Theological wonderland

It may not exactly be competing with the Smithsonian, but Kentucky’s Creation Museum is attracting large crowds. It’s…a unique attraction.

The museum exhibits are taken from the Old Testament, but the special effects are pure Hollywood: a state-of-the-art planetarium, animatronics and a massive model of Noah’s Ark, all intended to explain the origins of the universe from a biblical viewpoint. 

The Creation Museum, which teaches life’s beginnings through a literal interpretation of the Bible, is claiming attendance figures that would make it an unexpectedly strong draw less than a year and a half after it debuted. More than a half-million people have toured the Kentucky attraction since its May 2007 opening, museum officials said.

This haven for creationists is worrying some evolutionists.

Many scientists say they fear damaging effects on science education when young people tour the museum and fail to square its lessons with what they’re learning in school. One display shows humans coexisting with dinosaurs – despite the two species being separated by 65 million years in most science texts.

But…

State education officials said they have seen no sign of students challenging science teachers in their classrooms based on conclusions drawn from visits to the Creation Museum.

“It’s not been a huge issue. In fact it’s almost a nonissue for public schools,” said Lisa Gross, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department of Education. “Teachers have been dealing with these things long before the Creation Museum came into being.”

Evolutionists and creationists have been battling directly in an ongoing culture war. Or maybe indirectly, since they don’t talk much, not having patience or tolerance for each other’s views.

The Intelligent Design school of thought looks to reconcile the two, though it doesn’t really. Former Vatican Observatory Director Fr. George Coyne has spent decades advancing research and education in science and theology. He was in Chicago yesterday for a seminar called “Religion and Science in Today’s America”, continuing to address the confusion “Intelligent Design” has created for people of faith (who see it as the antidote between evolutionists and creationists).

This is a reasonable look at Coyne’s expression of the science/faith conflict, which in fact is not a conflict for the Catholic Church.

Look at it this way, Coyne says:

It is unfortunate that, especially here in America, creationism has come to mean some fundamentalistic, literal, scientific interpretation of Genesis. Judaic-Christian faith is radically creationist, but in a totally different sense. It is rooted in a belief that everything depends upon God, or better, all is a gift from God.

If we take the results of modern science seriously, then what science tells us of God must be very different from God as seen by the medieval philosophers and theologians. For the religious believer modern science reveals a God who made a universe that has within it a certain dynamism and thus participates in the very creativity of God. Such a view of creation can be found in early Christian writings, especially in those of St. Augustine in his comments on Genesis.

So, respect the results of modern science and don’t make God into a ‘clockmaker’.

For some reason, this online version of Coyne’s talk has a couple of lines missing from the copy I have. They are these:

Theologians already possess the concept of God’s continuous creation. I think to explore modern science with this notion of continuous creation would be a very enriching experience for theologians and religious believers.

Then the online text picks up from there:

God is working with the universe…

For those who believe modern science does say something to us about God, it provides a challenge, an enriching challenge, to traditional beliefs about God. God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world which reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution. He does not intervene, but rather allows, participates, loves. Is such thinking adequate to preserve the special character attributed by religious thought to the emergence not only of life but also of spirit, while avoiding a crude creationism? Only a protracted dialogue will tell.

And that is just what the Vatican-initiated STOQ Project is doing in Rome, and beyond.

“Science can purify Religion from error and superstition; Religion can purify Science from idolatry and false absolutes.” 

– Pope John Paul II, June 1, 1988, from a letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory