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Counter-evolutionary | page 1, 2
The wizard must be the first pop psychologist in American literature. Once revealed to Dorothy and company as "a little old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face," Oz, the (formerly) Great and Terrible, keeps a stiff upper lip. All set to deflate the travelers' illusions of inadequacy, he has an aphorism ready for everyone. "You have plenty of courage," he tells the lion. "All you need is confidence in yourself." To the scarecrow he recommends experience, "the only thing that brings knowledge." The tin woodman, on the other hand, is informed by the homesick wizard that he is better off without a heart at all.
The Genesis Flood The Voyage of the Beagle The Origin of Species The Wizard of Oz But the travelers insist, and a simple bit of sleight-of-hand convinces them they have finally gotten what they were after. Only Dorothy must seek her salvation elsewhere, but here too it turns out that what was sought had all along been close at hand. Or, in Dorothy's case, close at foot. The silver shoes she has worn throughout her adventure in Oz -- transformed into ruby slippers only when Hollywood and Judy Garland stepped in -- deliver her from the alien landscape only once she is informed by Glinda (the good witch of the south) of their "wonderful powers." Baum's tale at first appears to be a very American fable of self-reliance, but it is really closer to an "authorization myth" of the sort so dear to Joseph Campbell. The land of Oz springs so fully formed from its author's brow that it seems the quintessential creationist landscape (though Darwin could probably find some way to explain the plethora of "aboriginal productions" present at so remote a locale). Thus the solutions to its denizens' problems -- finding brains, a heart, courage or a way home -- always lie with the local authorities. No different from the creationists, really. But very different from Darwin, who finds his solution only after a long, hard look to nature. Strikingly, Morris and Whitcomb seem to acknowledge as much in their introduction. "We believe that most of the difficulties associated with the Biblical record of the Flood are basically religious, rather than scientific," they write. And here, at last, the true battlefield is identified -- though Morris and Whitcomb go on to ignore their own admonition and spend nearly 500 pages advancing half-baked "scientific" hypotheses, as do those fighting the current creationist debate. In the end, though, they tell us, it all comes down to this: Either you read the Bible as history (in which case, like the creationists, you draw your authorization from it), or you don't (in which case, like Darwin, you look elsewhere). No amount of science can prove or disprove, say, Genesis 9:20-21, in which Noah gets drunk to celebrate the covenant God has just made with him and his descendants. Creation, it seems, is not a scientific debate after all. Either the word of the Great and Terrible is all you need to dismiss Darwin's theory -- or you peek behind the curtain to discover it's just a wizened, homesick humbug back there after all.
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