Oklahoma-Texas Evolution Road Trip, Part Three. Dinosaurs and the Humans Who Are Still Looking for Them

On June 1, the participants in the Road Trip hopped (or, rather, packed themselves) into the van and I drove them down into the heart of Texas, to the town of Glen Rose, just southwest of Ft. Worth. We arrived at the Creation Evidences Museum in time for the monthly sermon of an infamous creationist named Carl Baugh. Baugh is a smooth talker, and cultivates a friendly, calm, and reasonable image. The image of humility may conceal great pride, however: he seems very proud that lots of scholars, including many young-earth creationists, know him and reject his beliefs. Every month you can expect to hear something different and astonishing from Baugh that you will hear nowhere else, even from the Institute for Creation Research or Ken Ham. Every month the world of Baugh and his followers retreats a little further from reality. I could hardly wait to see what this month had in store. The other time I visited, Baugh said that there had been no lava flows on the moon until after the Flood, and that pre-Flood moonlight promoted longevity before the Flood (see here). What would he say this time? (Photo courtesy of Mary K. Johnston.)

The museum included a replica of what Baugh thought Noah’s Ark might look like, and many other displays, including a model of an Acrocanthosaurus head. Acrocanthosaurs seem to chase Mary K. Johnston around; but relax, Mary, can’t you see that this acrocanthosaur eats plants? You can see them hanging from its mouth. That’s what the razor-sharp teeth are for!

Most of Baugh's sermon was devoted to defending the idea that humans and dinosaurs lived together about 4,000 years ago. This idea is no different than what you will find in Ken Ham’s creationist museum in Kentucky. And Baugh defended at length the idea that human footprints and dinosaur footprints occur in the same layer of Cretaceous rock exposed in the bed of the nearby Paluxy River. Again, this is what he has been saying for years. And he admitted that this belief has undergone some challenges. For example, what he had long considered to be a trackway of human footprints turned out to be dinosaur footprints. He admitted that Glen Kuban, who has studied the Paluxy River dinosaur tracks for decades, was right about that. Even John Morris, who leads the Institute for Creation Research in the footprints, as it were, of his father Henry, has withdrawn his support from this assertion. So is this the end for Carl Baugh?

Not on your life. Baugh insisted that giant humans had hopped along and put their footprints in the middle of pre-existing dinosaur footprints, so of course they looked like dinosaur footprints. These were of course giant humans, with strides as great as those of large dinosaurs. They grew big because the intense atmospheric pressure of the pre-Flood Earth buoyed them up. Of course, he could not prove this, and hesitated to say that he could.

In the end, Baugh’s entire belief system rested primarily on just one piece of data: a supposed human footprint overlapping a dinosaur footprint. The slab of rock with these structures can be seen right in his museum. Some of our group took a look at the “human footprint” after the sermon. The dinosaur print was real; there are still hundreds of them in the bed of the Paluxy River. And there are compression lines below them, showing that the dinosaur footprints have not been carved. But the human print looks both too good to be real and artificially cartoonish. Judge for yourself.

I was still waiting for the surprise. Toward the end of the sermon, I got it—something I had not heard Baugh say before. (Not that I am a regular visitor to his sermons.) Baugh said that dinosaurs were still alive. No, you cladists, he didn’t mean birds. He meant the big ones. The likes of Paluxysaurus and Acrocanthosaurus. Where? In some African jungle, I think; he wasn’t clear about this. I’ll have to look it up in the Edgar Rice Burroughs book. Maybe in a parallel time dimension at the other end of a cosmic wormhole. They are waiting to emerge when the Millennium starts. His evidence? He said that the book of Job, written after the Flood, refers to dinosaurs (leviathans and behemoths) in the present tense. After all, medieval European and Chinese tales told of dragons. Are you calling St. George a liar? That settles it.

In a later discussion, our group considered the cult characteristics of Baugh’s followers. He seemed to have a mental list of things to do to make himself credible. He knows most of the audience members by name, therefore Baugh has formed a community of believers. He has also told them that they are a little embattled enclave surrounded by unbelievers, some of them even fellow creationists. While Baugh said that people could disagree with him and still be good people, some audience members muttered that anyone who disagreed with Baugh could not be a good person. And they seemed to be mesmerized by him. I did not notice this at the time, but when I reviewed the brief video I took of Baugh’s sermon (which is out of focus, sorry), Baugh said something like, “Have you ever seen a human footprint stepped on by a dinosaur…” A big scary man in the front row nodded in the affirmative. Wow. I would not want to encounter that big scary man who thought I was a bad person and who was convinced that he had seen dinosaurs. This is the same guy who said that disagreeing with Baugh was like Pharaoh spurning Moses even after the Ten Plagues. It’s not quite as cultlike as Jonestown, but it has all the defining characters of a cult.

