It’s not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about. They could, though, if they were the bragging sort, brag about a quaint old optician’s shop that will make you a new pair of spectacles in an hour—by chance I am both shortsighted and had an hour to spare. As the nice lady gave my new lenses a polish, I asked her if she thought the eye was such a complicated and mysterious structure that it could have been created only in one inspired, farsighted moment by God and not by the blind trial and error of natural selection. “That kind of makes sense,” she smiled. But then, Galileo invented a refracting telescope and the church locked him up for pointing out that, as he learned by observing the rest of the solar system, the earth isn’t the center of the universe. Do you think that glasses might be the work of the Devil? She smiled again. “Would you like a hard or a soft case with that, sir?”

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An extensive slide show of Paul Bettany’s photos of the Creation Museum.

Perhaps the biggest thing the citizens of the “Queen of the West” have to tell a tall tale about is the Creation Museum. Twenty minutes outside of town, just over the Kentucky border, it was placed here with prayerful care to be accessible and available to the greatest number of American pilgrims coming by road, presumably in surreys with fringes on top. Build it and they will come. November was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—last February the 200th anniversary of the birth of its author—so now seems like a good time to see what the world looks like without the benefit of science. Or spectacles. Although both these anniversaries seemed to pass without ever troubling most Americans—there were precious few commemorations, TV specials, or pop-up books—it’s not that you don’t care about where you came from; it’s that our collective origin is a trip-wire issue, a knuckle-dragging skeleton in the closet. If you want to get through a class, a dinner, a long-haul flight in peace, it’s best not to go there. This is one argument that refuses to evolve.

I took Paul Bettany, the actor who plays Charles Darwin in the new film Creation, along with me to photograph the museum. He has played crazed and murderous apostates in films the devout ban themselves from seeing—in Legion, also out this month, Bettany stars as the archangel Michael, who defies a vengeful God hell-bent on destroying mankind. He once played a Wimbledon champion. Here in Nowheresville, Kentucky, tennis is considered a game for Europeans and other sexual deviants. I can’t imagine what they think of English actors.

Just off a motorway, in a barren and uninspiring piece of scrub, the museum is impressively incongruous, a righteously modernist building resting in landscaped gardens filled with dinosaur topiaries. It cost $27 million and was completed in 2007. It answers the famous question about what God could have done if he had had money. This is it. Oddly, it is a conspicuously and emphatically secular construction. There is no religious symbolism. No crosses. No stained glass. No spiral campanile. It has borrowed the empirical vernacular of the enemy to wrap the literal interpretation of Genesis in the façade of a liberal art gallery or library. It is the Lamb dressed in wolf’s clothing.