Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
replace God's Word. In this view, the dangerous brotherhood of science is humanity's com-
mon enemy. Reason threatens us all.
After absorbing the anti-reason display, visitors advance to the modern world through a
graffiti-filled alleyway, where mock windows voyeuristically display videos of a teenage
boy watching pornography and a girl seeking an abortion. Across the alley a wrecking ball
demolishing a church is branded with giant letters spelling out “millions of years.” The
message is clear. Belief in geologic time drives the decay of modern society.
Moving through the next display, a Garden of Eden diorama where people and dinosaurs
frolic together and signage says carnivores didn't eat meat, I came to the creationist per-
spective on geology. The exhibit told how Noah's crowded ark surfed a great wave that
swept back and forth across the world. After the world-remodeling Flood, nothing much
happened, except for a few volcanic eruptions and earthquakes scattered here and there
throughout history. That rivers and glaciers could sculpt topography is summarily dis-
missed as the deranged product of human reason.
In this depiction, geologic time never happened. Gone are centuries of painstaking work
to piece together the story of our planet. Gone are the overlapping tree-ring records that
meticulously matched up patterns of annual growth to reach back more than ten thousand
years. Gone are the hundreds of thousands of individual layers recording annual snowfall
recovered from cores drilled through the polar ice caps. Gone are the revelations of plate
tectonics that elegantly tied earth history together in a unifying framework, explaining the
form of continents and their wanderings over millions of years. Gone, in fact, is nearly all
of earth history.
In addition to the inherently untestable idea that a divine being created the universe with
a particular plan in mind, creationists advocate testable interpretations of earth history. Be-
cause their ideas have failed when put to the test, they declare reason to be their enemy.
Even minimal geologic training equips one to see how the material displayed in some of
these exhibits contradicts the interpretive signage. For example, dinosaur tracks preserved
in layers of sedimentary rock present a serious problem for creationists. How could land
animals have been walking around on the seafloor during an event that ripped up Earth's
surface before depositing their bones in the very stuff they were walking around on? Like-
wise, it is readily verifiable that it takes more vigorous flow to erode hard bedrock than to
