Answers in Genesis responds to enthologist’s claims that creation museum discriminates against, isolates non-Christians
Kentucky’s Creation Museum responded recently to an article featured in an online publication that was based on research conducted by a sociology professor in preparation for a book.
The article, published by Live Science, suggested that the Creation Museum can be a painful reminder of discrimination and isolation by religious fundamentalists.
Answers in Genesis, the body behind the Creation Museum, said the article posed a number of outright inaccuracies and contextual errors, giving an extremely false impression of the museum. The article was based on a study by Bernadette Barton, a sociology professor at Morehead State University in Kentucky.
Barton’s research methodology is the ethnography, which is essentially a narrative. It does not aim to be impartial but instead focuses on the researcher’s personal reactions and reflections to observation, according to Live Science.
Barton based her study on three visits to the Creation Museum where she attended lectures, observed guests at the museum and brought a group of her students there, then noted down their feelings and observations about the visit.
Of her motive in doing the study Barton said, “I went there seeking to understand how people adhere to [a] set of beliefs that can, in my opinion, have sometimes destructive consequences,” Live Science reported.
Points of argument
Answers in Genesis responded to the following points that were presented in the Live Science article:
1. The museum’s description as fundamentalist.
The Creation Museum felt they are not “fundamentalist” which today has come to carry derisive connotations of extremism. The Creation Museum’s depiction of how God created humans is believed by almost half of all Americans, rendering this one of many mainstream areas of agreement.
2. The museum can be uncomfortable for non-fundamentalist visitors.
The Creation Museum presents its worldview in a respectful way. They noted that there are many institutions with different beliefs and forms of thought including secular museums and media outlets that deride Christians or present a humanist viewpoint, which can make creationist students feel uncomfortable. They also acknowledge the Last Adam theater challenges people to accept the claims of Christ, but this is done lovingly and not aggressively.
3. The museum’s primary message is to proclaim the truth of a young earth.
The Creation Museum upholds the authority of the entire Bible, rather than isolates the belief in a young earth. This is shown through their “walk through history” as depicted in the Bible. Dr. Jason Lisle, director of the museum’s planetarium, clearly said the museum was made to show visitors that the Bible is true, beginning with Genesis.
4. “Graffiti Alley” shows that when men abandon Young Earth creationism the consequences include abortion, divorce, gay marriage and murder.
A visual on answersingenesis.org clearly states, “Scripture abandoned in Culture: Leads to relative morality, hopelessness and meaninglessness.”
5. Warning signs in the museum were nerve-wracking including those that said guests could be asked to leave any time, and museum staff can send the group off if they are not honest about their “purpose of [the] visit.”
The signs, answersingenesis.org said were posted in 2009 in response to continuous threats from atheist bloggers. Also, museums often show such signs and some even inspect the bags of guests.
6. People non-adherent to fundamentalism felt pressured to hide their beliefs for fear of being snubbed or judged.
Answers in Genesis said they sincerely wish for skeptics to visit and have hosted many agnostic and atheist groups. The museum is evangelistic at heart and so welcomes nonbelievers. They see themselves as a way to attract nonbelievers who might otherwise not want to go to a Christian church, so they can be exposed to the gospel.
7. The article’s subhead “Compulsory Christianity.”
Answersingenesis.org noted that guests come to the museum out of choice, and are not forced to read all exhibits nor watch all videos. Even detractors of the museum have described it as “family-friendly” and “cordial.”
The LiveScience article also mentioned that a guard and his guard dog circled around one student twice who wore leggings and a long shirt. The Examiner said without independent corroboration there is no need to respond except to say that K-9 dogs only attack at the urging of their handler.
