| Something about the Big Valley Creation Science Museum, located in the village of Big Valley about two hours northeast of Calgary, rattles nerves and ignites emotions. Like an aged nuclear power plant, it lights up the NIMBY radars of those for whom Christian fundamentalism is a distant and uniquely American preoccupation. Its advocates, however, feel themselves pushed to the margins by the closed-minded. The locals seem to have come to terms with it. They dodge talk of the controversy and prefer to tell those passing through about the man who built it. "He’s a cool guy," says the lady at the fudge shop. He is Harry Nibourg. Along with Vance Nelson and Ian Juby, Nibourg has spent the last four years of his life putting the museum together. For Nelson and Juby, the museum was a logical extension of the lectures and travelling exhibits they had each run for several years. For Harry, it was a personal mission. He has had his resolve both shaken and strengthened as the museum attracted national attention. Earning dismissal from scientists and inviting curiosity and hostility from the public since it opened in May, the museum has become a place where the definition of science is contested by lay people and non-traditional experts.
Located directly across from the Alberta Prairie Railway station, the museum is housed in a small, grey building that is easily mistaken for a quirky prairie home. The lawn is decorated with dinosaur footprint stepping-stones and a giant slab of rock depicting a fossilized scene from pre-Cambrian life. Visitors are greeted by an aggressively postured dinosaur perched like a gargoyle above a door that leads to a compact and surprisingly rich collection of artifacts and information. In sharp contrast with the "A for effort" appeal of other Alberta roadside attractions, the megachurch gloss of the Big Valley Creation Museum is aimed straight at the souls and minds of the modern museum-going public. Exhibits designed to refute biological evolution and make the case for an intelligent designer are illustrated with kinetic models and slick videos. Along with simplified explanations of the mechanics of the electric motor and the biophysics of bacterial locomotion, the museum’s exhibits argue that the Earth is younger than scientists tell us, and that life began not in a primordial soup but with a moment of divine action.
For Nibourg, the museum is the culmination of personal explorations into the mysteries of the origin of life. He is an oilpatch worker whose bright-eyed enthusiasm can be disarming. Dressed for a lazy afternoon in jeans and a shirt softened by age, he explains that he saw creation science as part of an unfairly suppressed scientific tradition. "I can't tell anybody what to believe. We're just asking the people to question everything." Professor Margaret Osler, a historian of science at the University of Calgary, was clear that "what the creationists and intelligent design (ID) folks are proposing is not science." She told me by e-mail that the framework within which science operates doesn’t allow appeals to supernatural entities or actions. More than this, "(creationists) start with a pre-ordained conclusion, making their arguments ideological rather than scientific."
The museum did little to convince Laura, a self-declared atheist and university student from Calgary, and her five friends, who had come to see what the other side was saying. Agitated by a debate with Vance Nelson, the main exhibit developer, Laura saw in the museum an underhanded attempt at religious indoctrination rather than scientific scholarship. "It will give people false information. Secular groups and atheists are not very organized. We need to get our point out better."
Michael Lamoureux, a mathematician at the University of Calgary who was visiting with his children, was cautiously open-minded. "The essential science idea I thought was that they have this hypothesis, and they're trying to present evidence that supports the hypothesis. I do like that, because it seems scientific. But there are the religious overtones, and there are a lot of assumptions you have to buy into before you can really take it as a serious science."
Some leave the museum unconvinced but pleasantly amused. Others are utterly repulsed. Laura and her friends left feeling the need to know more about evolution and buttress their ability to defend science. Michael and his kids went on to the Tyrell Museum so that they could better answer for themselves the question, "why evolution and not creation?" Visitors walk away feeling that the borders separating faith from reason, religion from science, and heresy from orthodoxy have been blurred, if only for a moment. The religious fundamentalism that hangs in the air of the one-room space is tough to see past, but if this faith-based initiative has anything to teach, it may be that we must better understand what we choose to take on faith. |
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