Because it is a little cult, I doubt that their attempts at world outreach will amount to much, especially when the 76-year-old Baugh, whose charisma holds the group together, “graduates” to Heaven someday. Of course, if he gets inside the hyperbaric chamber (their next project, though they cannot legally do human experimentation) he might outlive Methuselah. (The hyperbaric chamber is meant to mimic the high air pressure believed to have existed before The Flood.)

Baugh might have thought that everyone who came to hear him, including trip participant Mary K. Johnston, was there to admire him. We did not tell him any differently. (Photo courtesy of Mary K. Johnston.)

We met outside the museum to see Marlyn Clark’s Flood Tank. About 1980, an engineering professor, M. E. Clark, at the University of Illinois, constructed a tank that could pitch and yaw around. If you put water, gravel, sand, and silt into it, they sort into different layers. Clark considered this to be experimental confirmation that The Flood could produce all the fossil layers. I do not know if he threw the family cat into the tank to see if it would fossilize. I don’t think Thelma and Becky would have let him. You see, I knew him and his family a little bit, mostly because he was one of the people at our church who tried to silence me from teaching a class about evolution, which I taught at the request of the church leadership. He was pretty grim but had a good side. He invented some component that is now used in artificial hearts. As he neared the end of his life, he donated his tank to Baugh’s museum. It sits out on the grass, unlabeled; very few people know what it is. We took a group picture in front of it.

Front, left to right: Carl Rutledge; Cora James; Mary K. Johnston; Lindsay Fluker; Sharon Young. Back, left to right: Jim Huff; Wilfred Berlin; Drew Marteny; Fran Stallings; Gordon Stallings; Gordon Eggleton.

I will skip ahead to a final observation. Before we left the Paluxy vicinity and headed into Glen Rose for some barbecue, we stopped at a little rock house where the proprietor sold fossils: ammonite casts, which were probably genuine; trilobites, which looked too good to be real; fragments of crinoid stalks from Morocco, which is famous for fake fossils (as described by Gould in “The Lying Stones of Marrakech”); coprolites, one of which I bought and do not care if it is real; and other things. This was the very rock house in which George Adams had carved fake human footprints in slabs with dinosaur prints in the 1930s. While we were there, who should pop in but Baugh’s understudy Aaron Judkins, whom Baugh had introduced before his sermon. The proprietor gave Aaron a very nicely made clay pitcher. Let me predict what might happen. Judkins might imbed the pitcher in limestone matrix and put it in Baugh’s museum, claiming that it was used by one of the pre-Flood humans. I may be wrong, but I put the world on notice: in the future, if and when I visit this museum, I am going to watch for that pitcher. I asked Judkins if the pitcher was “from around here.” He said it was from pre-Columbian Mexico. For the record, that pitcher is not pre-Flood; it was obtained from the rock shop, free of any matrix, on June 1, 2013.

After we entered Dinosaur Valley State Park and ate our lunches and discussed what we had seen, we went looking for dinosaur tracks (next entry).

Yesterday’s blog entry got a comment, from Prom Limo Service saying what an informative blog it was. It appears that parasites live in the blogosphere just as in the biosphere.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Seven. The Ghost of Marlyn Clark

