Suspicious Minds

Drifty’s written an excellent piece, Behold the Amazing Jebusaurus!, on the Creation Museum being built on the Answers in Genesis “campus.” The whole thing is worth your time to read, so I’m not going to try to highlight any excerpts.

There is, though, one thing from the Chicago Tribune article that serves as the basis for Drifty’s post on which I want to comment.

While mainstream scientists shake their heads, marketing research indicates Answers in Genesis may be welcoming up to 250,000 visitors a year after the museum's scheduled debt-free opening next spring, according to Michael Zovath, vice president of the Creation Museum. Admission fees remain to be determined.

"The 250,000 people going to it will go back to their legislators and pressure them to vote for Jesus," said Volney Gay, director of the Center for Religion and Culture at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "There's a suspicion of science and a suspicion of intellectuals in general."

A suspicion of intellectuals in general. Think about that for a moment. A suspicion of—and let’s be real; that’s a generous way of saying “a contempt for”—those who use their intellects, who engage reason. These are the same people who are horrified by the thought of our having evolved from apes, who scoff at the notion precisely because they view it as undermining the specialness of humankind. All of god’s creatures are divine, but humans, they believe, are a little bit diviner, because we know god, unlike those butt-scratching monkeys with their unopposable thumbs.

One might assume they would notice that the ability to “know god” is predicated on the intellectual capacity unique to humans, that perhaps the in whom god they so fervently believe imbued them with this faculty specifically so they could know him, and other things. One would be wrong. That, my friends, is logic, reason—and they don’t “do” reason. They are, instead, suspicious of it.

What I find most loathsome about the disdainers of intellectualism is that they subscribe to a doctrine which explicitly states that they were given free will, and they choose not to use it. Worse yet, given the opportunity, they would make life unbearable for those of us who do.