Creation Museum opens in KY, end times draw nearer

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Creation Museum opens in KY, end times draw nearer

Postby Rspaight » Thu May 31, 2007 11:49 am

I guess that it's nice that stupid people now have their own museum, since all the existing science museums cater to folks with at least trace amounts of intellectual curiosity and capacity.

Still, I have to wonder how Jesus would have spent $27 million.

Inside the Creation Museum

Adam and Eve frolic amid the dinosaurs in the new $27 million museum that demonstrates Darwin has nothing on the Book of Genesis.

By Gordy Slack

May. 31, 2007 | The Creation Museum swung open its stegosaurus-guarded gates to the public Monday, and I have to say it's out of this world. For those of us raised in natural history Meccas like the American Museum in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, or the Field in Chicago, the beautifully designed museum induces an eerie vertigo. All the familiar characters are here: T. rex, giant skeletons of triceratops and apatosaurus, a pterosaur spreading its wings above the crowd, live exhibits of birds, amphibians and reptiles, and the dripping, hooting and chirping soundtrack of the primeval forest. There are also a couple of unfamiliar faces, for a natural history museum, in the tan and finely muscled bodies of Adam and Eve.

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. "It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom," Ham says. "We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn't prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."

The Book of Genesis, that famous first chapter of the Bible, which Ham's group has interpreted to claim that the universe was created in six 24-hour days a mere 6,000 years ago, serves as the blueprint for the museum. Astronomy, geology and evolution, as they are commonly understood in mainstream science, have no place here. As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith. On the other hand, he says, the Book of Genesis is true "from the first word to the last."

With a staff of nearly 300 employees, Answers in Genesis, devoted to "Biblical apologetics," produces a daily radio program fed to 860 stations, operates a Web site instructing visitors how to out-argue Darwinists, and organizes about 300 traveling lectures each year. It's also a well-oiled money-raising machine and opened the $27 million museum without a penny of debt to banks or lenders.

The museum is situated in Petersburg, Ky., just 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati, an area chosen in large part because it's within a one-day drive for two-thirds of the country or 200 million Americans. Recent polls show that 40 percent of all Americans would feel at home with the views put forth in the Creation Museum. Only about an equal percentage accept the underlying message of the country's mainstream science museums. Only 39 percent answer yes to the question, "Do you believe that human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals?"

The museum's 49 acres of carefully landscaped grounds are encircled by a tall metal fence. Visitors tempted to enter without paying will be discouraged by armed guards in black state-trooper-like uniforms and attack dogs. On Monday, just outside the fence, a group of 50 die-hard atheists and skeptics are gathered in the light rain under a "Rally for Reason" banner. Overhead, a small airplane pulls a sign that says, "Thou Shalt Not Lie." Edwin Kagin, national legal director for American Atheists, explains that as far as he's concerned, AIG "can teach that things fall up if they want. But we want to make it clear that this nonsense is not accepted by those who do not share its fundamentalist religious views. They are trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages."

Among the damp roadside protesters is Lawrence Krauss, author and physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and a member of the advisory board of Defcon: Campaign to Defend the Constitution, the group that paid for the airplane tugging around the Seventh Commandment. Krauss calls the museum "anti-science" and says it reflects an erosion of American science education, posing "a threat to American kids already struggling just to get the basic concept of what science is and how it works."

Inside, the museum is organized according to the "Six C's of History": creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, and the final C, consummation, which isn't given much time or space in the exhibits because there still isn't consensus on just how the apocalypse will come down or who goes to heaven and when. At the Creation exhibit, two young T. rexes peacefully watch fish swim in a placid pond. Two curly-haired robotic kids play nearby. In any other place, this would be the setup for a massacre. But this pre-Noah's-flood Jurassic Park is benign. The animals are vegetarians and plants don't have thorns. The fossil record, says the museum, confirms all of this.

Mark Looy, co-founder of Answers in Genesis, is walking me through the museum. He explains that the great flood is responsible for the fossil record. Plants and animals are distributed in different strata based not on the time of their formation, but on where the flood waters moved them before receding. Those areas where no thorns or other defensive or hostile plants are found, he explains, are pre-flood forms.

Later Ham tells me that his skeptics, who cling to the "millions of years" theory, are wrong about when dinosaurs stalked the Earth. He cites a recent discovery of intact blood vessels in some T. rex tissue, suggesting that the finds are only thousands of years old, not 65 million, as paleontologists say. "They will try to come up with an explanation to keep the fossils old," says Ham, "but we don't need to. The explanation of their age is already right there in the Bible."

