A Tolerantly Fair Discussion of Intolerance

Sunday’s Cincinnati Enquirer, one of the Creation Museum’s “hometown” papers, included an insightful and forthright Creation Museum write-up by Enquirer columnist Peter Bronson. The national media has been awash during the past month with various museum-related flotsam—ranging from the skeptical to the vulgar to the curious to the appreciative (and beyond)—and we have mentioned only a modicum of it.

Bronson’s piece, however, is an original, well-thought, humorous (at times) examination of one of the debates surrounding the Creation Museum. The author asks which group, creationists or evolutionists, are acting more in favor of debate and discussion of the origins question. Bronson characterized the protests and comments of such anti-creationist groups as DefCon as “religious intolerance,” contrasting their views with the Creation Museum’s fairer, more open treatment of creation and evolution:

[I]n many exhibits, [the Creation Museum presents] both sides— evolution vs. intelligent design. “Two paleontologists can work side by side and reach different conclusions,” one says, “because they have different starting points.”

So the evolutionist bone-digger finds skeletal remains of a Utahraptor dinosaur that died 125 million years ago—and the creationist finds evidence that it died 4,300 years ago.

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Another exhibit said that the 1925 Scopes trial portrayed anti-evolution Christians as “close-minded, ignorant bigots,” and now the situation is “completely reversed.” Good point. Who sounds more like close-minded bigots today: a museum that says the Bible is true, or progressives who attack it like something from “Jurassic Park”?

(Bronson also comments on the amazingly lifelike animatronic dinosaurs and some self-referential caution signs in the museum.)

The Creation Museum has been the recipient of no small measure of vitriol, despite the fact that it is a privately funded museum, fully concordant with the First Amendment. Furthermore, Answers in Genesis has never been opposed to the teaching of evolution, for it is a dominant worldview in society that can’t be ignored, but is definitely against attempts to restrict the teaching of alternative views on man’s origin. Even so, our detractors act as though their goal is to censor the Bible’s message on creation (and, for that matter, what other Bible messages?).

Some are fond of pejoratively calling us “fundamentalists,” which, in one sense, we are. But when used maledictively to decry closed-minded adherents, who does “fundamentalist” apply to more: creationists or evolutionists?