There has been much commentary about the Creation Museum, an institution which opened recently in southern Ohio, but little has been said about what this implies for economics, science, business and society at large.
At one level it is all somewhat encouraging. Clearly a determined person can get almost any enterprise off the ground in this country. Whether there will be a market for this is less certain, but if there is it is perhaps another small victory for private enterprise.
Less facetiously, the emergence of this museum and the degree of publicity it has received both nationally and internationally is worrying. The people who are responsible for this are trying to assume a mantle of scientific respectability, and this is bad for the rest of us, even if, as will surely be the case, their efforts will be entirely fruitless.
If one had any doubt about the desire by the creationist wing to put a scientific stamp on their beliefs, the Creation Museum should settle the question. Behind this costly effort is a desire for acceptance. Creationists don’t seem to want the recognition and respect of established scientists, on whom they regularly pour scorn. Instead, they seem to want acceptance from the public as representing legitimate scientific thought.
Before going any further I should first declare my colors: I am entirely sure that creationism is an essentially religious belief. The young earth variant of creationism as espoused by the founders of this museum is contradicted completely by a vast body of unconnected scientific evidence. No reasonable, well-educated and intelligent person doubts this, and no serious scientist gives literal creationism any credence whatsoever. So at one level, the whole thing is a bit of a joke. The museum will have no effect on accepted scientific ideas. The only people who will emerge convinced by this depiction of the origin of life will be those who know absolutely nothing about the accepted explanations – the scientific illiterates – or those who are familiar with those explanations but dismiss them on religious grounds, i.e. the zealots.
Nevertheless, what bothers me is the advance of the idea that what one believes is more important than what is actually the case. This entire venture is the diametric opposite of pragmatism, and pragmatism is what we need much more of if economies and societies are to progress. Given that a majority of people in this country believes that the fairy-story portrayed by the Creation Museum is broadly correct, the picture is quite bleak. When it comes to issues of what used to be called political economy, where is this majority going to side? Not with the facts and the data, you can be sure. This is a manifestation of a tendency to abandon real experience and objective data in favor of a system of belief, a system of economics, for example, as the believer wishes it to be, not as it is. This negates the credibility of the professional who has made a life study of a subject, whether that might be economics, geology, biology or genetics. In fact, I wonder why someone would really want to go into any demanding technical field if any new ideas that might be developed can be trumped by this faith-based, ideological way of looking at the world.
All good business people, all great economists and scientists and all effective politicians are pragmatists and empiricists. The world is the way it is, notwithstanding any theological mindset we bring to trying to understand it. If we want to affect any useful change we need to accept things as they are, not as we would like them to be. This is the defining characteristic of reasonable people.
Down the other way lies chaos, turmoil and ultimately a type of self-destructive individual and collective deceit that will drive civilization back, not forwards.
