Driving the six-hour distance from my home in Chicago to the Creation Museum in Kentucky is a kind of espionage sortie in the American culture wars.
Just as the skyscrapers recede and the now-verdant landscape begins to flatten out, the radio develops considerably more twang. Suddenly, around Hebron, Indiana, there are eight or nine Christian stations pumping songs with lyrics like 'You are my one redeemer' and a host of inflammatory conservative talk shows.
I was heading south to see the $27m Creation Museum, which opened in May. Once inside, I was immediately confronted by a bizarre animatronic scene - a small girl plays next to a raptor dinosaur, unaware that her species arose 64 million years after the extinction of dinosaurs.
But this is only the first in a long line of polemical exhibits designed to undercut the idea that the earth is billions of years old.
The museum is an offshoot of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a creationist educational website and outreach programme, which is run by Ken Ham, a former Australian school teacher who moved to the United States in 1987.
Ham, who now pens such titles as The Lie: Evolution and Walking through Shadows: Finding Hope in a World of Pain, developed his thinking in the Creation Science Foundation in Queensland, Australia, then honed it in the US at the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, before starting AiG in 1994.
Ham and his organisation believe that the time is ripe for a rebuttal museum. The promotional material on the AiG website reads: 'Almost all natural history museums proclaim an evolutionary, humanistic worldview.
For example, they will typically place dinosaurs on an evolutionary timeline millions of years before man. AiG's museum will proclaim the authority and accuracy of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and will show that there is a Creator, and that this Creator is Jesus Christ.'
After the foyer animatronics, I am shuttled into a high-tech cinema to watch Men in White, a 'humorous' and preachy spoof of the Men in Black film. Here the hip, sunglasses-wearing characters are actually the archangels Michael and Gabriel ('Mike' and 'Gabe'), and they give us a quick tour of the 'problems' with modern science.
Science is represented entirely by a congregation of dogmatic egg headed teachers, who espouse such 'dubious' doctrines as geology, evolution and basic cosmology.
From here, it's just one unsettling display of edutainment after another. We get to walk inside a scaled section of Noah's ark and learn that pornography, suicide and abortion are on the rise due to evolution's nihilism, while the Grand Canyon was formed in just a few weeks.
It's not quite accurate to call this evangelical centre a museum. It contains almost no information. It offers no new observations about nature and, unlike most other natural history museums, it has no research component whatsoever.
What the Creation Museum does have, however, are copious ways of needling accepted and established theories of science with juvenile conspiracies and misguided quests for certainty.
Some of its hostility towards geology and evolution is understandable on the cultural (as opposed to evidentiary) grounds that some science educators are dogmatic - that is, bad educators.
The museum had nearly 50,000 visitors in the first month of opening. These are impressive numbers, and one wonders whether the excitement will drop off. What's unclear is how real science museums
should respond to the Creation Museum, or whether any response would just serve to dignify an otherwise kooky endeavour.
A new Darwin exhibit has just moved from the American Museum of Natural History in New York to Chicago's Field Museum, which may help immunise visitors against the increasingly viral critique from fundamentalists. (According to a recent issue of the Economist, anti-evolution propaganda is 'going international' now, with Muslim fundamentalists starting to mimic the once-provincial cant of the American evangelicals.)
Well-intentioned exhibits that show visitors that Darwin was really a good guy after all are not going to stem the tide of fundamentalism. These exhibitions make the mistake of accepting the invalid terms of debate set up by creationists - God and goodness versus Darwin and evil.
This is an erroneous starting point and mainstream museums and scientists should point out that Darwinism is only a subterfuge. It should be underscored that creationism is not just contrary to some Victorian gentleman's theory of nature, but in fact it is disproved by modern geology, astrophysics, biochemistry and genetics.
And in addition to taking the heat off Darwin and distributing it correctly over all the sciences, mainstream museums might also do right by the other camp, too. The public needs to be reminded of how many forms of religion are compatible with science in general and Darwinism in particular. Once the debate is framed accurately, creationism begins to appear as it really is - witless.
But Americans believe that the power of 'choice' is supreme, and so a growing number of Christians feel comfortable choosing a different origin story than the materialist one. The Creation Museum emboldens them to do so because it invokes a naive 'show me' empiricism - I don't see evolution happening, therefore it's not true.
It's an empiricism that gives them just enough scepticism to doubt the secular culture they're immersed in, but not enough to doubt their own Biblical culture.
