Seite - 62 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 03/02

62 | Larissa Carneiro www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 53–64 all debate about the origin of life leads to a foregone conclusion for creationists. the Word of God, inerrant and fully intact in the scriptures, is the only reliable and fully sufficient documentation of the origin of life. in one of many “God’s Word” charts displayed in the Creation Museum, visi- tors see two trees placed side by side, composing the “creation orchard”. on the left of this chart appears the tree of the “primate kind”, from which all ape- like creatures evolved (chimpanzees, gorillas, and even what secular science considers the earliest hominids). on the right side, a single line represents the creation of humans, which occurred only 6,000 years ago, when God decided to make “man in his own image”. in another antithetical pairing, darwin’s “tree of life” (dubbed “Man’s reason”) is contrasted with all trees that, according to creationists, constitute the creation orchard, which includes the trees of but- terflies, dinosaurs, worms, and mushrooms. The illustration declares that after the Flood all these kinds evolved into many different species due the new post- diluvium environmental condition. this point is crucial for young-earth Creation- ism since the Book of Genesis affirms that God instantaneously created the first humans. CoNCLUsioN In the fields of sociology and the rhetoric of science, images like those I have described become objects of critical scrutiny. Since Socrates, the word “repre- sentation” may imply something suspect or deceptive. for many moralists and religious thinkers, representation has long been associated with the manipula- tion of reality, the vanity and folly of idolatry, the beguiling effect of spectacle, or the moral dissipation induced by the falsehoods of theatre.21 in the realm of scientific illustrations, Ludwik Fleck points out, it is hard (even impossible) to find one single “natural” representation. All representations are retouched, rhetorically designed, and systematized according to some theory or world- view.22 Bruno Latour and steve Woolgar have even suggested that such visual devices serve to conceal the fact that scientific results are not produced by na- ture but fabricated by scientists.23 according to these scholars, in science, pic- tures are instruments for persuasion: they tell viewers what to think and how to look at a phenomenon. in the visual rhetoric of representation, persuasion is the subtle business of seeing depictions in a particular way. the representation is there, on the wall of a museum, on the page of a scientific article, in a children’s illustrated book, in order to corroborate what viewers already know. Understood rhetorically, 21 For further consideration in visual representation in science, see Daston 2014, 319–322. 22 fleck 1979, 35. 23 Latour/Woolgar 1986, 176.