Hardcore Christian creationism isn’t just for the U.S. Bible Belt. A creationism-based zoo outside Bristol, England, attracts more than 100,000 visitors a year with its mixture of furry animals and fuzzy science, reports New Humanist in its Sept.-Oct. 2009 issue. At Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm in North Somerset, owner Anthony Bush perpetuates a unique interpretation of the earth’s history, which of course includes a global flood and a kindly man with a large boat who saves all the animals—but also branches into soundly unscientific territory concerning the non-evolution of humans.

New Humanist writer Paul Sims, on his visit to the zoo, found the creationist agenda to be more implicit than explicit in the place’s signage and materials. “Rather than providing the headlines, creationist propaganda … was more often than not inserted alongside established science,” he writes. “Unless you are actually looking for the creationism you might not even notice it.”

But I suspect Sims, in his humanist heart of hearts, is trying too hard to overlook the obvious. The magazine gives enough glimpses of Bush’s interpretive displays to establish the zoo as a wonderland of weird science:

One sign reads, “Eating meat was allowed after the flood. Before this most people might have been veggies.”

Another describes “30 reasons why apes are not related to man.”

And another boldly states, “All the people in the world come from Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Caucasian from Japheth, Semitic from Shem, Negroid/Mongoloid/Redskin from Ham.”

The zoo has made the news a couple of times since the New Humanist article came out: The BBC covered the British Humanist Association’s objections to the zoo, and earlier this week one of the zoo’s tigers ascended a climbing tower and wouldn’t come down.

If the cat is that freaked out by life at Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, imagine how it would do aboard Noah’s ark.

Source: New Humanist, BBC

Members of the Royal Society, Great Britain's national academy of science, were thrown into a tizzy recently when, according to the New Scientist, the society's director of education Michael Reiss said, “creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view.” In an article for the Guardian, Reiss added that science teachers should be able to engage in serious and respectful discussion with students who have doubts about the theory of evolution.  

Though Reiss was not advocating that creationism be taught as science, some society fellows were furious that Reiss, an ordained priest, would suggest creationism be discussed in science classes. Nobel laureate Harry Kroto told the New Scientist that Reiss's comments, taken at face value, are not entirely problematic, but the messenger is. “There is no way that an ordained minister—for whom unverified dogma must represent a major, if not the major, pillar in their lives can present free-thinking, doubt-based scientific philosophy honestly or disinterestedly.” 

In a letter to the Royal Society calling for Reiss’s resignation (he has since stepped down), Kroto and fellow Nobel prize winners, Richard Roberts and John Sulston, emphasized the point that as a deeply religious man, Reiss never should have been appointed to his position in the first place: “Who on earth thought that he would be an appropriate Director of Education, who could be expected to answer questions about the differences between science and religion in a scientific, reasoned way?” 

Their comments raise a big philosophical question: Can a person represent both science and faith? Or are science and religion so fundamentally different that a person must choose one before the other? 

Many people of faith are baffled by the opposition to the study of evolution. They trust scientific explanations of the origins of life, they believe that God was somehow behind it all, and they don’t lose a lot of sleep over the whole thing.

A recent exhibit on Darwin at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History highlighted the voices of people who find no conflict between belief and science. The problem is that many of the exhibit’s visitors were wholly unimpressed, Jason Byassee reports on Theolog, the blog of mainline Protestant magazine the Christian Century. Byassee makes some good observations about what more thoughtful religious engagement with Darwinism might look like:

All Christians are challenged to articulate how the sheer unlikeliness of our existence here—amidst countless species who did not survive natural selection—is a witness to the goodness of a creator God. That’s tough to do. But it’s easier to take on this challenge than to ignore the bones that Darwin dug up.

—Steve Thorngate