The Creation Museum, a project of the socially conservative religious organization Answers in Genesis, mocks evolutionary science and invites visitors to find faith and truth in God. It welcomes its first paying guests -- $19.95 for adults, $9.95 for children, not counting discounts for joining a mailing list -- just weeks after three Republican presidential candidates said they do not believe in evolution.
Opinion polls suggest that about half of Americans agree. They dismiss the scientific theory that all beings have a common ancestor, believing instead that God created humans in one glorious stroke.
--Washington Post | May 27, 2007
Of course he, or she, or it didn’t know enough
to make nature seamless so we could trace
how atoms went to molecules, molecules to peptides.
Too stupid to make it work intricately
without a clumsy “intelligent design” hand fumbling the plan.
Of course he, or she, or it couldn’t figure out in advance
whether this fertile egg was destined to venture living.
No, it’s easy to mess up his, or her, or its plan,
so easy that you have to call it sin.
Oh especially sin to fight death
or to trace root complexities of its opposite.
Oh, where would mystery be?
You have to have mystery!
And he, or she, or it never made anything higher than the moon
which is why we shouldn’t build golden ships.
Galaxies are just fuzz; that’s the way it should be.
The universe is oh say a hundred miles high.
Forget Mars, comets, stars.
That’s it. He, or she, or it wouldn’t have skill
to make it so you’d never see fingerprints.
Nothing is bigger, more complex, or older
than you imagine. That would be blasphemy.
Or is it just that you have to make him, or her, or it
smaller and stupider than you are, so you get to explain
the meaning of everything, to keep our heads bowed
lower than yours, so we revere you
not him
or her
or it.
Mary Turzillo's “Mars Is no Place for Children” won the 1999 Nebula, and An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl, her first novel, appeared in Analog. Among other magazines, Asimov's, F& SF, Cat Tales, Interzone, SF Age, Weird Tales, Oceans of the Mind, Electric Velocipede, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet have published her fiction and poetry. Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, her poetry collection, will appear from vanZeno press this year. An Emeritus Professor at Kent State University, she founded Cajun Sushi Hamsters and has taught in NASA's Science through Arts. Her favorite people include her son, Jack Brizzi, Jr., and her husband, writer-scientist Geoffrey A. Landis. Website: www.maryturzillo.com.