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 My inbox this morning included this article from Salon:

http://salon.com/news/feature/2007/05/31/creation_museum/index.html?source=newsletter

First, a bit of perspective:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/21329204.html

(Full article here, with interesting notes on the development America's religious landscape:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-evolution.html )

And nuance:

http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm

And food for thought from media coverage of the event:

http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/news/2007/KY/858_and_now_a_word_about_the_creat_5_29_2007.asp

A commentary on evolution as a theory: 

http://www.qctimes.com/articles/2007/05/14/opinion/letters/doc4646934dbe6a0443633273.txt
(See my recent post on Q as a theory:  likewise evolution isn't something that someone believes in
or disbelieves.  Divine Creation is:  Creationism in a doctrine, a type of theology — but not everything that challenges a religious doctrine is, itself, also an article of faith or part of a form of spirituality.  For believers, new knowledge must be ignored or somehow integrated into their prior spiritual understanding — every religion in the world (of a certain age) has done this with, say, the information that the earth orbits the sun ... most contemporary people of faith do not spend much thought on how their tradition went through that process or find it controversial, now.)

I disagree with the link, do not think it takes any education to follow that things develop from similar things:  everyone can hear influences in their favorite kind of music or see how artists were
shaped by the work of their predecessors.  I do think education brings practice in unfamiliar
ways of thinking (like an economist... like a mathematician... etc.) and it supplies contexts
that people usually don't come across on their own:  most people can't say much about the
literary and historical background of Shakespeare's plays  without the intervention of some kind of
teaching, at some point.  Most of my education was in the context and background of the Bible:
I didn't suspect any of it before I went to school, I thought Judaism was a thing in its own
right and I didn't think very much about the fact that it may have changed with events and
circumstances.  I could have told you that Protestantism came after Catholicism,  but I could
not have said much about how religions are changed by their (unrelated) neighbors.

I find it interesting that evolution has even been classified as a religious issue.  It's more
correct to say that a belief in various forms of divine (or semi-divine) creation are parts of many respective religions and that every religion has a fairly set catalog of options for dealing with changes in what-we-know as time passes.  (This post covers one of them:   interpretation.)

A flat earth is part of the Bible:  read the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) carefully (in a translation that tries to make the Bible somewhat less friendly and familiar) and you'll notice that and that fact that rain and floods come from portals in the earth or the solid dome (the firmament) of the sky, and that water surrounds this entire structure — that's where rain and flood water comes from.  The sun revolves around this structure (see Psalm 19:1-6), and God is reachable by a mountain or ladder.  (In fact one temple of a contemporary deity from another religion of the time shows that gods were thought to be about 15 feet tall — based on their carved footprints and the length of their stride.)

There has been a lot of work on the cosmology of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, illuminated by
similar beliefs in neighboring, contemporary religions.  (If this interests you I recommend looking up the very compressed notes under "creation" in this link   and reading Pritchard's Ancient Near East vol. 1 and 2.  To understand how changing views in science shaped the Bible, read Dr. Gregory Riley's River of God.) 

Learn about the parallels; note that I make no theological points, here:  every religion borrows from
its neighbors.  (No matter what tradition you belong to, I assure you this is true and that
careful study of your own past will bear it out.)

If you're not yet sick of reading, I have an assignment for you.  Set aside everything that's
gone above, set aside what you do and don't know and believe and go read Genesis 1-3 (or 2-3 if
you're in a hurry) in any Bible you have at hand.  (There's a Google bar on the left sidebar if
you need to call up an online Bible for the moment.)  [Citations ahead, keep the Bible at hand! ]

Does it say the snake is Satan?

Does it say Eve is responsible for sin?

Does it mention sin?

Does it mention dinosaurs?  (According to the Salon article, Looy says, "But it is clearly written [in
Scripture] that they [people and dinosaurs] were alive at the same time.")

Does it say "The animals are vegetarians and plants don't have thorns"?

This is interpretation:  putting dinosaurs in Eden requires reading into, supplementing,
surmising about the Biblical account.  It is not the plain vanilla text-on-the-page, it's an
inference made for a variety of reasons with a variety of sources.

Before you feel defensive (or smug) recall that all religions do this with their foundational
texts and stories; a story has no meaning without some kind of application or explanation, it's
just a thing, and every religion uses interpretation so its foundational materials can talk
about contemporary development and issues.  (Note how little this is done with, say, Lev 13:9-13
— it's  not a contemporary issue, or rather it's not dealt with in the same way ... yet you
don't see any pious folk clamoring for a return to the literal application of this text or
using it to talk about a well-removed contemporary issue.)

All book-based religions find ways to put certain passages on the backburner or to modify how they're read and used:  saying "We should do x now that there's no longer a Temple" is one way of intervening in how Leviticus is read and applied.

