Finches, Frogs, and Fossils
Finches and
poisonous frogs caged in glass, dinosaur bones and skeletons, ancient
fossils, and even minerals all abound in the Main Hall, the exterior of
the Men in White Theater, The Flood Geology Room, and Palm Plaza.
Superficially, these authentic living and petrified creatures serve to
give the Creation Museum the legitimacy and atmosphere of a real
natural history museum. Looking more closely at the placards that
explain each animal, artifact, and display you'll see each has a faux
truth statement delivered in an authorial voice that is sometimes
scriptural sometimes scientific, and sometimes a composite of the two.
Creationist Science as a Human Creation
These
explanatory statements collectively offer a creationist textbook that
teaches, reinforces, and fleshes out the creationist perspective using
scientific artifacts. Implicitly, the knowing scientific voice and
display of actual creatures and artifacts suggest scientific
objectivity, credibility, and truth. This camouflages (sometimes
cleverly, often awkwardly) the interpretive, subjective, unsupported
(in the sense of application based on a belief system rather than
concrete data derived from the natural world) and finally unscientific
work of creatively applying scripture to make sense of their natural
history. In other words, the species and specimens you see come from
the natural world, but the writing about them is a human fabrication
based solely on literal interpretation of the bible. Of course, this is
all in the name of persuasion, with simulated scientific support that
has nothing to do with the scientific community used to create a
largely fictional scientific case for creationism.
(top)