It is not with fondness that I remember Dr. M. E. (Marlyn) Clark, who was an engineering professor at the University of Illinois while I was a plant ecology graduate student there. Marlyn was, to put it mildly, grim. He scowled, and looked incapable of smiling. We were both members of Twin City Bible Church in Urbana, although in that large church our paths had not crossed. That is, until I was asked by the Board of Leadership to teach an adult education class about Christian views of creation and evolution in 1982. Having recently left creationism, I presented the theistic evolution side; I invited Clark to present the creationist side. This was a mistake. When he found out that there was another side other than creationism being taught at this church, he and his associates began a campaign of disinformation against me, about which I later heard from student members even of other churches in town. He demanded a sort of trial to be arranged against me at the church, at which I was not allowed to speak. I knew, of course, that Clark and the other creationists (who were militant members of Phyllis Schlafley’s Eagle Forum and strong supporters of bloody terrorist raids by Nicaraguan contras against the Sandinistas), but I expected at least a modicum of fairness from the church leadership. It turns out that, after this trial, the church leadership took no further actions and even insisted that the creationists not cause the class to be cancelled. However excruciating an experience this was for me, it was formative: it was the beginning of my transformation from comfortable Christian evolutionist to passionate Christian anti-creationist. Perhaps I have Marlyn Clark to thank for that. It is regrettable that Clark left this kind of negative memory. He did some fine engineering work with computer models of the human circulatory system; this part of his legacy remains a blessing to many patients with cardiovascular disease.


Then, 29 years later, I encounter him again, posthumously. On March 5, as I left Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum (see previous entries), I saw Marlyn Clark’s “Wall of Truth.” It was (see bottom photo) a model of geological strata from a creationist “Flood geology” viewpoint. That is, it was an attempt to fit the geological record into a creationist viewpoint. Creationists believe that all fossil deposits were produced during the Flood. Therefore, there could be human artifacts at all levels of the strata, from Paleozoic to Recent. And some creationists believe they have found evidence of this very thing. Clark donated money to build a wall, near the museum entrance, that summarized this evidence: a bowl that was found in a coal deposit, and which he assumed had to be the same age as the coal, as well as the hammer and footprints found elsewhere in Baugh’s museum. One thing you will notice right away about this wall: the putative human evidences are found at different levels. This means that humans had to emerge from their hiding places and run around on hundreds of feet of mud, without sinking in, several times during the Flood, leaving footprints at two different levels, and dropping a hammer at yet another. Whatever the putative evidence of the Wall shows, it does not demonstrate a Flood. The skulls and tusks at the top represent post-Flood australopithecines and mammoths. (The figure looking out over the Wall is a nine-foot-tall statue of Tom Landry. Baugh intends it as an example of what magnificent specimens of humanity the Homo bauanthropus men were, at least from the viewpoint of Texas creationists.)


When I left the deliberately-created psychological delusions of Baugh’s museum (described in earlier entries), and emerged into the fresh air, I thought I had left creationism in general and Marlyn Clark in particular behind. But I got into my car and looked up through my windshield. I saw what looked like a green merry-go-round (see top photo). It was not labeled but I recognized it instantly. It was Marlyn Clark’s Flood Tank. Over thirty years ago, Clark built a merry-go-round that was supposed to prove something or other about Noah’s Flood. It was no ordinary merry-go-round. First, it had the ability to lurch, not just spin. And around its perimeter is a water-tight ring into which water and sediments could be placed. Once the machine is running, you can watch the water slosh around and mix up the sediments. Clark’s hypothesis was that, if there was a worldwide flood, it would not have produced a uniform slurry of sediments (his null hypothesis), but would have made distinct layers (the creationist hypothesis). Of course, you don’t need a giant merry-go-round to prove this. If you mix soil into water, the sand will settle out first, then the silt, then last of all the fine clay. Soil scientists do this with their sedimentation columns all the time. Clark’s machine did in fact produce distinct sediment layers, and he proclaimed the triumph of his theories. Only in the most alternate of alternate realities might one consider an eight-foot-wide merry-go-round to be a realistic simulation of the Earth during a Flood. At the moment, the Noachian merry-go-round is non-functional. But maybe Baugh will set it up outside his museum. I doubt that he would let the kids ride it. But maybe a frog will get buried in the sediments and fossilized. Maybe a giant will leave a footprint.


Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Six. Lies and Damned Lies at the Creationist Museum

On March 5 I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum near Glen Rose, Texas. In the previous entry, I described some of the displays. But the most prominent display of all, nestled among scriptural scrolls, is the Darwin display. All it has in it is a few of Darwin’s book, one of which has one of his more lugubrious photos on the cover, and a collection of slave shackles and handcuffs (see photo).


The message is clear, just as it was in Bill Gordon’s museum in Oklahoma: belief in evolution causes human oppression and slavery. If you believe we evolved, then you think people can be treated like animals, but if you believe humans were created, then you will treat them like fellow children of God. The footprint displays were lies; but this one was a damned lie.


