Well, what a hornet's nest this has become. Perhaps for the sake of
those who want to get back to more prosaic museum-related matters we
should agree to take our discussions of religion and science to a bar,
where such things belong.
I can't resist adding one more stone to the pile, however.

The formative literature of natural science - the writings of
Aristotle, Darwin, Cuvier, Lamarck and so on - has to varying extents
been superseded or even countermanded by later research. Though many of
Darwin's basic ideas, such as natural selection, are still held to be
basically sound, others have since been found not to be testable or not
to hold up in the face of more detailed research, and have been
discarded. In my own field, Malacology, there have been to date over a
dozen synopses of the Mollusca since Linnaeus's in 1758. Each was
definitive for its time, and a clear advance over its predecessor, but
each in turn was replaced as more became known about the animals
concerned. 
The difference between scientific literature and scripture is that the
former is subject to constant revision as new discoveries are made,
while the latter is held sacrosanct in every word. This leads to
problems for the clergy as situations arise (cloning; abortion;
stem-cell research) for which scripture has no clear answer. Each body
of clergy decides for itself what stance it will adopt on behalf of its
adherents, and seeks some interpretation of scripture that supports
this. There is no vote, and no peer review of whatever edict is then put
forth, and no appeal. Meanwhile, scripture - the Bible, Koran, Torah,
Bharagavad Gita or whatever - remains inviolate, not shortened or
lengthened by a word.
It is this difference in attitude towards what has been written that
most clearly differentiates science and scriptural religion. When a
dinosaur skeleton was put on display at my place of work in the
nineteenth century, nobody noticed for a long time that the head was on
the wrong end (it is a plesiosaur with a longer neck than tail, to be
fair). When someone did point this out, however, the paleontologists
took another look, confirmed the error - and put the head on the right
end straight away. There are countless other examples of museum exhibits
being fixed as knowledge advances, and I hope that process never ends. 
Museums cannot hope to present complete scientific truth, as so many
things remain unknown, but are duty-bound to keep trying. I contend that
any institution that will not alter its displayed content to take
account of new thinking and research does not deserve the title
'museum'. 

Paul Callomon

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