Def ear to toleration?

A woefully misnamed national organization calling itself The Campaign to Defend the Constitution (better known as DefCon) has apparently decided—if its name is to be taken seriously—that one way to defend the Constitution is to convince people to stay away from the Creation Museum when the center opens May 28. Furthermore, Americans must be warned, DefCon says, about the museum's mission to tell visitors that God's Word can be trusted from the very first verse.

Well, if there are constitutional issues at play here about a privately funded museum that has been built on private property, we can't find them.

AiG is not even aware of any DefCon leaders who have ever visited the museum and introduced themselves to us, and also examined our exhibits and multimedia presentations.1 In fact, since virtually all museum signage has gone up in the past two weeks, if a DefCon leader has ever dropped by (e.g., by sneaking in with museum charter members when construction tours were held), he/she would have read very little text and would not have seen any of the 50-plus videos (which have just been loaded into their monitors). Yet DefCon has managed to start a national petition-signing campaign against a museum they really haven't seen (but nevertheless can still claim that the museum is a “nefarious campaign to institutionalize a lie”).2

DefCon allows people to sign its petition multiple times as multiple users. You see, after you sign in and then click “back,” a page comes up which states that you’ve already signed the petition, but encourages you to “Click here to take action as another user.” So whatever the number of petition signers DefCon will eventually trumpet will likely be very inflated.

[Ed. note: As of May 30, 2007, DefCon has now changed the petition to no longer allow users to sign multiple times. However, we do not know the exact time for this change or how many were able to sign the petition more than once.]

Additionally on its petition page, DefCon offers an immediate option to simultaneously forward a call to action (to sign the petition) to up to 50 friends at a time. And there’s nothing to stop each recipient from “signing” it multiple times as multiple users!

At the core of this national campaign against the Creation Museum is DefCon's desire to turn people away from the museum and keep them from hearing what the Bible says about earth history (and how science, as we say, confirms it).

Having the opportunity to hear both sides of a controversial topic seems very American to us (especially since young people who attend public school science classes and visit science museums are presented with only one view of origins: evolution). So it begs the question: why is a group that purportedly exists to defend the Constitution's First Amendment’s right to free speech wanting to keep people from being exposed to another view?3

It also begs another question: why is DefCon (and other groups like the American Atheists) so afraid of one museum near Cincinnati?

Busting another myth

It’s become a frequent refrain: “There are no real scientists who believe in creation.”4 The late famous evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that “virtually all thinking people accept the factuality of evolution, and no conclusion in science enjoys better documentation.”5

Our creation scientist page lists just a small sampling of scientists who accept Genesis creation, and then note the famous scientists who also believed in creation (some were contemporaries of Darwin):

• Physics—Newton and Faraday
• Chemistry—Boyle
• Biology—Mendel, Linnaeus, and Pasteur
• Geology—Steno and Cuvier
• Astronomy—Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo

The caricature that there are no real scientists who believe in creation is patently false. Just ask Dr. Raymond Damadian, the famous scientist/inventor who produced the first full magnetic resonance imaging (“MRI”) scan of the human body. Today MRIs are utilized in hospitals and medical research institutes worldwide. Dr. Damadian will fly here to take part in the grand opening celebration of the Creation Museum in a few days.

Please join Dr. Damadian and stand with AiG's soon-to-open Creation Museum as it upholds the authority of the Bible and presents the gospel.

If you're an educator or scientist, please fill out our special feedback form and let us know of your museum support. Then let other educators and scientists know that DefCon and similar groups are trying very hard to keep people away from a center that presents the good news of Jesus Christ.

But don’t send your comments of support under the guise of multiple users. We must leave such tactics to those who have chosen to believe that there is no Creator to whom they will account for their actions.

See you at the museum.