Foreign Perspectives

One of the basic tenets of the new politic of Northern Ireland that the various institutions were set up to encourage was the removal of religious bigotry and now we find that the Minister for Culture and Leisure has weighed in with the most extreme version of it that I’ve seen in a long time.

What he took upon himself was to write a letter suggesting (which, from the government minister in charge means essentially ordering) the Ulster Museum to incorporate creationism into its various displays. Not as a religious belief mind you, but as scientific fact (hence his referring to it as creationism rather than Christian belief).

Now, I don’t see that representing the influence of Christian (and Viking and Pagan) beliefs on the social development of Ulster as a problem. After all, there are significant Pagan burial grounds all over the place and we’re almost knee deep in Christian churches so obviously there’s been significant influence on the social development of the country over many centuries. In fact, those influences are shown at various points in the museum; the Christian ones aren’t so obvious as they’re so deeply ingrained in the culture.

What is wrong is to show the pseudo-science (false science to be truthful) that is creationism. This puts forward the notion that everything was created about 6000 years ago which is something of a problem as some of the exhibits in the museum are somewhat older than that. Millions of years older in many cases and billions of years older in some cases. Even the Egyptian exhibit would cause some issues.

The basic problem with his entire belief system is that it starts from the premise that evolution is only a theory. The problem is that there’s whole raft of science behind it which would need to be very wrong for it not to be right. For example, if the carbon dating used to date the fossils (millions of years old) is fundamentally wrong then it means that a number of fundamental physical theories are also wrong which would be a bit of a problem as some of them are required to control the operation of things like nuclear power stations. Similarly, it would mean that some fundamental principles behind biology are wrong and that’s a problem as some of those things that support evolution in biology are also used to create new vaccines. Creationism also has to deal with the “small” problem that for the first time man has created a life form that never existed before; that creation relies on using a number of those theories which support evolution.

But what about the other religions? If one is to be (incorrectly) represented then shouldn’t others be given equal treatment too? Nelson McCausland shouldn’t be permitted to try and impose his own fundamentalist Christian beliefs and should be considering his resignation speech this evening.

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