First, consider the clear message that it proclaimed: Darwinian evolutionary science causes such things as slavery. As anyone knows who has read the masterpiece 2009 book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, both sides of Darwin’s family were abolitionists, and Darwin detested slavery. Moreover, Darwin transferred his early belief in the common origin of all human races from Adam and Eve into his later acceptance of the common evolutionary origin of all human races. Desmond and Moore’s book also documents the creationist beliefs of American slaveholders and their scientific sympathizers. Louis Agassiz was most notable among them, but there were many others. If we must draw a causal inference, it would be that because slavery was forced out of existence during the period of history in which scientists and some societies and churches accepted evolution, then evolution deserves the credit. No causal inference either way is, however, justified. Certainly Darwin did not cause black American slavery. This is something only hypnotized victims of Baugh’s sermon could believe as they glanced at the displays.


Second, consider what the display did not mention. The history of Christianity in the western world for the last two millennia has, until very recently, been the story of murder and oppression. Ask any Huguenot victim of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre if Lamarck caused their plight. And nearly all of the five hundred sovereign Native American nations had been conquered, and many exterminated, by Darwin’s time. It was religious zeal (and greed and plunder) that caused the Spanish settlements started by Columbus to enslave, then torture and kill, the Caribbean natives, against which the lone Christian voice was Bartolomé de las Casas. The Pilgrims, so much revered by creationists and other Christian conservatives, surrounded Pequot villages, set them ablaze, and shot anyone attempting to escape. Here is what William Bradford wrote: “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they [the colonists] gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully.” While massacres based on the Christian religion are today rare, the uncomfortable fact remains that one of the conservatives’ favorite books of the Bible is Revelation, which depicts a violent Jesus making the Earth run red with blood.


Baugh’s display added stupidity to dishonesty. It was not until I got home and looked at the photograph (look at it again!) that I noticed that one of the slave shackles was from the “Georgetown County Plantation Police.” The printing seemed awfully crisp to be on a real, well-used slave shackle. So I googled the name. It turns out that fake Georgetown County Plantation Police paraphernalia are sold on the internet. Badges are more popular, but you can get the shackles on Amazon for $39.99. (“Customers who bought related items also bought Wild Planet Spy Gear Night Goggles!”) If Baugh just stopped at being a fraud, and satisfied himself with entertaining lies about giant humans and about how moonlight allowed pre-Flood humans to live almost a thousand years, it might be funny; but he has slipped into the world of attempting to stir up hatred of evolutionary scientists.


Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Five. Mysteries of the Cretaceous World at the Baugh Museum

Before I begin this essay, I want to let you know that the National Center for Science Education has posted its Upchucky Award winners for 2011! And now, on with the essay.

I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum on March 5. After Baugh had finished his presentation (see two previous entries), I looked at the displays I had driven down to Glen Rose, Texas, to see. The bed of the nearby Paluxy River is famous for the trackways of footprints that dinosaurs left in the mud 110 million years ago (according to scientists). But Baugh claims that it was only about 4000 years ago, and that humans had left their footprints in the mud also. In his museum you can see excavated pieces of Paluxy River limestone that have what are supposed to be human footprints in them. One of the stones has what is supposed to be a human footprint overlapping the print of a three-toed predatory dinosaur (see photos). Think about what it would mean if these displays are genuine. It would mean that the entire timeline of evolution, in which dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago but the human genus did not evolve until about two million years ago, is wrong. If you glance quickly at these displays, as most people visiting the museum were doing, it seems to be pretty clear that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time on a young Earth. But if you look closely at the stones, as I did, you begin to notice a few things.

During the Depression, when the dinosaur footprints of the Paluxy River were already famous, some enterprising individuals carved human footprints in the stone and sold them. One might naturally assume that the footprints in Baugh’s museum were also carved. Baugh claims that, while some Paluxy human footprints were fakes, the ones in his museum are genuine. Unfortunately, the only way you can evaluate this claim is by looking at the footprints, as I did. They did not look like fakes to me, at first glance. But, I am not even a geologist, much less an ichnologist (expert in fossil burrows and tracks). How would I know? I was, however, suspicious. The footprints looked good—a little too good, as a matter of fact. Every toe was perfect. I could see no chisel marks, but I concluded that the human prints are fakes, even if Baugh did not carve them himself. For a summary of the human footprint story, click here. In other displays, you can see putative human sandal prints which are supposedly the same age as the dinosaur prints. And even what Baugh claims is a child’s handprint.

