http://www.sundayherald.com/oped/opinion/display.var.1945367.0.belief_without_question.php
Belief without question
By James Cusick, Westminster Editor
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WHAT DOES it take to shoot your credibility to hell? For instance,
what university would want to take the cash and build the George W
Bush Institute of Climate Change Research or the Osama bin Laden
School of Inter-governmental Peace Studies?
Down at the Kelvingrove Museum, would it matter if they built a new
multi-million pound extension to house Real Lives - an exhibition,
curated by Glasgow University's anthropologists, examining the true
existences of Rocky And Bullwinkle, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs,
Deputy Dawg and Roobarb.
Might initially bring in the crowds, but institutional credibility?
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In Petersburg, Kentucky, at the Creation Museum, they don't worry much
about credibility. At $19.95 for adults, $9.95 for kids, with the
under-fives free, all are expected to "Prepare to Believe" - that the
earth is just 6000 years old, that dinosaurs, along with humans, were
created by God on the sixth day and that geologists are a bunch of
maladjusted forgers who say the Grand Canyon was formed by the erosion
of the Colorado River over six million years, when creationists know
it could have been made in days with, say, an explosion similar to one
that erupted on Mount St Helens in Washington State in 1980.
Age of the universe at 12.5 billion years, primate history going back
85 million years, dinosaur fossils found in the Ischigualasto Basin in
Argentina dated radiometrically at 228 million years. Inside the $27
million museum, where models of prehistoric children are shown playing
alongside dinosaurs in the post-Garden of Eden rainforest, science,
any science, isn't allowed to get in the way. Fossil evidence? The
museum says no fossil is older than Noah's Ark (which was packed with
dinosaurs, in case you ask).
What they do for academic kicks in Petersburg is their business. But
it becomes my business when a former Baptist preacher and creationist,
Mike Huckabee, suddenly wins the Iowa caucus, polling 34% of the
Republican evangelical vote in the first part of the 2008 race to the
White House.
Pastor Huckabee, his 6000-year-old earth, his Petersburg friends such
as "TK" (a so-called atmospheric scientist who says "God said it and
that settles it") is something the United States, and everywhere else,
can do without for the next four years.
Is Huckabee worried about how his creationism might affect
presidential credibility? Hell, no. Born-again Americans put God-
fearing George Bush in the White House. Huckabee is mark II. "Prepare
to Believe" as they say in Petersburg.
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