What did Noah do with the manure? And other burning questions of creation science.

• Author: Hitt, Jack

WHAT DID NOAH DO WITH THE MANURE?

Remember the scene in the movie, "Inheritthe Wind,' where the Darrow character wickedly taunts the fundamentalist Bryan, asking him if he truly believes God condemned the snake to crawl forever on its belly? Yes, says the unshaken believer. Well, needles the lawyer, how did the snake get around before that? On his hind legs?

In the old days creationists cringed at being somockingly bested by the opposition. Today, instead of shrinking, they might welcome such an observation and even dispatch some researchers to investigate the matter.

Very little has changed in the peculiarAmerican clash of religion and science since 1925, when a substitute biology teacher named John Scopes collaborated with a couple of Tennessee pranksters to scare up the first national media circus. The only significant difference is that creationists now insist more evhemently than ever that they are creation scientists. It's not religion they want taught, they argue. It's a science that deserves to be taught alongside evolution.

The argument for this "balanced treatment'is now before the Supreme Court and the case should be decided sometime this spring. The case involves a Louisiana law that requires public schools to teach creation science if a course in evolution is offered.

In order to get a fiar hearing in the courts, creationistshave had to learn to speak secular science. Nowadays they don't talk publicly about the Bible's account of clay and ribs, but proclaim the scientific theory of the "sudden appearance of highly developed forms of life.'

In the face of such claims, mainstream scientistshave locked arms and become dogmatic. Evolution, they bellow, is not a theory but a fact. And creationism is nothing more than a Trojan horse brimming with Bible-thumpers. Creationists, playing to American notions of fairness and equality, respond calmly that they ask for nothing more than balance.

But is creationism really a science? It's nomystery what science is, at least in the popular conception. It is the development of theories, which are tested by experiments, result in data, are written up and published in journals. Creation science seems to have all of these. In its most prestigious journal, the Creation Research Society Quarterly, one finds even the lesser trappings so loved by big-time scientists: pompous titles, sesquipedalianisms, Latin words, scientific jargon, even the metric system.

The Quarterly certainly looks scientific, withits dignified covers and conservative format, but there is one oddity. Above the volume and year are printed the words "Haec credimus,' or "This we believe.' After that comes the Exodus quotation: "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is and rested on the seventh.' Although evolutionists have been known to be just as cocksure, it is peculiar for a scientific journal to publish its conclusions on the...