One of the footprints is quite large. Baugh has an explanation for this. The footprints were produced by a species of giant humans, which Baugh, no stranger to ego, decided to name after himself (Homo bauanthropus).

There are other items on display at the museum that, according to Baugh, prove that not just humans but technologically advanced humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs. One is the Cretaceous hammer (see photo). It is an iron hammer with a wooden handle that was found, according to the display, embedded in Cretaceous rock further south in Texas. How could a hammer get into a Cretaceous rock? There is actually an easy answer to this question. Somebody in the nineteenth century dropped a hammer into a crack in the Cretaceous deposits, and then erosion filled in the gaps. You can see eroded limestone filling cracks in today, down at the river.

The museum is designed for a quick glance at the displays, rather than careful thought. If you think carefully, however, you quickly realize that the creationist explanation makes no sense. Cretaceous deposits, in Texas and all over the world, are above the Paleozoic, Triassic, and Jurassic deposits, all of them full of fossils. And, in many parts of the world, there are Cenozoic deposits on top of the Cretaceous layers, and they, too, have fossils. That is, if all of the fossil-containing layers were formed during Noah’s Flood, then these Cretaceous layers had to be deposited in the middle of the Flood. Here’s what had to happen. The Flood had been going on long enough to deposit thick layers of sediments full of plants, animals, and technologically advanced people. Then the waters receded, and dinosaurs and humans who had been hiding somewhere came out and walked (not ran) over hundreds of feet of mud without sinking into it. One of the humans lost a hammer. Another lost a finger (see below). Then the Flood came back and buried all of them.

By the way, you don’t want to miss the Cretaceous finger. It looks like a finger from a statue, since there is no evidence of any internal structure such as bone. But Baugh claims it is a real finger, which apparently broke off of a giant who was fleeing the Flood.

The visit to the displays, just like the experience of Baugh’s lecture, creates an alternate psychological reality. Quickly glancing at the displays gives you the impression that humans and dinosaurs lived together on a young Earth. But one of the displays, as I describe in the next entry, proclaims that evolution is the major source of evil in the world in the past and today.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Four. The Lost Paradise of Carl Baugh

In my previous entry, I described the psychological experience that I had when I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas on March 5. Baugh created an aura of scientific truth by presenting little fragments of information, just enough to mesmerize the audience. I mentioned that the actual claims he made were incredible, and had no scientific or Biblical basis. I present these claims here.

First, Baugh claimed that a chemist in Louisiana (Edward Boudreaux) had proved how God created the Earth from a ball of plasma (which is a form of matter in which electrons are torn away from nuclei in atoms). The chemist’s calculations proved that such a ball of plasma would have cooled down in 47 hours, which was plenty of time for the “dry land to appear” on Day 3 of Genesis 1. There is, of course, no mention of any ball of plasma in Genesis. So why would anyone go through the trouble of inventing the idea that God created the Earth from a ball of plasma? According to Genesis 1, before God began to create the heavens and the Earth, there was water. Therefore, some creationists claim, God made everything out of water. Everything, including uranium and lead and other heavy atoms. The only way for God to do this would be to transform the water into plasma, which could then form into every kind of atom. Therefore one motivation for this theory was to make sense out of the Biblical statement that water existed before the universe.

The second motivation was to prove how there could be both uranium (a radioactive element) and lead (a product of radioactive decay) in the crust of a very young Earth. The fact that there is lead in the rocks makes it look as though the Earth is old. But, Baugh claimed, Boudreaux’s plasma theory shows how the original rocks could have had both uranium and lead in them. (Baugh, and the chemist he was quoting—the one who had written the book the last copy of which sold for a hundred dollars—seem to have overlooked the fact that it is not just uranium and lead that allows scientists to calculate the age of the Earth, but the fact that zircon crystals contain both uranium and lead.) It may have occurred to you that, while God was performing miracles, he could have just made the uranium and lead and all the other atoms, skipping the plasma stage. Boudreaux’s calculations are totally unnecessary, because they simply posit a different set of miracles.

