Seite - 60 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 03/02

60 | Larissa Carneiro www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 53–64 case the “tree” is called an “orchard”. if, as Campbell has suggested, darwin relied on his famous “tree of life” to counter opposition to this theory and its problematic lack of material evidence, the creationist orchard is no different. With no source of material proof, the “orchard” visually asserts that God cre- ated each group of original forms or “kinds”, such as an original equid or canine, from which different specimens later developed, i.e. all contemporary breeds of horses or dogs. therefore, the rhetorical purpose of the creationist orchard is to assert that all dogs and horses, whatever their size, color, and constitution, share the same ancestry in the original equid or canine created by God. It is helpful at this point to recall the major rhetorical reasoning at work in Darwin’s illustration of finches: he sought to demonstrate that the great variety of finches on the Galápagos Islands had not been created one by one but had descended from a single original finch. In spite of the visual and rhetorical simi- larity of their argumentation with darwin’s, advocates of baraminology insist on targeting the evolution of finches. In a reference to Darwin’s illustration, the Creation Museum website reads: “God created ‘every winged bird according to its kind’ (Genesis 1:21). So, for example, fluctuations in the population of finches and finch speciation occurs [sic] in a response to different environments. But after all, finches still remain finches.”19 in order to present a counter-model for evolution, the website displays an- other polyptoton constructed analogously to darwin’s illustration: a sequence of 140 images of different dogs displayed side by side, in which each dog pre- sents a slight difference from the next. Just as Fahnestock suggested of Dar- win’s use of polyptoton, the creationist version aims at building a new knowl- edge on what has been previously accepted, but in the latter case the previous knowledge is the theory of evolution! Surprisingly, the creationist representa- tion does not directly contradict darwinism, but, like darwin, seeks to refute the old premise of natural theology in which God had created all specimens individually. The different dogs in the Creation Museum website had not been created one by one but were all descendants of an original dog. the similarities between secular and Christian visual argumentation do not end here. On a wall in the Creation Museum, visitors find a visual incrementum that literally blends the secular paleontological timeline of horses and the “evo- lution of homo sapiens” illustration. Like the secular paleontological timeline, this visual incrementum features the development of horses as a motif. similar to the “evolution of homo sapiens”, this horizontal incrementum also repre- sents a march from the beginning, albeit a much shorter trek from the “ark equid” to the present time of the larger modern equid. alongside the state- ment that some sort of progression happened from a common ancestor, this 19 see “darwin’s finches”, n.d. Creation Museum website, https://creationmuseum.org/creation-science/ natural-selection/ [accessed 11 february 2017].