What on the 6000-Year-Old Earth Were They Thinking?

[Originally posted at Unscrewing the Inscrutable]

In case you hasn’t heard, thanks to protesting e-mails and phone calls from the sane, the Cincinnati Zoo ended a cross-promotional deal with the Creation Museum of Petersburg, Ky. P.Z. Myers is getting a great deal of the credit/blame for encouraging his readers to make a stink. Well done, say I.

But I must also say, as happy as I am that this nonsense was dispensed with, I remain flabbergasted that the Cincinnati Zoo would enter into a deal like this in the first place. The contradiction is obvious: an institution that highlights and celebrates the biological wonders of our planet (and therefore reality) as they actually are versus a quasi-theme park that insists, paraphrasing Lewis Black, that The Flintstones was a documentary. Or, as radiologist Dr. James Leach put it in his protest e-mail:

The Cincinnati Zoo is one of this city’s treasures. The Creation Museum is an international laughingstock.

Indeed. So what happened here? Are the folks at the zoo secret religious zealots?

It doesn’t seem that way. If anything, they just seem astoundingly hapless. From the Cinci Enquirer:

Zoo officials said they considered the promotion – dubbed “Two Great Attractions, One Great Deal” – a marketing deal no different than other cross-promotions they do with institutions like the Newport Aquarium or the Cincinnati Reds.

Wait. What? Say that again.

“When we partner with the Reds, we don’t get these kinds of e-mails,” [zoo spokesman Chad] Yelton said. “It’s pretty clear this is more of a distraction.”

Come on, Chad. You don’t mean that. Do you? You really think it’s the same thing? Talk to me, Chad.

Steve Goble of a local Kentucky paper writes in defense of the zoo-museum deal as a benign money-saving holiday promotion, but even he sees the problem:

The Creation Museum’s founder, Ken Ham, wrote in a news release: “It’s a pity that intolerant people have pushed for our expulsion simply because of our Christian faith. Some of their comments … reveal great intolerance for anything having to do with Christianity.”

Here’s where I have to disagree. The outpouring of complaints was not a bashing of Christianity. It’s a bashing of made-up, nonsense “science.”

That is spot on, and Goble makes one point that I think deserves some consideration:

. . . a promotional opportunity that would let people save money and see two impressive Christmas displays — and let people on opposite sides of a great big gulf look each other in the eye and perhaps learn from one another — was lost.

Indeed, the deal might have made more sense if the idea had been to lure those who were being misinformed by the Creation Museum into a sanctuary of reality in order to help counter the nonsense to which they had just been exposed. Also, it never hurts for rational people to see how the other half lives to better understand what it is the practice actual science is up against.

But that obviously wasn’t the point of the promotion at all. The Creation Museum was likely hoping to inject a bit of legitimacy into its operation by its association with the zoo, and if Chad is any guide, the zoo obviously didn’t think beyond “Hey, coupons are cool!”

I hope it’s not a trend.