Next, Baugh started telling tall tales about what the Earth was like before the Flood. What a fantastical world! Creationists often claim, without Biblical evidence, that the pre-Flood Earth was surrounded by a vapor canopy, which would have created worldwide tropical conditions and very high atmospheric pressure. I expected to hear about this from Baugh, but he barely mentioned it. Instead, Baugh made the claim that, prior to the Flood, the Earth year consisted of only 336 days, allowing the moon to circle it exactly twelve times at 28 days per cycle each year. In some unexplained way, the Flood slowed down the revolution of the Earth but not of the moon. Now, what is so important about the 28-day cycle of the moon? You guessed it—because the moon regulates the ovulatory cycles of women! Most of us would assume the ovulatory cycle fits the moon, but Baugh claims God made the moon fit the ovulatory cycle, and the Earth fit the moon. The whole movement of the Solar System was originally created for the sake of the ovulatory cycle of women. None of this is in the Bible but, well, at least nobody can accuse Baugh of misogyny, can they?

Baugh was on a roll. We all know that the surface of the moon has dark patches created by volcanic eruptions. But, Baugh claimed, before the Flood, the moon had a perfectly smooth surface. In some unexplained way, the Flood caused volcanic eruptions on the moon. A pure white moon would have been seven times brighter than it is now, and it would have emitted light at 518 Hz (I didn’t quite follow this part) which would have stimulated DNA repair enzymes that would have allowed people to live over nine hundred years—but only if the moon was brighter. (It is not quite clear how moonlight could have gotten through a thick canopy of water vapor.) The moon had phases before the Flood just as it does now, explained Baugh. Apparently the reason for this, if I understand his explanation, was that an unrelenting full moon would have worn people out by making them have sex every night for nine hundred years. I may be misunderstanding this just a little, but I am not making it up. (From what I have read about Baugh’s look-alike Garner Ted Armstrong, the latter might have attempted such a marathon.)

It is both entertaining and disturbing to see that many creationists think that God has given them permission to just make stuff up and claim Biblical authority for it. This practice is without theological justification, but it works. Baugh craves adoration, and there was a room full of people giving it to him, gladly yielding to him the authority to invent scripture as he goes along. Meanwhile he raises thousands of dollars to buy Bibles to prove what the exact words of the Bible ought to be. I wonder why he does this. Since he just makes stuff up, about changes in the length of the year and the face of the moon, why does he need to be so careful about the exact wording of the Bible?

The high air pressure underneath a vapor canopy would, Baugh claims, have caused giant vegetables to grow and animal wounds to quickly heal. Off to the side of the museum is what looks like a gigantic barrel, which Baugh intends at some future date to make into a hyperbaric chamber, with high air pressure (and presumably a source of 518 Hz light). Maybe he will grow some giant vegetables in the barrel, or maybe he will experiment on himself to see if he heals up quickly. Hospitals do in fact use hyperbaric treatment to help wounds to heal. If this is all that Baugh wants to prove, there is no need for him to have his own hyperbaric chamber. So why is it there? Maybe he and his staff someday will disappear inside and live forever, in complete separation from the world of inconvenient reality.

I then proceeded to look at the displays in the museum, about which I will write in the next entry.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Three. Into the Land of the Dinosaur Preacher

On March 5 (which was Lynn Margulis’s seventy-third birthday), I continued my fun weekend of learning about creationism (see previous two entries). On this morning, I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas. This museum, as some of you may know, is the one that purports to prove that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. The museum is on the banks of the Paluxy River, which is famous because the bed of the river contains entire trackways of dinosaur footprints. And, Baugh claims, human footprints as well.

I was in for a real treat. It was not just creationism that I saw. It was an entire world of psychological illusion.

I arrived just after 11:00, just in time to hear Baugh’s monthly sermon. I parked my car in the gravel lot, walked past a big yellow school bus (wondering about the legality of using a public vehicle to take kids to this place), and slipped in through the front door. It was standing room only; all the seats were occupied by the approximately 100 people who had come early to hear Baugh. A man was singing hymns to a music track.