For generations, paleontologists have shown that dinosaurs and humans never trod the Earth at the same time, that in fact with the exception of birds (modern-day dinosaurs), they never got within 60 million years of each other on the timeline of natural history. Not so, says Looy. "They all had to exist at the same time because they were all made on the same day. There may not be any fossil evidence showing dinosaurs and people in the same place at the same time. But it is clearly written that they were alive at the same time."

In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, says Ham, when everything was still perfect, animals weren't predators or prey, so the museum's designer, Patrick Marsh, is able to crowd grizzly bears, wildcats, zebras, kangaroos, an iguanodon and several other dinosaurs into the same little chunk of primeval Eden. After the fall, such a scene would result in a bloody mess.

Buddy Davis, a technician and artist who has also made dinosaurs for use in secular exhibits, tells me he's much happier seeing his dinosaurs at the Creation Museum, promoting faith in the Bible. "I want to see God get credit for his creation," he says. "I look around and see so much beauty -- even if it is marred by sin -- and to think that it all just came from an explosion billions of years ago is just wrong. To me it's obvious the hand of God is behind it. As scripture says, 'They are without excuse' who do not believe."

The Garden of Eden presents a series of scenes down a "trail of life." In the first, a bearded, dark-haired Adam beckons to a mountain lion with one outstretched arm, while the other is wrapped around a little lamb. Smaller animals appear drawn to Adam, who is perhaps naming them, God's first assignment for him. A bit farther along we're introduced to Eve, looking like a great big brown Barbie and staring intently into Adam's eyes. Adam and Eve are naked, and Maggie and Tom Thorne, a pair of Christians visiting from Michigan, are smiling at the scene. They agree it seems a little unfair for God to expect two such well-designed specimens not to get around to sinning pretty quickly. A few yards further we see Adam and Eve again, this time standing in a pool of water, their genitals coyly obscured by lily pads. Now they definitely appear to be grappling with the chemistry that will get them in big trouble.

An oversize cobra-like snake makes an appearance, and before you know it, Eve is holding grape-size, blood-colored fruits in her outstretched hand, offering knowledge of good and evil to a flummoxed-looking Adam. "We're not sure what kind of fruit it was, but we do know it wasn't an apple," says Looy, perhaps to demonstrate the kind of questions the several Ph.D. researchers at the museum are now toiling over in the labs behind the walls of the exhibition space.

In the next scene, after the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, looking far less happy than before, are standing next to two lambs they have slaughtered on a sacrificial stone table. The sacrifice has a practical value -- the original couple are now wearing lambskin suits and the lambs are skinless -- and a spiritual one; the lambs are sacrificed, a visitor explains to me, in partial payment for the debt incurred by Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of knowledge. I tell the visitor it seems unfair for the lamb to pay for their mistake. "Well, it wasn't enough," he says. "God had to send his only Son to pay the ultimate price for their sin." When I tell him that sounds kind of extreme, he looks at me and shakes his head slowly a couple of times before moving on.

Inside the Garden of Eden, Nancy Senai, who is visiting from Lansing, Mich., tells me, "It feels pretty nice to have something that is for God and about God, instead of all the evolution in other places." I ask her if she thinks the history presented here is true. "God said it clearly, and I believe it the way he said it," she says. "Everything else is uncertain."

The great flood, which washed away all life on earth, is the key to understand the Catastrophe exhibit and the museum's version of natural history. After Adam and Eve's original sin, God told Noah to build an ark. He sent him two of every kind of land animal to repopulate the earth. Visitors to the museum walk among robotic representations of Noah and his building crew as they construct a supposedly full-scale section of the boat. After Noah has invited his sinning neighbors onto the ark and warned them of the coming flood, they mock him or are dissuaded from heeding his advice by the small pressures of daily life. The door slides shut and they are left behind to drown in the 40-day deluge that formed everything we see on Earth today, from Mt. Everest to Death Valley.

In Ham's view, the great flood explains not only where scientists find fossils today but also the topography of the modern world. The Grand Canyon, he informs me, was made in a matter of days or weeks as the waters of the flood rushed away and the land was reclaimed. In the exhibit, you walk through a winding canyonlike corridor with spinning, dizzying lights into a wide-open room with videos, exhibits and diagrams explaining the hydrology of instant canyon-making. Ham says that instant canyon-making is based on the fact that volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens, created reservoirs of water for a time in their altered topography. When those reservoirs breached, deep grooves were cut by the flowing water, leading to the fast formation of canyons.

After the flood, Noah's descendants multiply again on Earth, but not quickly or broadly enough to satisfy God, who then introduces a slew of new languages to drive people apart, resulting in their dispersal around the globe. The ensuing C-for-Confusion theme is represented through a gritty and menacing back alley postered with newspaper headlines about the rise in abortion, drug use, homosexuality and teen suicide.

The entire exhibit, in fact, is awfully grim. A montage slide show of fetuses, starving kids, swastikas, tourniquet-bound arms ready for the needle bombard the wall in a room with a soundtrack of blaring sirens, boots marching in unison, and crying kids. In the middle of this urban mess is a big wrecking ball with the words "Millions of Years" carved into it. Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world's problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief "is at the root of modern evil."

Inside the Confusion exhibit, I strike up a conversation with Tim Shaw, a high school student visiting from Florida. "I don't care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon," he tells me. "It's not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin's theory has no God. It can't be right. I don't know if this story is truer than Darwin's theory, but I do know it's better."
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Re: Creation Museum opens in KY, end times draw nearer

Postby lukpac » Thu May 31, 2007 1:14 pm

We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn't prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."


Isn't the point of *faith* that it doesn't need defending, especially by "modern science" of all things? It just *is*, isn't it?
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Postby Rspaight » Thu May 31, 2007 4:58 pm

And then, in the next paragraph:

As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith.


So... creationism can be defended by modern science, but modern science is not to be trusted?

These people sure are confusing.

Ryan
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Postby Xenu » Thu May 31, 2007 4:58 pm

I should point out that PZ Myers *hates* this article.
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Postby Rspaight » Thu May 31, 2007 5:01 pm

I noticed that a lot of the letters on Salon thought the article was too kind to the museum. I thought the author clearly thought the whole thing was hokum, but wrote in a very dry manner intended to give the museum's founders and visitors plenty of rope with which to hang themselves.

Was that Myers' complaint, or something else?

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Postby Xenu » Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:24 am

Pretty much. I had the same impression you did: it was supposed to be dry, in the service of letting the incredibly vacuousness of the whole affair speak for itself.
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Re: Creation Museum opens in KY, end times draw nearer

Postby lukpac » Wed Dec 01, 2010 11:54 pm

Not to be confused with Noah's Ark

More here.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40445249/ns/us_news-life/

Giant Noah's Ark likely landing in Kentucky
Governor, Creation Museum officials expected to announce creationist theme park

FRANKFORT, Ky.— A huge replica of Noah's Ark and an 800-acre creationist theme park reportedly are coming to Grant County, Ky., according to NBC station WLEX.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear and Answers in Genesis, builders of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., are expected to unveil plans Wednesday for the $150 million northern Kentucky attraction, WLEX and other area news outlets reported.

The ark and theme park are expected to attract 1.6 million visitors annually, WLEX said. The operation is expected to create 900 jobs. That doesn't count employment at new restaurants and hotels expected to complement the park.

The museum and private investors have been looking at several spots around the county, but efforts to place the park in Grant County have been under way at least for 18 months, officials told WLEX.

The Creation Museum, opened in May 2007 about seven miles from the Cincinnati-northern Kentucky airport, was estimated to draw about 250,000 visitors per year but surpassed 1 million visitors in less than three
years, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

Exhibits represent the views of Apologetics Ministry, including the belief that the Earth is only about 7,000 years old and that dinosaurs were among the creatures on Noah’s ark.
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Re: Creation Museum opens in KY, end times draw nearer

Postby Rspaight » Thu Dec 02, 2010 9:59 am

Living here is like living in Disneyland with Jesus instead of a mouse.
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Re: Creation Museum opens in KY, end times draw nearer

Postby lukpac » Wed May 25, 2011 8:14 pm

http://eveloce.scienceblog.com/2011/05/ ... ce-museum/

A Trip to the Creation “Science” Museum
Posted on May 22, 2011 by eveloce

Oh Boy. Oh Joy. I live in Cincinnati, home of the “Creation Museum”. In case you didn’t know, it is a “museum” dedicated to a literal interpretation of the bible. Earth is only a few thousand years old. God created all life on earth as we see it today. Evolution is wrong, never happened. The earth was completely flooded, and all land life would have perished, but for Noah’s Ark.

