Creation Museum

I’ve been planning on doing it all summer but today I finally went to the new Creation Museum in KY. Here is my official review. It is long and has lots of pictures. Sorry to anyone on dial-up.

For anyone who doesn’t know my background, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology. At the time I was studying I was a fundamentalist Christian. I learned all my required evolutionary theory with no problems. I didn’t think much about how it correlated with my faith. I was good at cognitive dissonance in those days. After vet school my faith changed. Do I think science has all the answers? No, but I think it has the best answers that we have at this time. So with that all in mind I went to see what was being presented at this museum.

First impressions:

I’d been following the story of the building of the museum and knew that there were millions of dollars involved. It shows. The facility is beautiful. This is the entrance.

When I went inside I was amazed that there was a long line for admission. It was 11:45 on a Monday morning. The line was full of very polite people. Since driving in I was feeling very sad. All I could think was, “Do all these people believe this?” and “This is a beautiful presentation of a lie.”

I paid for my admission and bought admission to the planetarium show. I figured since I had driven down I was going to see it all. The first exhibit I saw was a life sized model of a Wooly Rhino skeleton with these signs.

If you were near me at this point in my tour I would have been the lady standing slightly open-mouthed with tears in my eyes. It actually felt hard to breathe. Everyone around me was happily taking all this in as fact. I turned the corner and came face to face with this.

The dinosaur and the prehistoric child together. The dino wags his tail and moves his head. It is similar to canine play posturing. Dinosaur as prototypical Golden Retriever.

From here you are funneled past some small exhibits. Here is a representative sign.

I tried to go to the rest of the museum but guards stopped me and wouldn’t let me pass because it was less than 45 minutes to my planetarium reservation. So I wandered a bit near the entrance and found this.

The vegetarian part of me loves it but sadly, the scientific part just can’t agree.

I went to the planetarium and the show was very well produced. It was pretty good until the end when it started talking about things that science doesn’t have an answer for. I’m ok with not having an answer but I don’t know that I can trust that they are telling me the truth about there not being scientific rationale for the examples cited. Astronomy is not something I know about. That’s the problem with this museum. If I wasn’t well versed in biology would the absurdity be as clear?

On my next attempt I got past the guards to the rest of the museum. I walked into a display of fossils. There was a movie playing. The “scientist” on screen said that he knew how to interpret fossils because the Bible tells him what happened. His colleague comes to a different conclusion because he doesn’t believe. Shot of spooky looking Chinese guy representing the unbeliever is on screen. I scoffed out loud but quietly. That washed away the sadness I was feeling and moved me towards open disbelief.

So how do you deal with the fossil record? Show displays comparing and contrasting “Human Reason” and “God’s Word.”

Then there is a display about the Bible and you move into a narrow hall that talks about what happens if the Bible is ignored. You are moving from a light and airy room to a cramped, graffiti lined passage. There are fake mice. It is dark and gloomy. The walls are papered with magazine and newspaper articles doubting Christianity. The guys in front of me looked at each other and said, “Are we going into the ghetto?”

There are 2 video screens under a sign asking what happens if you remove Scripture from the home. In one a boy is wearing a t-shirt with beer pictured on it and he is on the internet. The room is messy. I couldn’t hear the sound. In the next a teen girl is on the phone. She has a pregnancy test in her hand. Then there are displays for taking Scripture out of church, etc. A loudspeaker gives statistics. As I was about to be able to leave this room it said that 50% of teen girls had had premarital sex. I stopped cold to wait to see if they would say anything about boys. No. Apparently either the girls are having sex by themselves or they are all lesbians because no boys are involved. Got my feminism all riled up. By now I was starting to talk out loud. But it must not have been too obnoxious because no one even looked at me. There was a thing that said that the church might be dead and buried in 40 years. Ah, the Christian persecution complex is alive and well.

I eventually moved into a replica of the Garden of Eden and the story of the fall of man.

Let us never miss a chance to take a swipe at gay marriage, I guess.

You turn a corner and come face to face with huge pictures of women screaming in labor, junkies (minorities only), wolves snarling, etc. I doubled over laughing. It had gone so absurd at this point. I worked my way through Noah’s Ark to the dinosaurs. I’ll let them speak for themselves.

In case you didn’t know the Flood was in 2348 BC. That would be smack-dab in the middle of the Egyptians building the pyramids. They don’t address that little problem.

I was in a pretty good mood so I decided to hit another movie on my way out. It is called Men in White. Two angels in white coveralls tell an animatronic girl not to listen to her culture and to believe the Bible. The intro says that it is a satire but that you will learn truths. This movie made me furious. I was taking notes like crazy all the way through. It was so bad that I’ll just give the highlights.

1. The basic idea is that evolution equals despair. If it is true then life can have no meaning.
2. They said that evolution only makes sense if you believe that you have billions and billions of years to work with. Then they laughed because that’s obviously not true.
3. There was a fake news broadcast with a scientist called Dr. Ed U. Kaded. The angel guys would mute him and mock what he was saying. That gives the impression that it is bad to be educated.
4. They tried to say radioisotope dating of rocks doesn’t work using various examples. My favorite was when they said that the rocks thrown out of Mt. St. Helens were tested to be thousands of years old when everyone knows that it erupted in the 1980s. (Uh, they were inside the volcano for a long time and were spit out in the 80s? Sorry, my logic kicked in there for second.)
5. There was a scene in a science class. No one is listening to the cartoonishly boring teacher. (Implication – science is boring). The angel guys start asking questions to the teacher that he of course can’t answer. The implication being that no one can answer them. The teacher says that the proof for evolution is the picture of an ape leading to proto-humans leading to Homo sapien. The angel guys say it is just a picture. The teacher gets flustered because this drawing is the only proof he has.
6. At the end they explain that atheism is a bias that scientists have so they can’t see that God created everything. (And they aren’t biased?)
7. Again they state that if you dismiss Genesis then you dismiss the existence of God and therefore life has no meaning.

I was so frustrated after this that I went for a walk in the gardens. They are lovely and getting out in nature made me feel better.

I breathed deeply and settled myself. I started to imagine what wonderful museums could be made about the Hopi Creation stories or the Feri Star Goddess who who gave birth to the universe after an act of (gasp) self-love if millions of dollars were available. I took a comment card and wrote that it made me sad to see these displays of intellectual dishonesty and lies presented as fact. I mailed the card so my voice can be heard even though it won’t matter. I will be making a matching donation to a scientific organization to balance the money I spent on admission.