Faith Infiltration: Creation Museum Pt. 5

I’ve been very photographic lately on this blog after a long lull of texty blog posts. This is part 5 of a series of blog posts documenting my visit to the Creation Museum. You can find previous posts by clicking the “intelligent Design” label at the bottom of this post.

Here is another example of the “human reason” and “God’s word” dichotomy that permeates the museum:

The text is a little hard to read from the picture, so here is what it says:

So, “human reason” seems to clearly be starting from the null hypothesis and moving toward a tentative conclusion based on the evidence we find. “God’s word” is a starting point of the Bible, retrofitting evidence so that said evidence does not contradict what the Bible says.

Most people reading this blog will understand how ridiculous this is. In the event that I am not preaching to the choir, let me illustrate why this is an inappropriate way to approach evidence with an analogy.

You could pretty much take any creation myth and, starting from that myth, force fossil evidence to fit it. The Lisu creation story might sound like a tale used by another culture to explain origins, but objectively it is equally fanciful as the Biblical creation myth. This is why we need to begin with the scientific method (“human reason”) and then look at the evidence as objectively as possible. What the creation museum does is essentially pit the scientific method against the Bible, insisting that the scientific method is something akin to an “arbitrary guess”. To a believer, “God’s word” is infinitely better than some “arbitrary guess”. Evidence does not matter, because it can simply be redefined, ignored or marginalized in favor of an “innerant” holy book. A believer in Lisu mythology could similarly ignore or redefine evidence in favor of their mythology. In this way, the faith of an individual or organization can become historical “fact”.

To put it yet another way – a forensic investigator and his assistant are at the scene of a murder. Who is more likely to arrive at the truth: the forensic investigator, who makes no assumptions about the nature of the crime, or the assistant who “knows” before he enters the crime scene that his neighbor perpetuated the murder, and his only evidence is that his pastor told him his neighbor was an atheist sinner with no morals? The assistant can look at the crime scene and say, “it does not matter that the murder weapon was a gun and my neighbor does not own a gun. He borrowed it. It does not matter that my neighbor has an alibi because he was at a local atheist meeting – he just committed the crime before the meeting. The investigator using evidence to date the time of death is wrong, because that dating method makes too many assumptions.

We can’t find his fingerprints or DNA evidence anywhere at the scene, but that’s no matter because he could have worn a full body suit, the clever fox. Your standards of evidence are based on human reason, but my evidence is based on the word of my pastor and the word of God, who says nonbelievers are evil. Your human reason will lead you in the wrong direction because it’s just an arbitrary guess”.