Patt Morrison:  Los Angeles Times:

  A Museum That Lies Far, Far Off the Path of Science
   Creationism is enough to create a fainting spell.

I wrapped up my little visit to the Museum of
Creation and Earth History in Santee and
walked into the gift shop in time to hear a
customer assuring the clerk that the
Smithsonian in Washington has actual pieces
of Noah's ark but won't admit it and won't let
anyone near them.

Keep in mind I'd just seen "proof" that the
Earth is no older than about 10,000 years,
that man and dinosaurs coexisted before a
flood that not only created the Grand Canyon
but put the final score at humans (Noah and
kin) 1, dinosaurs 0. After all that, the bit
about the Smithsonian nearly sent me into a
faint. I needed someone to deliver a couple of
"quick, snap out of it, girl" taps with a copy of
Scientific American.

Santee is a long way from Los Angeles, in a
lot of ways. I saw more Bush bumper stickers
there in an hour than I had in all of last year
in L.A. It's closer in spirit to Cobb County,
Ga., where stickers applied to biology
textbooks declared that evolution is a theory,
not a fact. Or, they did until last week, when
a federal judge told the school board to
unstick them because they endorsed religious
beliefs.

The Santee museum has been making the
creationism argument for 33 years, with
low-tech exhibits bearing the touching, dorky
earnestness of middle-school science projects
? plastic butterflies, blue-painted fake
stalactites, piped-in music from some De
Mille biblical epic. When I was there, a gaggle
of schoolgirls was taking earnest notes in front
of an exhibit on Noah's ark. In the artist's
rendering of life below decks, the ark looked
an awful lot like the dining room at Musso &
Frank, except the booths were occupied by
ostriches and bears.

What confronted the Georgia judge is not
Santee's brand of quaint creationism but a
more sophisticated, neo-creationism creep
that's moving through school boards and state
legislatures across the country. The forces
behind it are emboldened by another four
years of a president who is on the record as
saying: "On the issue of evolution, the verdict
is still out on how God created the Earth."
They're emboldened by the bogus logic that
declares that wanting WMD is just as
dangerous as having WMD, so wanting
Genesis to be science is just as good as
making it so.

The sweaty hallelujah chorus of the 1925
Scopes "monkey trial" is out of the picture.
The talk now is about "Intelligent Design." ID
says chance alone can't account for
everything in creation, and that's where a
higher intelligence ? meaning God, though the
ID forces may not use the word ? comes in.
ID is a canny tactic, a wedge into the realm of
science, in which the Bible is an encoded
science text. If IDers can put their argument
on an equal footing with science, they figure
they'll skip nimbly around the Constitution's
church-state wall without having to wear
themselves out trying to knock it down. 

Really, it's a backhanded compliment to
science that religion tries to co-opt its
vocabulary. Santee's museum has its Institute
of Creation Research. (Americans respect
words like "institute" and "research.") ID
materials show lab beakers, not Bibles. ID
also takes a science word like "theory" and
deliberately twists its meaning, equating the
empirical research that backs up a scientific
theory with any fleeting idea that finds a roost
in more than one brain. Like the theory that
the Smithsonian has a secret stash of ark bits.

Science and faith should always be at odds.
Science starts with the smallest bits of
evidence, collecting facts and data to figure
out the principles that make them all work
together. Faith starts with unshakable belief in
itself. Cross those wires and you get oxymorons like creation
science.

There was a man in the last century who practiced top-down
science with harrowing consequences. His ideology came first, and
science had to fit it. He denounced the important genetic studies of
Mendel as the work of "enemies" ? not exactly the language of
science. He insisted, among other things, that wheat plants could
bear rye seeds. His notions sent real scientists to exile and execution
and condemned whole populations to starve. He wasn't a scientist
himself but he played one at the Kremlin. His name was Trofim
Lysenko, and his ideology was communism. 

Teaching creationism is flat out against the rules in California public
schools. The school board in Vista, not far from Santee, tried to get
away with stealth creationism more than 10 years ago but got
booted out before it could do any damage. Kansas' pro-creationist
state school board also tried to expel evolution but was voted out
four years ago, before it had enough time to do more than mau-mau
small changes in the geology section of a children's textbook. 

Now Kansas is getting another bite at the apple of ignorance, with a
new pro-creationism school board. And the battle is joined in
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Montana, Missouri and Mississippi.

Jack Krebs is a veteran of this war. He teaches high school math
and serves on the Kansas state science standards committee, which
fought creationism once before. "Watch out," he says, "it could be
in anybody's backyard tomorrow. You could be next."

Where have I heard that before? Oh yes, Kevin McCarthy,
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" ? and now the scary real-life
sequel, "Invasion of the Brain Snatchers." 
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