Squeezing brontos into an ark …
Here’s a museum I won’t be visiting:
PETERSBURG, Ky. (AP) — Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve.
That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that’s the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky, a few miles from Cincinnati.
Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago.
“If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that’s our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there,” museum founder Ken Ham said during recent tour of the sleek and modern facility, which is due to open next year.
Ham, an Australian native who started the Christian publishing company Answers in Genesis in the late 1970s, said the goal of his privately funded museum is to change minds and rebut the scientific point of view.
“We’re going to show you that we can make sense of the different people groups, we can make sense of fossils, we can make sense of what you see in the world,” he said.
Visitors to the museum will be able to watch the story of creation unfold in a 180-seat special-effects theater, see a 40-foot-tall recreation of a section of Noah’s Ark and stare into the jaws of robotic dinosaurs.
“It’s education, but it’s also doing it in an entertaining way,” Ham said.
Scientists say fossils and sophisticated nuclear dating technology show that the Earth is more than 4 billion years old, the first dinosaurs appeared around 200 million years ago, and they died out well before the first human ancestors arose a few million years ago.
“Genesis is not science,” said Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. “Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and certainly knew nothing about what fossils were.”
Ham said he believes most fossils are the result of the Great Flood described in Genesis.
Mark Looy, a vice president at Answers in Genesis, said the museum has received at least $21 million in private donations. He said two anonymous donors have given $1 million, and he expects the museum to be debt-free when it opens next May.
John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, an organization that promotes creationism, said the museum will affirm the doubts many people have about science, namely the notion that man evolved from lower forms of life.
“Americans just aren’t gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish,” he said.
I’m not sure why people try so hard to reconcile Genesis with science. To me, religion is a faith thing — not a science thing. If faith tells someone there’s a God in Heaven looking out for us, why the need to make science back that up? Isn’t the faith alone enough?
When people start ripping up science to make it fit a Bible they insist must be literally true … I just don’t get it.
If a Christian tells me he has faith in God, there’s no argument from me. But when a Christian wants to warp science … well, I think there are better uses for a brain. And I think in a world where we have nuclear arms, the capability of cloning, debates over stem-cell research, global warming, increasing technology, etc., anything that furthers the scientific illiteracy of this country is just plain bad. How can we possibly elect leaders capable of dealing with this nation’s problems if we don’t understand basic science ourselves?
Honestly, part of me would like to check this museum out. I think it would be a hoot. I have a lot of pointed questions I’d love to ask the curators. But I don’t want to give them my money.
And I think the donors could have taken that $25 million and actually helped a lot of people, instead of spreading bad “science.”
– Steve
P.S. — I’ve shut down comments on this thread, not to silence anyone, but simply because the topic is more or less exhausted and I’m exhausted from replying to it all the time. Is was a lively discussion, and far more than I expected. Thanks for your contributions, everyone.
P.P.S. — With the passage of time and the emergence of other things to talk about, etc., I’ve decided to re-open this topic to comments. So if anyone has any points they’d hope to expand upon, or questions to ask, go ahead. Just keep it civil, ya’ll.
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