing body-cavity search, not getting turned to a pillar of salt--but I still find it a bizarre echo of God's warning to Lot as he fled the destruction of Sodom: "Do not look back."
A half hour later, I pull up to the museum--a low building fronted by thick yellow columns. In the parking lot, I spot a bumper sticker of a Jesus fish gobbling up a Darwin fish.
I'm greeted by publicist Mark Looy, a gray-haired man with a gentle schoolteacher voice, who guides me to a door that lets us into the lobby. The lobby is, in a word, awesome.
The museum is still a work in progress. Hard hats everywhere, the smell of sawdust, the whine of drills. But even in its unfinished state, you can tell this is going to send the media into a Michael Jackson-trial-like frenzy.
The first thing I see is a life-size diorama of an Eden-like scene. There's a waterfall, a stream, and cypress trees. An animatronic caramel-skinned cave girl giggles and cocks her head to look straight at me, which is odd and impressive and disturbing all at once. She's playing awfully close to a fierce-looking razor-toothed T. rex. Don't worry, Mark tells me. In the beginning, humans and dinosaurs lived together in harmony. The T. Rex's scary incisors are for coconuts and fruit, just like pandas' teeth.
When the museum opens, the Answers in Genesis folks expect thousands of visitors. And it'll probably get them--polls say that as many as 45 percent of Americans believe in creationism. Not intelligent design. We're talking strict the-earth-is-less-than-ten-thousand-years-old creationism. (The creationists I met scoffed at intelligent design, the theory that the world was designed by a superior being, but not necessarily in seven literal days. The creationists think of this as some sort of nebulous theological mumbo jumbo.)
Mark introduces me to Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis. Ken is a wiry and energetic fifty-six-year-old with a gray Vandyke beard. Ken quizzes me about my last book, the one about reading the encyclopedia, and I end up telling him about my ill-fated appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I was stumped by the question "What is an erythrocyte?"
"It's a red blood cell," says Ken.
He's right. I'm thrown off guard. A creationist who trumps me in science knowledge--that's unexpected and unsettling.
Ken was born to religious parents in Queensland, Australia, and still has a thick Aussie accent despite his twenty years in America. We start walking through the rooms. "The guy who designed the museum also designed the Jaws attraction at the
Universal theme park," Ken says. And it shows. The place is professional. We stroll past more than a dozen robotic dinosaurs. A statue of Eve, with her flowing hair placed conveniently over her pert breasts. A partly built ark. A room with a circular slope like New York's Guggenheim Museum, a subtle reminder of man's fall from paradise. A theater with sprinklers to simulate the flood. A huge crocodile (a prop from the secular movie Crocodile Dundee). The future home of a talking Saint Paul robot. A medieval castle-themed bookstore. Medieval? Because the dragons of medieval times were actually still-living dinosaurs.
As we pass by the statue of a Roman centurion and the currently headless giraffe, I ask Ken the questions he's been asked a thousand times.
If Adam and Eve gave birth to two boys, Cain and Abel, how did Cain and Abel have kids?
"That's an easy one. Adam and Eve didn't just have Cain and Abel. It says in Genesis 5:4 that Adam had 'other sons and daughters.'"
When it says "day," does that mean a literal twenty-four-hour day?
"Yes. You've got to go back to the original word in Hebrew, which is yom. It's the same word that's used for a twenty-four-hour day. If you don't take that to mean 'day,' it's a slippery slope."
What about scientific dating that says the world is millions of years old?
"Ninety percent of age-dating methods are faulty."
Which version of the Bible do you use?
"Usually the King James. But you have to be careful with translations."
Ken explains that, for instance, many versions say the rabbit "chews its cud" (Leviticus 11:6). "The skeptics say the rabbit doesn't chew its cud. But you look at the original language, it says 'the rabbit re-eats its food.' And look at what a rabbit does. It excretes rabbit pellets and then eats the pellets. The Bible is correct."
We walk into a room with a brick wall covered with menacing-looking graffiti. This room is devoted to modern ills, among them drugs and racism. "There is only one race, the human race," says Ken.
The creationists I meet are surprisingly liberal on race matters. Racial intermarriage is considered just fine. In fact, they think that Darwin's theory can lead to racism because minorities are sometimes seen as lower forms of Homo sapiens on the evolutionary scale. They are also progressive on Darfur. On other topics--including abortion and gay marriage--they are down-the-line conservatives.
We pass a dinosaur with a saddle on it. This display was mocked by my own magazine--Esquire--which called it a dressage dinosaur because of the English saddle. Ken downplays it. "It's just a novelty. Just something for the kids." He ushers me through. "This way, A. J." (That's one thing I notice: They say "A. J." here a lot. It seems common among certain types of very religious people to say your name all the time. It makes me think of God's first words to Moses, which were "Moses, Moses!" but it's probably unrelated.)
Speaking of dinosaurs, if they really were on the ark, as creationists claim, how did Noah squeeze them all in?
"He put them in when they were younger and smaller. The equivalent of teenagers."
I later bought a paperback at the museum bookstore called Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, which spends three hundred pages outlining the brilliant engineering that made the boat possible. There are chapters on the ark's ventilation system, methods of onboard exercise for the animals, and the myth of explosive manure gases.