Then Carl Baugh came to the microphone (see photo). A late middle-aged man, he bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the late Garner Ted Armstrong. His mellifluous baritone voice announced that all of the money from the collection that the ushers were taking would go to benefit the singer. And then he began his sermon. The first half hour was not about creation-science at all. It was about old editions of the Bible. Baugh’s museum had recently purchased a Bible, using funds provided miraculously by a donor, which had been edited by Desiderius Erasmus and published just prior to the King James Bible of 1611. The King James Bible is the one that many fundamentalists revere, even more than original documents. Some churches, like the Baptist church just outside the town where I work, actually proclaim “KJV 1611” on their sign. Why? Because, Baugh said, the King James Bible is the one that has saved more souls than any other version. I suppose this means that nobody actually knew what the actual words of God were until 1611, perhaps (I may guess) even the people who heard Jesus himself. This Bible that Baugh had purchased contained editorial revision marks. This Bible, therefore, represented the final step before the publication of the King James Version. Baugh told the audience that one of the world’s foremost experts on seventeenth-century Bibles, at Oxford, was going to verify the authenticity of the book.

Now it was time to build some excitement in the crowd. Baugh’s cell phone rang. I thought it was odd that an experienced speaker would forget to turn off his cell phone, and then would pointedly refuse to turn it off after it had interrupted his presentation. He announced he would ignore the call. The phone rang again. He said he would answer it because it just might be the manuscript expert calling. Guess what—it was! The world expert on seventeenth-century Bibles just happened to be starting his work at what would have been 5:00 pm on a Saturday in England. Well, guess what, said Carl. There is a whole audience here who wants to know what you are finding out about the manuscript! It did not take long for me to figure out that the phone call must have been from one of Baugh’s associates, perhaps standing outside or in an office. It was a smooth attempt to manipulate the audience. This was just in time for Baugh to announce that he was looking for a new donor to buy another old Bible. A local informant tells me that Baugh has conducted bids before, using a cell phone with a fake bidder on the other end.

Baugh then showed another old Bible. It was one of the original King James Bibles, only the printer had changed just a single word, and for this crime he was imprisoned by order of King James. Almost all copies of this Bible had been destroyed, but Baugh had gotten hold of one. What was the word that the printer had substituted? (While driving down into Texas, I had been listening to NPR, and there was a report that a new edition of the Bible had been published that changed the word “booty” to “plunder,” but I doubted that this was what Baugh had in mind.) The printer, Baugh said, had changed “Jesus” to “Judas” in just one verse of the New Testament. After the presentation, people lined up to see the “Judas Bible”, but only if they washed their hands and made sure they did not drop any dandruff on it.

The reason I have gone into this part of Baugh’s presentation in some detail is to show you that the Baugh’s entire purpose is to cultivate followers and donors, rather than to convince anyone of the truth of his creationist evidences. What I witnessed here was not just an atmosphere of psychological manipulation, but acts of psychological manipulation. And it was working. Whenever Baugh asked if the audience was agreeing with him, there were mesmerized nods, rather than affirmations. The audience was not enthusiastically engaged, but hypnotized. I could feel it myself—I could feel my own brain becoming soft. It was at least fifteen minutes before I realized what was going on.

When Baugh got into his “scientific” presentation, the astonishing content of which I will present in the next entry, it was clear that he was manipulating the audience with the aura of science, rather than trying to present evidence to them. He made some incredible claims, but verified them by saying that they had been published in a book that had sold out, and the last one had been bought for a hundred dollars by a professor, who just happened to be in the back of the room. (By this time I was wondering if any such thing had happened, but I have no proof that it had not. I cannot locate the book on Amazon.) Anything in a book that sells for a hundred dollars must be correct, I suppose.

Baugh rushed through a PowerPoint of “evidences”, skipping the details, claiming that the scientific terms like “nucleosynthesis” were really big and complex and hard to pronounce, then ending with the triumphant claim that he had found scientific evidence for God’s Truth. Wow, all these scientific terms and even a few Greek symbols—that settles it. How could he be wrong, when he could almost pronounce the word nucleosynthesis? And how could you doubt him? He spoke so smoothly, and slipped in jokes. He had time for jokes and homey stories, but not for the evidence, which flashed by on the screen. (There needs to be a term for this. It is not quite like Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” or Charles Seife’s statistical “proofiness.” It is the illusion of proof that comes from flashing through a series of scientific-looking slides. If any of you know a good term to describe this, feel free to post a comment.)

In the next entry, you will find out some of the scientific claims that Baugh made that morning—claims without evidence, and even without Biblical basis. It is all part of the mind-numbing psychological effect that he deliberately cultivates in his museum.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.