Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs

The New York Times has a fantastic article up about the opening of the $27 million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky: a wonderfully delusional natural history museum featuring happy Christian cavemen cavorting with placid and herbivorous thunder lizards. In fact, did you know that dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark?

It has always puzzled me why fundamentalists are so challenged by the theory of evolution: intelligent and thoughtful Christians (and yes, there are many) have long accepted the Bible as metaphorical. Some flexible thinking allows a Christian to accept Genesis as a largely metaphorical account of creation primarily aimed at simply explaining the world to people who lived in a pre-scientific era, but also to wedge evolution in (II Peter 3:8 makes clear that God's concept of a day is not the same as a human's, which makes Genesis' "days" entirely figurative).

This exhibit at the museum goes a long ways in explaining the disconnect between intelligent Christians and the Fundies:

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled “Millions of Years,” that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.

How ridiculous: what we have here is a religious movement aimed at promoting blind faith. But if God exists, he doesn't want blind faith, because that's not a choice. It's simple conditioning. Doubt is integral to an intelligent Christian's concept of faith, because Christians believe that we were given free will to make this choice. Fundamentalists, on the other hand? They think that choice is the same as calculated, hysterical ignorance.

Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs [New York Times]