"The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore

I just received my copy of Al Gore’s new book "The Assault on Reason" in the mail from Amazon.com. I have just read a few pages so far but it is clear that Al Gore has a better handle on what has gone wrong lately in America than all the supposed "experts" trotted out to pontificate on television.

The truth is that American democracy is now in danger – not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

From the Introduction of “The Assault on Reason” by Al Gore

As I discussed in my last post even among people who believe the earth is only 6,000 years old there is less concern today that their beliefs be logical, self-consistent and reasonable than there was in the past. In 1925 William Jennings Bryan argued in the Scopes Monkey trial that because he believed in the literal truth of the Genesis account of creation he believed that fossils told us nothing about the past. "I am more concerned with the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks," he famously said. Today the Biblical Literalists who designed the exhibits in the Creation Museum illogically believe both that the earth is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs existed. This would have to mean that the dinosaurs lived, died and the fossils from which we know about them were created from their remains all within a few thousand years – a much less logical and reasonable position than William Jennings Bryan’s.

The Republican candidates for president, many of them with multiple divorces, are considered by many Americans more “family-oriented” and concerned about the “sanctity of marriage” than all the Democratic candidates for president, with nary a divorce among them. Gay people wanting to get married somehow constitutes a threat to the institution of marriage.

Al Gore is right. Reason itself is under assault in America today.

Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark

Have you heard about the Creation Museum which is just about to open in Petersburg, Kentuck? According to their website

The Creation Museum will proclaim to the world that the Bible is the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice and in every area it touches on. This ‘walk through history’ museum will be a wonderful alternative to the evolutionary natural history museums that are turning countless minds against the gospel of Christ and the authority of the Scripture.

This point of view is not new or rare. What is new, at least to me, is their contention that dinosaurs coexisted with man, human children played with baby dinosaurs and dinosaurs were taken onto Noah’s Ark during the flood.

The only information we have about dinosaurs come from fossils. These fossils appear to be much more than 6,000 years old because all the biological material has long since disappeared, leaving voids in the rock with the exact shape of the bones (or in rare cases softer body parts) which had become encased in the mud or clay which has now become rock. The voids in the rock where the biological material had been were gradually filled in with minerals from seep water until it is now all solid rock, but because the filled-in portion of the rock was formed later and by a different process than the surrounding rock the filled-in rock looks different from the surrounding rock and is the size and shape of the original animal remains – as if the originally entombed biological material had turned into rock. Obviously this whole process, the entombing of the bones in mud or clay, the mud or clay becoming rock, the biological material breaking down, the filling in of the void with minerals gradually leaching out of seep water, takes a long time -- much longer than 6,000 years.

Traditionally people who believed that the Genesis story was literally true and the earth was created 6,000 years ago contended that fossils which appear to be more than 6,000 years old were not the remains of creatures who once lived but were created as rocks by God when all the other rocks were created 6,000 years ago. From this point of view a belief that dinosaurs had ever existed would be just as false as the idea that the world is millions or billions of years old. (When asked why God would create fossils which appeared to be the remains of animals and plants, the existence of which would be a refutation of the Biblical account, the usual explanation was that fossils were created by God as a “test of faith.”)

So how can these people believe that the world is only 6,000 years old and also believe that dinosaurs once existed? Apparently when people go to museums they like to look at dinosaurs. A natural history museum without dinosaurs would be at a disadvantage. I have to suspect that the people behind this museum do not really believe the nonsense they are pretending to advocate.