To go into some quotes from the Salon article:

Buddy Davis, a technician and artist who has also made dinosaurs for use in secular exhibits,
tells me he's much happier seeing his dinosaurs at the Creation Museum, promoting faith in the
Bible. "I want to see God get credit for his creation," he says. "I look around and see so much
beauty — even if it is marred by sin — and to think that it all just came from an explosion
billions of years ago is just wrong. To me it's obvious the hand of God is behind it. As
scripture says, 'They are without excuse' who do not believe.'

His quote is from some translations of Romans 1:20, passage of Jewish polemic directed at
idolaters (like Dan 14:7) which Paul has re-purposed.  Raise your hand if you're worshiping an
idol in the image of an animal have become sexually deviant as a direct and immediate result.
(Yes?  No?  Anyone?)  That is who Paul was addressing — if you are, please feel chastised and
weigh the merits of Paul's rebuke.  To say that Paul is addressing modern scientists is to infer
something about the passage.

(Note: for a look at what earlier people did with fossils, see The First Fossil Hunters:
Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times by Adrienne Mayor.  Or listen to this
podcast:  http://humaniststudies.org/enews/?id=286&article=0  (The Mr. Deity segment fits in
with this post's theme of the Creation account in Genesis, as well.)  Note:  when I link something I am not endorsing the entire website, I'm just looking for an example of something.  If you want to hear Dr. Mayer interviewed rather than read her whole book, then listen to that portion of the podcast.)

As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are
biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith. On the other hand,
he says, the Book of Genesis is true "from the first word to the last."

I would observe that it takes just as much 'fickle reasoning' to put dinosaurs into Genesis 2 or
to have Paul speaking to 21st century palaeontologists, as a profession — you're exercising your
mind just as much and putting just as much of your human interpretive powers into your reading
of Scripture.  (If this upsets you and you want to look up links ... stop yourself and have some
discernment.  Where does that agitation come from?)

On the subject of human reasoning, what tools (since the kind of fruit is not mentioned in Gen)
has Looy used to arrive at this statement? —

"We're not sure what kind of fruit it was, but we do know it wasn't an apple," says Looy,
perhaps to demonstrate the kind of questions the several Ph.D. researchers at the museum are now toiling over in the labs behind the walls of the exhibition space."

And I don't quite recall reading this in Genesis:

In the next scene, after the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, looking far less happy than before,
are standing next to two lambs they have slaughtered on a sacrificial stone table. The sacrifice
has a practical value — the original couple are now wearing lambskin suits and the lambs are
skinless — and a spiritual one; the lambs are sacrificed, a visitor explains to me, in partial
payment for the debt incurred by Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of knowledge. I tell the
visitor it seems unfair for the lamb to pay for their mistake. "Well, it wasn't enough," he
says. "God had to send his only Son to pay the ultimate price for their sin." When I tell him
that sounds kind of extreme, he looks at me and shakes his head slowly a couple of times before
moving on.

(In fact animal sacrifice begins after the "coats of skin", making this scene difficult to
square with the Biblical account...)

And this:

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the
nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum
will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. "It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed
by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom," Ham says. "We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn't prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."

Hm, this is God we're talking about, yes?  The God of Psalm 21?  Able to fight His own battles?
I'm not clear on when any particular human being was given this mantle (instead of God) — I'm
not a theologian and I don't get those particular memos — but I can tell you quite a bit about
what happens when one person or another assumes it and goes forth to battle in God's name.

Note that this is one of those issues in society where the pressure is coming from religion:
left to its own, biology would be providing the grist for Nature and not waving its arms about anything (except, perhaps, for withering biodiversity.)*  Step back a moment, whether you agree or disagree with a belief in divine Creation:  do you want a particular stripe of religion — any religion — to influence public education?  (No one is asking houses of worship, home schoolers, or religious schools not to teach the theology of their tradition.)  Remember that the religious complexion of every place changes, and that precedents (once set) may be used by quite different groups than the
ones who originated them.  (I've studied the history of doctrine and I can just see Neo-
Zurvanites fulminating about changing the curriculum to include mandatory instruction in the simultaneous creation of Time and the Deity ... I suppose can picture far more frankly alien applications of this precedent than most people.)

* Biodiversity:  I sympathize, I hate it when religions go extinct — it leaves me with that
much less to study.

I'm picking on dinosaurs in the Book of Genesis because it's an example of interpreting the text in a way that's large (pardon the pun) enough for most readers to recognize.  But every time you read a portion of Scripture and think "Ah, he's talking about x" or "This means/applies to z" then you've interpreted what you're reading — and it can be very difficult to pry the plain text apart from this almost-automatic act.  (Historians have to do this all the time, however:  to look at the text by itself, then to think about everything it could possibly mean in its own time, then to understand what a particular reader (ancient or modern) is doing to interpret the passage.)

-Kushana

P.S.  I can't think of any herbivores with big pointy teeth .... (note her wishbone, also.)

Note to self: Talk about Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, she's beautiful.