Kentucky Boasts $27M Museum Devoted to Creationism

PETERSBURG, Ky. — The glass display case filled with a variety of finches could be in any natural history museum. It is set among exhibits on frogs and lizards, across from a gift shop and a diorama of life in ancient times.But this is something different: the Creation Museum, a $27 million destination that brings a new level of high-tech polish to an antievolution argument.The text below the display case says scientists are “puzzled” by the varieties of finches. “The Bible provides the explanation,” it says. “In the beginning of time, 6,000 years ago, God created every kind of bird, including the finch kind, and He gave them the ability to ‘multiply on the earth.”‘The 60,000-square-foot museum, which opened this week on 49 acres of lush Kentucky countryside, is the work of Answers in Genesis, a leader in the “young earth” creationist movement. Unlike proponents of “intelligent design” — who question aspects of evolutionary theory but may accept that the universe is billions of years old — members of “young earth” groups insist that the Book of Genesis is an accurate historical record.Because history began only 6,000 years ago, they argue, dinosaurs discovered in the fossil record must have coexisted with humans. In the diorama that greets museum visitors, models of baby T. rexes cavort among animatronic children clad in buckskin.Dinosaurs are all over the Creation Museum: Visitors can plunk down $29.99 for a plastic apatosaurus in the gift shop. Their children will be able to saddle up on the back of a model triceratops by the coffee bar.“Kids are fascinated by them,” said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, who says the creatures have too long been used as propaganda for the evolutionist cause.“We like to say, ‘You’ve captured them for evolution, and we’re going to take them back,”‘ Mr. Ham said.The museum, with its flat-screen TVs, coffee bar, and special-effects theater, is an attempt to go mainstream with an idea that has been widely discredited by modern science. And that is a concern for defenders of evolutionary theory. The Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a Washington-based group that advocates science education and the separation of church and state, recently compared the museum to cigarette ads aimed at the young.“This is to science what Joe Camel was to health — a crass marketing ploy that cynically preys on the impressionable minds of children,” campaign co-director Clark Stevens said in a statement.Edwin Kagin, national legal director for the group American Atheists, sees something worse at work.“In the recent presidential debate, you had three Republican candidates raise their hand and say they didn’t believe in evolution,” he said, referring to Senator Brownback of Kansas; a former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado. “Now, that’s getting dangerous. … Within a generation we could be back in a Dark Ages, where direct revelation is accepted over science.”Mr. Ham, a former Australian schoolteacher who founded his ministry in 1979, said he simply wants people to “think about the origins issue” in a new way.“You have secular museums in every major city that treat evolution as fact, and public schools around this nation treating evolution as fact, and they’re worried about one Creation Museum?“If evolution is so obvious,” he said with a smile, “why are they so worried?”Mr. Ham believes many modern Christians have strayed from the basic tenets of their faith because they learned in school that evolution, not Genesis, provided the best blueprint for the story of creation.Creationists already boast one smaller museum, called the Museum of Creation and Earth History, in Santee, Calif., as well as a number of roadside attractions. In Cabazon, Calif., dinosaur models tower as high as 65 feet over nearby Interstate 10, enticing visitors to unlearn Darwin.The Kentucky museum takes creationist tourism to a new level. Its chief designer, Patrick Marsh, designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Florida’s Universal Studios.Organizers are expecting to attract 250,000 yearly visitors, who will pay $9.95 to $19.95 for a ticket.Mark Looy, an Answers in Genesis spokesman, gave a preview of the experience earlier this month.Beyond the diorama of the dinosaurs and children is a reproduction of a narrow slot canyon from the Grand Canyon. A video on a flat-screen television asks “Have you ever wondered where canyons come from?” laying the groundwork for a recurring assertion: that the Grand Canyon was not carved out over millions of years by the Colorado River, but by a rush of water created by the great flood described in Genesis.Further exhibits promote the idea that the fossil record, among other things, can be viewed from two “different starting points.” Using the starting point of “human reason,” scientists arrive at the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang, and that all life, including humans, evolved from one organism 4 billion years ago.But if one begins with “God’s word” as a guide, the exhibits argue, everything looks different. One chart rebuts the notion that Lucy — the Ethiopian hominid whose bones showed scientists an intermediary link between apes and humans — has anything to do with the story of humanity.Elsewhere, the 176-seat specialeffects theater will simulate wind and rain for a “visual thrill ride” through Bible history; Noah’s Cafe will offer a Before the Fall salad with “ice-age” iceberg lettuce; and animatronic Bible characters will hammer on a reproduction of Noah’s ark.The Answers in Genesis group believes the story of the ark to be literally true. After the ark ran aground in Central Asia, the museum explains, the surviving animals repopulated the other continents by floating across the oceans on the “billions of trees” uprooted by the great deluge.It is those kinds of assertions that make scientists such as Lawrence Krauss laugh out loud.“That’s remarkable,” said Mr. Krauss, a physicist and astronomer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, in a telephone interview. “Any child knows that when they make up a story, and unfortunately make up the facts, they have to make up more and more excuses to justify those facts.”

Kentucky Boasts $27M Museum Devoted to Creationism

Kentucky Boasts $27M Museum Devoted to Creationism

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