From weird to worthy

Bananas, clowns, gophers, bunnies…and creation.

by Emil Silvestru

The May 2006 WestJet Airlines’ in-flight magazine ‘Up’ published an article titled ‘North America’s Weirdest Museums’.

The third weirdest (of ten) museums is, in author Rebecca Dumais’ view, the ‘Museum of Creation and Earth History’ in Santee, California, at the Institute for Creation Research. The museum is presented side-by-side with ‘The Banana Museum’, ‘Ron Lee’s World of Clowns’, the ‘World Famous Gopher Hole Museum’, ‘Bunny Museum’, ‘Liberace Museum’, etc.

According to the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus (1994 edition), the word ‘weird’ can mean: 1. uncanny, supernatural; 2. strange, queer, incomprehensible. Since there is nothing supernatural about gopher holes, one may safely conclude that the author refers to the second meaning in her title. The conclusion is obvious: Christians who believe the Bible are weird, strange, or incomprehensible.

There is a section in the article that seems to reveal what actually motivated this Canadian author: ‘Vacationing Republicans can also take in the lushly painted Garden of Eden and check out a model of the tower of Babylon [sic!] and actual archeological artifacts from its site.’ We shall leave the analysis of the implications of this sentence to the reader, and deal with the fundamentals of the whole article, though not in a fundamentalist way!

First, let it be said that I seriously doubt that the US Southwest Airlines, which is the model for WestJet, would risk such an offence to Bible-believing Christians because of their anticipated reaction to it—and the associated money loss.

If the museum had anything to do with Islam, I doubt it would have been mentioned at all, in the interests of being religiously neutral. However, even with the hyper-political correctness in Canada and many other nations, attacks on Christianity are ‘fair game’. As the actor Bruce Willis once said:

‘Unfortunately, with what we know about science, anyone who thinks at all probably doesn’t believe in fire and brimstone anymore. So organized religion has lost that voice to hold up their moral hand.’¹

In other words, ‘science’ has proven that the book of Genesis is not true and consequently Adam, Eve and their sin are not real; therefore the need for redemption is not real so that Christianity has no relevance (actually, ‘science’ is really ‘man’s flawed and limited interpretation of the real world’²). So just like any other idea that runs counter to the post-modernist’s relativism, Christianity can be mocked, criticized and attacked with impunity. Rebecca Dumais follows this line of thought, which underlies much of the philosophy of the western world.

Creation Ministries International fights against this philosophy. Our weapons are the Bible and science. The Bible as God’s inerrant Word, which speaks of a literal Creation taking place some 6,000 years ago in six literal days. Science as a true search for the truth of Creation, and not an instrument of mass deception, or lip service to the atheistic philosophy of evolution. The facts of Creation are perfectly scientific, if one frees science from the restraints of the naturalistic (godless) paradigm that is so clearly stated by the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin: ‘… we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism …we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.’³

Offering Christians solid answers to the difficult questions raised by evolutionary science, and through that a renewed confidence in the Scriptures as a whole, we hope one day that all creation-oriented museums will cease to be ‘weird’ and become ‘worthy’ to all people.