1) AiG’s message is most certainly “fundamentalist” in that it is biblically-literalist anti-modernist and anti-science (it denies large chunks of modern science, including most of biology, geology, anthropology, palaeontology, cosmology, and even parts of nuclear physics). Most of the world has no trouble accepting that a significant chunk of the US is “fundamentalist”, as they already think that a significant chunk are carpet-chewing lunatics who believe that Iraq had WMDs, that Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, that the sun revolves around the Earth and all sorts of other paranoid and/or ignorant nonsense.
3) You should not be surprised that people believe that ‘Answers in GENESIS’ has, as its main emphasis, the promulgation of two-centuries scientifically discredited claims of a ‘young Earth’ (and the related claim of a global flood). It is in fact notorious as one of the foremost promoters of Young Earth Creationism, whose promotion is a major theme of the museum.
4) Yes, and 50 years ago conservatives were claiming that ending biblically-based anti-miscegenation laws would cause the fall of civilisation, and fifty years before that they were probably arguing that women’s suffrage would cause it to fall. Chicken Little conservatism at its finest.
5) Typical of the bunker-mentality of Chicken Little conservatism. Creationists lead tours of real-science-based natural history museums all the time — yet the sky doesn’t fall. But should a single unbeliever snigger at AiG’s outrageous claims, it would appear that the sky would fall. Have any of these Atheist bloggers ‘threatened’ to do anything beyond laugh at them?
“Enthologist”? When Answers in Genesis can correctly spell “ethnology” and you can’t, I think you lose 50 points in the t.o. home game.
[Quote]
-50 if a C’ist corrects a factual error of yours (This may seem
like a big penalty, but lets face it — if a C’ist has a better
grasp of bio than you do, maybe you shouldn’t be posting.)
[End quote - Chris Colby, http://www.antievolution.org/features/evohumor/tohome.html ]
But going beyond the title’s spelling glitch, I don’t see much that looks like journalism here. AiG responds to just about anything that might resemble a comment about their facility in Kentucky. Did anybody even consider checking to see whether AiG’s response here made sense in its various supposed points?
Take response (1), for example. AiG doesn’t like the “fundamentalist” adjective. They note that their objection is solidly based on … market perception. Then they equivocate on “mainstream” versus “extremist”, using the demographic connotation of the former to try to deny the philosophical import of the latter. Sorry, inerrantist literalism is still a plank of the fundamentals, and it is still extreme, no matter what percentage of the population happens to be on board with it. All they manage there is to show that extremism is popular. I feel safe saying that Islamic fervor for sharia law in Iran is popular there, but that does nothing to make it any less extreme.
If you want to do some commentary from a Christian perspective on AiG’s curious commitment to plain error, then you can cite St. Augustine’s advice on these topics:
[Quote]
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
[End Quote - St. Augustine, “De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim” (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)]
Poor Wesley. He can’t tell the difference between a reposting (and not even of the actual response, but a rewording) of AiG’s response and someone else’s title.
All too typical of anti-creationists… Shoot first, aim later…
CP
CP,
Nowhere did I claim that AiG had misspelled “ethnologist”. A brief review of my post shows this clearly:
““Enthologist”? When Answers in Genesis can correctly spell “ethnology” and you can’t, I think you lose 50 points in the t.o. home game.”
See? AiG’s spelling is noted as being fine. The author of the post here is the one I *correctly* took issue with on the misspelling.
Nor does the rest of the criticism apply. One can look to AiG’s original wording to see that my take above is spot-on:
“Also, the reporter’s use of the word “fundamentalist” to describe our museum is a loaded term, one that has lost its original, legitimate meaning (see its definition here). It is now a term of derision to signify any extreme religious movement (e.g., fundamentalist, extremist Islam). When almost half of Americans agree with the statement that “God created humans pretty much in their present form either exactly as the Bible describes it or within the last 10,000 years”, we are not out of the mainstream (see Sliding Down the Polls).”
Typical antievolutionist jibe there, CP… condescending, projective, *and* false. (And safely anonymous. I’d be embarrassed to have to account for saying the sort of thing CP does above, so I guess anonymity figures.)
Wesley