Creationism’s Web

This chapter examines how creationists harnessed websites, magazines, museums, and institutes to rewrite history as well as the rules of science. By the end of the twentieth century, the Scopes trial was no longer a humiliation for creationists but an indignation. Realizing that the problem had been to make any compromise with literalism's naysayers, creationists recast and remythologized Scopes as a lesson, their defining moment in the fight against evolution. This chapter begins with an overview of the Creation Museum, located in Petersburg, Kentucky, and the ministry behind it, Answers in Genesis (AiG), along with AiG's proposed Ark Encounter museum. It then considers AiG's web sites as well as the Discovery Institute's creation of an online guide called Getting the Facts Straight: A Viewer's Guide to PBS's Evolution in response to the PBS seven-part series Evolution. It also discusses the movie Alleged, which addressed the conflict between science and creationism, and concludes with an assessment of the Creation Museum's depiction of Darwinism and interpretation of the Scopes trial.