Creation and Science Chronicle

Revealed: the vegetarian Eden that was home to Adam, Eve and T Rex
by James Randerson, Science correspondent
The Guardian (UK), page 12
April 5, 2008

Creationist preacher Ken Ham is used to the problems that arise from combining what he reads in the Old Testament and what scientists tell him. He has no difficulty squaring six days of creation and 6,000 years of Earth history with evidence from fossils and geological dating — for him, scientists who think the world is millions of years old are simply wrong.

Ham, a US-based Australian, has been on a tour of the UK, and listening to him explain this week that most of the fossils on the Earth were left during Noah’s flood, and that dragon legends are ancient memories of dinosaurs, it would be easy to dismiss him as a crank.

Scientific evidence suggests the Earth is around 4.5bn years old, the universe is around 14bn years old and dinosaurs died out 65m years ago, long before anything resembling a human evolved.

But Ham’s ideas and his organisation, Answers in Genesis (AIG), are influential, especially in the US. In May last year, the organisation built the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Within eight weeks of opening, the $27m (£14m) attraction had clocked up 100,000 visitors. The operation in the UK is smaller but still significant, with an annual turnover of around £500,000. One report suggested it dispatches between 30,000 and 50,000 books, DVDs and videos each year.

read more…

Back to the fundamentals
Book Review
by Kurt Kleiner
The Globe and Mail Weekend (Canada), page D8
April 5, 2008

Brett Grainger’s grandfather was a fundamentalist preacher who became convinced that he knew the exact date of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. So on Sept. 11, 1988, he and his wife put on their best clothes and sat down to wait. The day wore on, Jesus didn’t come and, finally around dinner time, Grainger’s grandmother went into the kitchen to cook a roast. She had put it out to thaw that morning – just in case.

Grainger grew up in Huntsville, Ont. as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Protestant group, and he later went on to study fundamentalism at Harvard University and to write about religion as a journalist. He has combined research and personal experience to write a fascinating, readable and sympathetic study of Christian fundamentalism.

Grainger sees fundamentalism is an entirely modern phenomenon, one that was born as a reaction against the modern world, but that has also been shaped by it. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, fundamentalists are not interested in returning to a premodern age,” he writes. “They are among the most adept pupils of modernity, copying and recasting its designs for their own purposes.”

In chapters on the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., or the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, Fla., he shows how fundamentalists employ sophisticated technology, marketing techniques and rhetorical tactics to promote their views.

read more…

Thinking about fundamentalism
by Robert Fulford
National Post (Canada), page A21
April 5, 2008

The Creation Museum, which opened last spring near Cincinnati depicts dinosaurs among the animals sharing the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. The “young-earth” creationists behind the museum believe God made the world, all of it, about 6,000 years ago. Instructors explain that most dinosaurs were wiped out by the Flood and the two Noah crammed into the Ark later died because the post-Flood environment wasn’t dinosaur-friendly.

The museum’s theologians differ from “old-earth” believers who speculate that a “day” in Genesis could mean millions of years. And neither faction embraces intelligent design, the idea that creation evolved under detailed divine guidance. For those who think of fundamentalist Christianity as a monolith, the Creation Museum serves as a reminder that evangelical religion contains many disparate opinions even on a question like planetary history.

read more…