Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Creationist Fan Fiction

Creationists don't spend all their time arguing with scientists about how the existence of the banana proves that God created the world in seven literal days. Lately some of them have been writing what can only be called Creationist fan fiction. A new novelization of the life of Noah is set in the bizarro world of Answers in Genesis, in which giants and dinosaurs roamed the Earth alongside humans a mere five thousand or so years ago.

The biblical Noah faces off against a giant and a dinosaur in a gladiator-like setting in a new novel that a creationist group is promoting.

Noah: Man of Resolve is the second book in a promised trilogy by Tim Chaffey and K. Marie Adams, and it’s available for sale from Answers in Genesis, which runs the Noah’s Ark attraction in Kentucky.

The group has claimed that Noah not only survived a global flood in his ark some 4,300 years ago, but did so with two of every creature aboard including at least some dinosaurs (which in reality died out some 65 million years ago).

The attraction shows dinosaurs living in cages aboard the ark, and features a diorama that shows a gladiator-style fight involving giants and dinosaurs.

The new book is a novelization of Noah’s life, and includes a scene where a giant holds him captive and in an arena, where he faces a dino-like “grendec.”

I'm all for creativity, and who knows? Maybe Noah: Man of Resolve is actually a well-written, compelling story that's fun to read. The point is that it's a story. It's not real history. Every piece of scientific evidence we have says that the strict Ussher Chronology favored by Answers in Genesis can't possibly be correct. In fact, it's not even scripturally accurate without a bunch of the same goofy interpretations that the Creationists accuse modern Christians of relying upon.

And you know, there's probably even a movie in the works, and that movie might turn out to be fun. It probably will be awful from a technical perspective. But as a big B-movie fan, I can tell you that sometimes movies like that are the most fun. That's especially true when the awfulness is made with the kind of earnestness I see from the Answers in Genesis crowd, who I imagine would be utterly convinced they were doing God's work by filming a guy in a tunic fighting an obviously fake CGI dinosaur.

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1 comment:

Scott Stenwick said...

I seriously wonder if the same joke is true for Creationist fiction as it is for Christian music. I have yet to see enough of the former to say for sure. The joke would go like this:

Q: What do you call Creationist fiction that's good?
A: Fiction.

In music, anyway, plenty of it has Christian themes. But the deal is that with the bad stuff, you have to brand it as "Christian" for anybody to want to buy it.