Stephen T Asma is a distinguished scholar at Columbia College Chicago, and author of Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums
Just as the skyscrapers recede and the now-verdant landscape begins to flatten out, the radio develops considerably more twang. Suddenly, around Hebron, Indiana, there are eight or nine Christian stations pumping songs with lyrics like 'You are my one redeemer' and a host of inflammatory conservative talk shows.
I was heading south to see the $27m Creation Museum, which opened in May. Once inside, I was immediately confronted by a bizarre animatronic scene - a small girl plays next to a raptor dinosaur, unaware that her species arose 64 million years after the extinction of dinosaurs.
But this is only the first in a long line of polemical exhibits designed to undercut the idea that the earth is billions of years old.
The museum is an offshoot of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a creationist educational website and outreach programme, which is run by Ken Ham, a former Australian school teacher who moved to the United States in 1987.
Ham, who now pens such titles as The Lie: Evolution and Walking through Shadows: Finding Hope in a World of Pain, developed his thinking in the Creation Science Foundation in Queensland, Australia, then honed it in the US at the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, before starting AiG in 1994.
Ham and his organisation believe that the time is ripe for a rebuttal museum. The promotional material on the AiG website reads: 'Almost all natural history museums proclaim an evolutionary, humanistic worldview.
For example, they will typically place dinosaurs on an evolutionary timeline millions of years before man. AiG's museum will proclaim the authority and accuracy of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and will show that there is a Creator, and that this Creator is Jesus Christ.'
After the foyer animatronics, I am shuttled into a high-tech cinema to watch Men in White, a 'humorous' and preachy spoof of the Men in Black film. Here the hip, sunglasses-wearing characters are actually the archangels Michael and Gabriel ('Mike' and 'Gabe'), and they give us a quick tour of the 'problems' with modern science.
Science is represented entirely by a congregation of dogmatic egg headed teachers, who espouse such 'dubious' doctrines as geology, evolution and basic cosmology.
From here, it's just one unsettling display of edutainment after another. We get to walk inside a scaled section of Noah's ark and learn that pornography, suicide and abortion are on the rise due to evolution's nihilism, while the Grand Canyon was formed in just a few weeks.
It's not quite accurate to call this evangelical centre a museum. It contains almost no information. It offers no new observations about nature and, unlike most other natural history museums, it has no research component whatsoever.
What the Creation Museum does have, however, are copious ways of needling accepted and established theories of science with juvenile conspiracies and misguided quests for certainty.
Some of its hostility towards geology and evolution is understandable on the cultural (as opposed to evidentiary) grounds that some science educators are dogmatic - that is, bad educators.
The museum had nearly 50,000 visitors in the first month of opening. These are impressive numbers, and one wonders whether the excitement will drop off. What's unclear is how real science museums
should respond to the Creation Museum, or whether any response would just serve to dignify an otherwise kooky endeavour.
A new Darwin exhibit has just moved from the American Museum of Natural History in New York to Chicago's Field Museum, which may help immunise visitors against the increasingly viral critique from fundamentalists. (According to a recent issue of the Economist, anti-evolution propaganda is 'going international' now, with Muslim fundamentalists starting to mimic the once-provincial cant of the American evangelicals.)
Well-intentioned exhibits that show visitors that Darwin was really a good guy after all are not going to stem the tide of fundamentalism. These exhibitions make the mistake of accepting the invalid terms of debate set up by creationists - God and goodness versus Darwin and evil.
This is an erroneous starting point and mainstream museums and scientists should point out that Darwinism is only a subterfuge. It should be underscored that creationism is not just contrary to some Victorian gentleman's theory of nature, but in fact it is disproved by modern geology, astrophysics, biochemistry and genetics.
And in addition to taking the heat off Darwin and distributing it correctly over all the sciences, mainstream museums might also do right by the other camp, too. The public needs to be reminded of how many forms of religion are compatible with science in general and Darwinism in particular. Once the debate is framed accurately, creationism begins to appear as it really is - witless.
But Americans believe that the power of 'choice' is supreme, and so a growing number of Christians feel comfortable choosing a different origin story than the materialist one. The Creation Museum emboldens them to do so because it invokes a naive 'show me' empiricism - I don't see evolution happening, therefore it's not true.
It's an empiricism that gives them just enough scepticism to doubt the secular culture they're immersed in, but not enough to doubt their own Biblical culture.
Stephen T Asma is a distinguished scholar at Columbia College Chicago, and author of Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums
