Vanity Fair reviews the Creation Museum

[The Night Owl]

Roll Over, Charles Darwin!
On the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s masterwork, the author visits Kentucky’s Creation Museum, which has been battling science and reason since 2007. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark: it’s a breathtakingly literal march through Genesis, without any hint of soul. Plus: Paul Bettany photographs the Creation Museum.

By A.A. Gill | Photographs by Paul Bettany | February 2010

It’s not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about. They could, though, if they were the bragging sort, brag about a quaint old optician’s shop that will make you a new pair of spectacles in an hour—by chance I am both shortsighted and had an hour to spare. As the nice lady gave my new lenses a polish, I asked her if she thought the eye was such a complicated and mysterious structure that it could have been created only in one inspired, farsighted moment by God and not by the blind trial and error of natural selection. “That kind of makes sense,” she smiled. But then, Galileo invented a refracting telescope and the church locked him up for pointing out that, as he learned by observing the rest of the solar system, the earth isn’t the center of the universe. Do you think that glasses might be the work of the Devil? She smiled again. “Would you like a hard or a soft case with that, sir?”

Perhaps the biggest thing the citizens of the “Queen of the West” have to tell a tall tale about is the Creation Museum. Twenty minutes outside of town, just over the Kentucky border, it was placed here with prayerful care to be accessible and available to the greatest number of American pilgrims coming by road, presumably in surreys with fringes on top. Build it and they will come. November was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—last February the 200th anniversary of the birth of its author—so now seems like a good time to see what the world looks like without the benefit of science. Or spectacles. Although both these anniversaries seemed to pass without ever troubling most Americans—there were precious few commemorations, TV specials, or pop-up books—it’s not that you don’t care about where you came from; it’s that our collective origin is a trip-wire issue, a knuckle-dragging skeleton in the closet. If you want to get through a class, a dinner, a long-haul flight in peace, it’s best not to go there. This is one argument that refuses to evolve.

I took Paul Bettany, the actor who plays Charles Darwin in the new film Creation, along with me to photograph the museum. He has played crazed and murderous apostates in films the devout ban themselves from seeing—in Legion, also out this month, Bettany stars as the archangel Michael, who defies a vengeful God hell-bent on destroying mankind. He once played a Wimbledon champion. Here in Nowheresville, Kentucky, tennis is considered a game for Europeans and other sexual deviants. I can’t imagine what they think of English actors.

...

Just off a motorway, in a barren and uninspiring piece of scrub, the museum is impressively incongruous, a righteously modernist building resting in landscaped gardens filled with dinosaur topiaries. It cost $27 million and was completed in 2007. It answers the famous question about what God could have done if he had had money. This is it. Oddly, it is a conspicuously and emphatically secular construction. There is no religious symbolism. No crosses. No stained glass. No spiral campanile. It has borrowed the empirical vernacular of the enemy to wrap the literal interpretation of Genesis in the façade of a liberal art gallery or library. It is the Lamb dressed in wolf’s clothing.

...

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/creation-museum-201002

"It is the Lamb dressed in wolf's clothing."

:rofl:

[TokenQueer]

1. Bwahahaha!

"He once played a Wimbledon champion. Here in Nowheresville, Kentucky, tennis is considered a game for Europeans and other sexual deviants. I can’t imagine what they think of English actors."

:rofl:

[The Night Owl]

2. Also this...

The next things I noticed were the very illiberally accoutred security guards. They are absurdly over-armed, overdressed, and overweight. Perhaps the museum is concerned that armed radical atheists, maddened by the voices of reason in their confused heads, will storm in waving the periodic table, screaming, “I think, therefore I am!”

:rofl:

[TokenQueer]

3. I know, I know! Hilarious!

Great read. Thanks, I needed the laughter.

:rofl:

[The Night Owl]

5. One more...

I spent a lot of time in the Eden picnic area, trying to wrest some sort of spiritual buzz, a sense of the majesty and the mystery, but it’s conspicuously absent. Literally beaten to death. This is Ripley’s Believe-It.

:rofl:

[peace frog]

4. So just say, "Cogito Ergo Sum"

and tell them you're quoting the Bible written in the original Aramaic. :evilgrin:

[southpaw]

6. Great piece!

Really enjoyed reading this!

[Bragi]

7. I went there last summer!

I was terribly disappointed. I expected (foolishly) to be presented with at least some faux "evidence" or even arguments that might have thrown some doubt on evolution.

Not a chance. All it offers are displays that say: "This is what science says" and beside it another display saying "This is what the Bible says".

It doesn't make any argument against evolution, it's just a series of displays and animatronics that show you how the Bible says things that conflict with the theory of evolution.

Anyway, some of the displays are very funny, though. The ark was particularly amusing since it gave a glimpse of all the horrible things that happened to sinners not on the ark, which mostly involved being attacked by lions, dinausars and each other.

At any rate, I would recommend the creation museum to anyone with a sense of humor who doesn't mind dropping $25 or so for a few chuckles.

[Quantess]

8. Thanks for the review. n/t

[DisgustipatedinCA]

13. Lions and dinosaurs attacking human beings. I love it.

I guess when you compress 4 billion years down to 6,000, there has to be a little human-dinosaur comingling. Morons. By the way, were the animatronic people depicted as Caucasians?

[Bragi]

14. You ask:

"Were the animatronic people depicted as Caucasians"

They looked to me like swarthy Caucasions, with vaguely "Caucasion" features, but dark skin tones. Well tanned, I'd say.

I don't recall any Black people in the mix (though I might have not noticed, or missed any that were there.)

[DisgustipatedinCA]

16. I've read the entire article since posting the question

Vanity Fair describes them as looking Latino and "Guatemalan". Maybe that's their idea of a "compromise race" for the museum.

[BrklynLiberal]

9. Thanks for this little ray of sunshine in an otherwise dreary depressing day.

[Fleshdancer]

10. The book I'm currently reading talks about this "museum"

I recommend the book:

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

http://www.amazon.com/Idiot-America-Stupidity-Became-Virtue/dp/0767926145/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264105026&sr=1-1

Q/A with the author:

Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America?

Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise. And it looked like the national media simply could not help itself but be swept along. This started me thinking and, when I read a clip in the New York Times about the Creation Museum, I pitched an idea to Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire, that said simply, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” What we determined the theme of the eventual piece—and of the book—would be was “The Consequences Of Believing Nonsense.”

Question: You visited the Creation Museum while writing Idiot America. Describe your experience there. What was your first thought when you saw a dinosaur with a saddle on its back?

Charles P. Pierce: My first thought was that it was hilarious. My second thought was that I was the only person in the place who thought it was, which made me both angry and a little melancholy. Outside of the fact that its “science” is a god-awful parodic stew of paleontology, geology, and epistemology, all of them wholly detached from the actual intellectual method of each of them. The most disappointing thing is that the completed museum is so dreadfully grim and earnest and boring. It even makes dragon myths servant to its fringe biblical interpretations. Who wants to live in a world where dragons are boring?

[silverweb]

11. Love it!

This part cracked me up completely:

This is a no-parable zone. It starts with the definitive answer, and all the questions have to be made to fit under it. That’s tough. Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker. Scientists have all this cool equipment and stuff. They’ve got all these “lenses” and things. They can see shit that’s invisible. And they stayed on at school past 14.

:rofl:

[ThomWV]

12. I just put the place on my "must Visit" list for next spring

[Bragi]

15. You'll not be disappointed

Except by the admission price, which if I recall, was in the range of $20.

No charity here.

[dixiegrrrrl]

17. This is a hoot of an article.

Thank you for posting it.
I would be interested in visiting the museum were it not for the fact that I live among displays of it every day, down here in the bible belt. Walking, talking amitrons are all too plentiful here.