The book is beautifully argued--and I don't believe a syllable of it. Which I know is counter to my quest. I had told Mark the publicist that I was coming in with an open mind, but while down here, I realize my mind won't open that far. I can understand being open to the existence of God and the beauty of rituals and the benefits of prayer. But the existence of a juvenile brontosaurus on the ark? And an earth that's barely older than Gene Hackman? I have to go with 99 percent of scientists on this one.
Of course, the creationists cite plenty of scientific evidence of their own. Or more precisely, they interpret the same evidence as being proof of creationism. Mark told me about a T. rex bone in Montana that broke open and had blood vessels. No way that could be millions of years old, he said.
The article Esquire ran was called "Greetings from Idiot America," and it was very funny. But I have to disagree with the headline. The Answers in Genesis folks aren't idiots. And despite a British news show that scored its segment with Deliverance-style banjo music, they aren't hillbillies. Everyone I met had a full set of well-orthodontured teeth and blinked at regular intervals. I can't prove it, but I'd wager there's no difference in the average IQ of creationists and evolutionists.
The thing is, their faith in the literal Bible is so strong, they will squeeze and distort all data to fit the Genesis account. In fact, you have to be quite sharp to be a leading creationist. The mental gymnastics can be astonishing.
Consider AiG's resident astrophysicist, Jason Lisle. Mark introduced me to him proudly. "A real, live PhD who believes in creationism. Here he is, in 3-D."
Jason has meticulously parted hair, looks a bit like Paul Reubens, and is sweet in an unforced way. He tells me it wasn't easy being a creationist PhD student. He had to stay closeted about his beliefs and write for the AiG magazine under a pseudonym.
Now here's the interesting part: Like mainstream scientists, he thinks the universe is billions of light years big. But if it's that big, and only six thousand years old, the light rays from distant stars wouldn't have time to travel to the earth. Shouldn't the night sky be black?
"That's a tough one," he says. "But it's not a killer." There are several possibilities.
1. The speed of light may not have always been 186,000 miles per second. Perhaps it was faster when the universe began.
2. The time-zone analogy. You can leave Kentucky at 5:00 p.m. and arrive in Missouri at 4:00 p.m. In the same way, there may be something to continuous time zones in space.
3. Something called gravitational time dilation. I didn't quite understand it, but it had to do with our galaxy having a special place in the universe.
After Jason the astrophysicist, I'm brought across the hall to meet another creationist named Carl Kerby. Carl is a big guy--turns out his dad was a pro wrestler. He's wearing a Hawaiian shirt and gives off a casual, feet-on-the-desk vibe. His specialty: He is the Creation Museum's resident expert on pop culture. Carl monitors movies and TV shows for subtle, or not-so-subtle, pro-evolution content so that he can alert fellow creationists to the danger.
On his list: Finding Nemo (namely, the line "Give it up old man, you can't fight evolution, I was built for speed"). And Gilligan's Island (they used the word prehistoric twice in one episode; "there's no such thing as prehistoric," Carl says). Other violators include Bugs Bunny, Lilo & Stitch, Bob the Builder, and The Incredible Mr. Limpet.
"It used to be my favorite movie," he says of Limpet. "And then I played it for my family, and thirteen minutes in, there was a nerdy science guy who pulls down a chart and starts talking about how fish were our ancestors. I had to stop the movie and talk to my family and explain."
Of course, when it comes to secular entertainment, creationism's enemy number one is Inherit the Wind, about the famous Scopes "monkey trial." It debuted as a play in 1955 and was later turned into a Spencer Tracy movie. And Carl--along with all his colleagues--insists that it's wildly unfair to Christians.
When I got home, I rented the movie and compared it to the actual court transcripts. And I have to say . . . the movie is wildly unfair to Christians. Or at least to this strain of Christianity.
William Jennings Bryan--a deeply religious three-time Democratic presidential nominee who was the prosecuting attorney for the anti-evolution folks--was turned into a total buffoon named Matthew Harrison Brady, played by Fredric March. Brady is a potbellied glutton prone to burping and smacking his lips. In one scene, he's gorging on fried chicken out of a basket--in the courtroom.
The film re-creates the famous showdown over the Bible between Bryan and the brilliant Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow. It's a good scene. But if you read the court transc
ript, it was actually a more interesting and subtle confrontation. For instance, here's the dialogue from the movie:
Darrow: Do you believe every word of the Bible is true? Bryan: Yes. Every word is literally true.
And here's the corresponding real exchange:
Darrow: Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?
Bryan: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively; for instance, "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.
Like creationists today, he admits that there is some figurative language in the Bible, even if most of it should be taken as literally true.
And he had wit: "I believe [the Bible] was inspired by the Almighty, and He may have used language that could be understood at that time, instead of using language that could not be understood until Darrow was born." [Laughter and applause.]
Not bad, you know?
As I said, I still believe in evolution. There's nothing that will change that, even if they found Noah's Year-at-a-Glance calendar on a pristinely preserved ark. And, yes, I know there's artistic license and all that. But it does seem odd to me that this movie--which is supposed to be a champion for the truth--distorted the truth so much. Why do that? Especially when you have reality on your side.