On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, and the 201st anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a writer for Vanity Fair visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky “to see what the world looks like without the benefit of science” (h/t P.Z. Myers):
The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do. This place doesn’t just take on evolution—it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.
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What is truly awe-inspiring about the museum is the task it sets itself: to rationalize a story, written 3,000 years ago, without allowing for any metaphoric or symbolic wiggle room. There’s no poetic license. 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. Science has given itself millions of years, eons, to play with, but the righteous have got to get the whole lot in, home and dry, in less than 6,000 years, using just a pitchfork and a loud voice. It’s like playing speed chess against a computer and a thousand people with Nobel Prizes.
According to modern scientific calculations, the earth is “at least 4.5 billion years old” and the universe about 14 billion years old. See also here, here, here, and here.
Here is a breathtakingly comprehensive Index to Creationist Claims. You could spend months going through all these claims and why they don’t discredit evolutionary theory. It’s beyond awesome.
Remember that piece I wrote recently about the Texas Board of Education rewriting standards for all the textbooks in the state — and potentially for all the textbooks in the United States, given how influential Texas is in the textbook publishing market? Well, one of those changed standards is the one that requires students to be taught “the concept of an expanding universe that originated about 14 billion years ago“:
In an amendment sponsored by board member Barbara Cargill, the board of education voted to replace a requirement to teach the “concept of an expanding universe that originated about 14 billion years ago”. According to the National Center for Science Education’s Josh Rosenau, teachers must now present “current theories of the evolution of the universe including estimates for the age of the universe” (emphasis added).
There certainly are many different theories about the formation of the universe. Whether it was a big bang or a big bounce are two of them. Cosmologists and astronomers wonder about the rate of expansion in the early universe, and they debate the effects of gravity (not to mention its nature) as well as consider questions about the composition of the universe and the kinds of particles that exist. However, despite the questions that do exist about the origination of the universe, there is very little debate about its age.
Right now, the latest estimate is that the universe is 13.73 billion years old, plus or minus 120 million years. This information is the latest from results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP). While the age of the universe is likely to be fine tuned in coming years, it is extremely likely that it will remain in the neighborhood of 14 billion years. And few scientists see the age of the earth being cast in doubt as well. But it appears that cosmology could now be thrown into the fray of science v. religion.
Until now, matters of space have been very little addressed in terms of religion. After all, couldn’t God have created the universe well before putting humans on Earth? But it appears that by working from Earth outward, some are becoming concerned. If God created humans on Earth just a few millennia ago, then Earth can’t be 4.5 billion years old. And if Earth isn’t as old as all that, surely the universe isn’t, either. It’s an interesting train of logic. And one that could result in all we know about space science being brought under attack.
Yeah, but think how much easier it will be to teach science to kids in the classroom of the future. You’ll just have to know what each side claims is true. Then you just print it up on a sheet of paper under the heading: “The universe: 14 billion years old or just 10,000? You decide.”
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