This is a two part article and the second part is here.
The Creation Museum has a point of view — a point of view that is astonishingly anti science — that is the focus of the museum. It acknowledges that its purpose is to advance this point of view. Any objective observer would accurately described the museum as a sophisticated, coordinated and expensive work of propaganda. And the museum itself, I imagine, would be proud to acknowledge that fact. It seeks to convince, and, the museum’s point of view is the most radical anti evolution point of view possible, the “Young Earth” view, and the museum seeks to persuade attendees that its point of view is true.
It is amazing that people pushing this point of view raised $35 million or so to build the Creation Museum. The museum is located off in Kentucky off I-275, 10 miles west of I-75, toward the Cincinnati Airport.
The museum has beautiful grounds and state of the art displays. It has automated lifelike figures, huge dinosaurs, etc. It’s very high quality. I visited yesterday — two adults and a child cost about $50. Regardless of the cost, the place was full of people — I heard that usually more than 2000 people attend each day. It has a gift shop where I bought this amazing element collecting guide book and it also has many restaurants. It offers photographs and special features that cost extra (the planetarium costs $7 extra per person). This place takes in a ton of money. I’d love to know how much and how the profits are distributed. You’ve got to wonder if the opportunity to make big bucks was part of the motivation for starting this attraction.
The Creation Museum, run by a group called Answers in Genesis, teaches that the world is 6013 years old and that all 6.5 billion humans now on earth came all from a very small group of humans that survived a world wide cataclysmic event, a great flood, 4350 years ago. This Great Flood, according to the museum, wiped out all human beings in the entire world — except a small group of survivors, at most, fifty or one hundred people, led by a man named Noah. The whole story of Noah and the Ark plays a big part of the museum’s explanation. You might think that the Grand Canyon came about because of millions of years of erosion, but the museum teaches it came about in a short time because of the great force unleashed by the Great Flood.
The Creation Museum teaches that the Great Flood also would have destroyed all animals had Noah not saved a pair of each, and all animals that we presently know today came from that small group of animals from 4350 years ago. A scaled down replica of the Ark that Noah built is shown in the Museum. And, by the way, all dinosaurs, according to the Museum, were very much alive at the time of the Great Flood, and various displays in the museum show humans and dinosaurs in the same scene.
The point of view of the Creation Museum repudiates everything modern science says about the origins of the earth and the origins of humanity. The museum’s point of view demands that the words of Genesis be accepted as being literally true. When the Bible says “day,” according to the museum, it means 24 hours and when the Bible says the first human, Adam, was created in one day, it means exactly that. And, since the present generation can be traced back to the original human, in order for the generations to work out, Adam had to have been created in exactly 4004 BC — all at once, out of nothing, fully formed. The museum says that when humans rely on human reason to find truth, instead of finding truth, humans find error. The point of view of the museum is that the literal meaning of the words of ancient scripture reveals literal truth. The writer of Genesis clearly meant a day to mean 24 hours and, according to the museum, there is no reason to think that the Bible doesn’t mean exactly what its words originally were meant to say. Ancient people had words to describe eons, but the writer of Genesis deliberately chose the word, “day.” Fair enough.
This is amazing that here in 2009 a state of the art, high quality museum is so brazenly teaching anti scientific ideas. And, it is astounding that educated, prosperous, middle class Americans, in 2009, can agree with and support such a shockingly radical, anti-intellectual point of view, to the point of making this museum, by all appearances, a huge financial success. Who was it that said that nobody ever went broke by underestimating the thinking of Americans?
Carole and Ike at the entrance to The Creation Museum. The museum advances a “Young Earth” belief that says dinosaurs and humans at one time were contemporaries.
