Many years ago my wife Shirley had a wristwatch whose battery died. It was a watch with a back designed to be opened with a special little wrench. Having worked in a clock and watch mending shop years ago as a teen-ager I figured out a way to get the back off. We had no battery the right size, so off we went to our local Sears to check out tiny batteries.
We looked at all those in the battery section and none were suitable. A helpful clerk, a not so rare species then, told us to check the jewelry section. Duh! The lady there was very helpful and very pleased to see that I already had unscrewed the back.
She produced a battery and said, “That will be 89 cents altogether.” Shirley took out a dollar bill. “Would you like me to put it in for you?” said the nice lady. “Yes,” said Shirley. The clerk dropped in the battery and finger tightened the back. “That’ll be $1.89” said the clerk. “What happened to the 89 cents? asked Shirley.
“There’s a dollar installation charge.” smiled the clerk. Shirley paid out two bills and we took the watch back. Not before or since have we both been speechless in any situation.
Well today I found a situation in which I would definitely have been momentarily speechless if I had been there. The guide was showing a group of children round the Denver museum of Nature and Science and they came to a skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex. He, the guide, pointed at the saber like teeth and told the children that this dinosaur must have been a vegetarian.
You may be surprised at that. I was speechless in front of the screen that held the words. The reasoning of the guide was that until the Fall of Man in Eden there was no death in the world. Death was the revenge of God for the disobedience of Adam and Eve. Here are his words to the children.
“If this creature was designed to eat meat from the very start what would he have to do until Adam and Eve sinned and death entered the world? What would he have to do?”
The children obediently followed this tack and chorused, “Starve.”
“Fast, and pray for the Fall. Is that likely?” the guide asked. “The answer is, everyone look at me and say’ ‘No.’ Try that with me.” “No!” the children replied, and the tour progressed.
The guide I have quoted verbatim is named Jack and he and his parter Carter operate BC Tours. The initials stand for Biblically Correct. People actually pay them to be taken on tours of museums, zoos and fossil sites, to receive the BC version of what they are viewing. They started their company in 1988, lead about 100 tours a year and have reached thousands of children and adults since then.
When talking to the group of some thirty home-schooled Christian children and parents, known as ‘Young Earth Creationists,’ Carter says, "We believe Jesus is our designer and our creator of everything that was ever made."
The guides tell the children that the Bible says that the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. They describe Creationism and the theory of evolution as ‘philosphies’ and ‘world views.’ They treat both as equal possibilities and say that it’s just a matter of which one you choose to believe.
Teaching young children to be ignorant, and training them to be ignorant is child abuse in my book, which of course is not the Bible. A scientific theory is NOT a matter of opinion. It is an explanation of how certain observed facts fit together in agreement with known laws of Nature.
A scientific theory can never be proved right, but it must be able to be proved incomplete or wrong. Creationism is not a scientific theory. It is not based on hundreds of thousands of observations of natural events. It is an assertion based on a piece of scripture. No amount of observed facts will ever alter the assertion. Putting an assertion as equal to a scientific theory is a lie or an error, depending on whether the perpetrator knows better or not.
The guides tell the children that the animal and plant life they see was not the product of billions of years of evolution but was created by their God in six days of 24 hours each. They tell the children that Adam and Eve walked around at the same time as dinosaurs and that all the dinosaur remains found all over the world are due to Noah’s flood. In their own creationism museum there are panoramas of humans and dinosaurs living together at the same time and in the same space.
A Gallup poll taken in 2007 showed that more Americans believed in the assertions of the creationists than in the theory, or facts of evolution. This is bad news for the future of America, and the world that sees American soldiers with this sort of education.
Carter plugs his catechism again: "Is evolution a religion?" and the children obediently reply "Yes." "Yes it's a religious belief," Carter says. "It's a philosophy."
Don’t forget that some of these tours take place in real museums, like the Denver museum. So how do the guides deal with the charts, panoramas and exhibits that just don’t fit into the 10,000 year old Earth assertion.
They call the museum displays,”pseudo-science" and describe the illustrations and panoramas of paleontology and evolution as "artwork." Standing before a display on "Life in the Cenozoic Seas," Jack told the group, "This is a great museum if they would take out the propaganda, if they take out the pseudo-science. It's appalling because students go away thinking that cows turned into whales."
There is no way, they say, that anything as complicated as the eye could be the result of evolution and mutations. They are ignorant of the latest mathematical models that demonstrate how such things could easily occur given the myriad possibilities of millions of years of mutation. They sneer at the idea that the scales of a fish could over millions of years become teeth.
"This is a fairy tale, " Jack declared to the children. "How do they know your teeth evolved from scales? Everybody, try that with me, how do you know?” "How-do-you-know?" the kids repeated in unison.
I was once a principal in a Roman Catholic school. I can recognize a catechism when I hear and see one. It is a system of questions and answers designed to short circuit thought and prevent it.
Such tours as these are tolerated by the museum because the groups are part of the public for whom the exhibits are demonstrated. They are not sponsored by the museum.
In this museum the Chief Curator Kirk Johnson who is a paleontologist, said "They selectively ignore the vast majority of science in their presentation."
For example, Jack and Carter stopped the group in front of a window display that contains samples of sandstone that have ripples created by water and fossils of ancient life. Jack explained "How do they date the fossil? By the layer in which they find it. They date the layer by the fossil and the fossil by the layer," he said. "That's circular reasoning."
Immediately he stepped past and turned his back on a display on radiometric dating, the method by which scientists determine the age of rocks through the rate of decay of their natural radioactivity. When asked why he skipped that unchallengeable part Jack said, "We can't cover everything."
Jack and Carter are now training other people around the country to hold similar tours at their local museums, and they are also putting together tour materials for Christian teachers.
"I've chosen to believe the God of the Bible," said Jack. "Now the evolutionist has chosen not to believe the God of the Bible. So we've chosen to believe they're both matters of faith."
That is why I titled the posting Invincible Ignorance. Darwin’s Origin of Species doesn’t have all the answers. He acknowledged that himself. His second book, The Descent of Man has over 700 pages. The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ occurs once.
That catch phrase from the Origin took off because the industrialists, the politicians and the elite of every society took it as the natural reason and excuse that they were in power. They and their success in competition showed that they were the fittest to survive. Our own economy and political system is based on the capitalist's acceptance and implementation of the Darwinian slogan. His second book, about the evolution of morality and ethics is ignored.
Nobody in science has all the answers. But the answers they do have are proven facts not blank assertions that contradict all the known facts. The scientific method is very slow to accept facts but when they can be demonstrated by anyone at all in the same field of science they are accepted. Theories based on those facts are used to foretell other phenomena. If those phenomena are found to occur then the theory is strengthened.
Nobody today even bothers to doubt the theory of gravitation. But it’s a theory. Doctors cling desperately to the germ theory of disease although it’s riddled with inconsistencies that must eventually be ironed out. Creationism isn’t a theory. It’s a blanket assertion based on invincible ignorance, for ever and ever. Amen.