Down the highway, a few miles past the airport. Take the Petersburg exit and you’re there. It’s a Saturday afternoon and the parking lot is full. I quickly counted vans and buses from seven Baptist churches, one Methodist, the Junction City First Christian Church, and a couple of Christian schools. The kids are filing out of the cars and church vans, eager to enter, anxious to learn.

It isn’t cheap, twenty five bucks, and I hate to pay, but I’m curious. So I’ll pay, so you don’t have to. Let’s take the tour.

The place is packed and the moving slow. There is a large group of Amish. And another group of about 50 kids with tie dye T-shirts, with big blue crosses on their backs.

One of the first exhibits shows dinosaurs walking around with people. Sort of like Jurassic Park. But this is serious, not a novel. Of course the Bible tells us that all animals were vegetarians before Adam ate the apple. So why do some snakes have venom? We are told that maybe those nasty chemicals used to do something else when the snakes ate plants. And we learn that God gave the Tyrannosaurus Rex big teeth to crack nuts with. And what ended the dinosaurs? Why don’t we still see them today? Well, read on and find out.

Of interest, we see some nice fossils in the museum. But, the museum explains that the dating methods of science are flawed, and that none are really more than a few thousand years old.

Some of the exhibits were more two-sided than you would expect. For example, one shows Human Reason on the left side, starting with the Big Bang, followed by the evolution of galaxies, and solar systems, and the earth and moon, and the continents, all taking millions and billions of years. Then on the right side there is God’s Word, quoting Genesis, describing how God created earth and life in just six days, about six thousand years ago.

A thinking person walking through the museum might conclude that God’s word isn’t always very reasonable.

I was surprised, however, to see some serious concessions to science. For example there is a small exhibit showing a copy of a book by Charles Templeton, titled “Farewell to God”, and a quote saying that it is simply not possible to believe the biblical account of creation. And in a later exhibit I was shocked to see the following statements. “Natural selection is an observable process that occurs in the present.” “Natural selection is supported biblically and scientifically.” The museum actually supports the conclusion that one species can give rise to many through natural selection. But it somehow separates this from evolution by saying that there is no evidence for more dramatic events, like lizards giving rise to birds. Pretty interesting.

We also see pictures of great canyons, like the grand canyon. While science claims that it took millions of years to carve these out, the museum clarifies that these things can happen in a much shorter time through the power of floods.

And this brings us to the great flood. The museum is actually building a full size replica of Noah’s ark. You’d think it would have to be pretty big to carry all of the species we see on the planet today. It turns out there was no room for the dinosaurs. And how on earth did Noah get the kangaroos back to Australia? Maybe the ark made an extra stop not mentioned in the bible. Or, the museum suggests that before the flood there was only one continent, which then divided into several in the past few thousand years. Wow, pretty fast.

And what about those fresh water fish? If the oceans rose up to swallow the continent(s) then all of the lakes and rivers must have disappeared. And anyone with an aquarium knows that you can’t put fresh water fish in salt water. They die. So I think that maybe another lost section of the bible described how one floor of the ark was dedicated to fresh water aquaria to save the fish. I’m personally especially glad that Noah was able to save the Rocky Mountain trout.

The bible is quite a nice book. It sold a lot more copies than any of mine. There is some interesting history in there, and many fascinating stories. Maybe you like the God thing that it pushes, or maybe you don’t. But whatever your religious view, please, oh please, one thing that we can all be sure of, you should not take everything in the bible for literal truth.
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Re: Creation Museum opens in KY, end times draw nearer

Postby Rspaight » Mon Jun 06, 2011 8:48 am

One of the funniest things about the "museum" is how hard it works to integrate "science" into its young-earth creationist message. Sure, natural selection is real, they say, but only within "kinds." And it's really really fast. So Noah only had to load two dogs onto the ark, and after the flood they spawned all the wolves, coyotes, dingoes, beagles, poodles and St. Bernards we have now. But a cat and dog can't have a common ancestor. That's just silly.

This is most obvious in the planetarium show. Most of it is actually really cool stuff, with some bonkers YEC stuff injected at regular intervals to "explain" the contradictions. For example, there's a compelling sequence about how immensely far away other stars are, let alone other galaxies. But wait, the universe is only 6,000 years old -- how can we see the light from these objects millions of light-years away? No problem, the light traveled through some sort of transdimensional wormhole between here and there. Problem solved.

And one of the exhibits showed dinosaurs on the ark (the writer must have missed that detail), but said they died out after the flood.
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Re: Creation Museum opens in KY, end times draw nearer

Postby lukpac » Wed May 08, 2013 11:38 pm

"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD