Posted on 01/02/2005 12:20:11 PM PST by PatrickHenry
With its towering dinosaurs and a model of the Grand Canyon, America's newest tourist attraction might look like the ideal destination for fans of the film Jurassic Park.
The new multi-million-dollar Museum of Creation, which will open this spring in Kentucky, will, however, be aimed not at film buffs, but at the growing ranks of fundamentalist Christians in the United States.
It aims to promote the view that man was created in his present shape by God, as the Bible states, rather than by a Darwinian process of evolution, as scientists insist.
The centrepiece of the museum is a series of huge model dinosaurs, built by the former head of design at Universal Studios, which are portrayed as existing alongside man, contrary to received scientific opinion that they lived millions of years apart.
Other exhibits include images of Adam and Eve, a model of Noah's Ark and a planetarium demonstrating how God made the Earth in six days.
The museum, which has cost a mighty $25 million (£13 million) will be the world's first significant natural history collection devoted to creationist theory. It has been set up by Ken Ham, an Australian evangelist, who runs Answers in Genesis, one of America's most prominent creationist organisations. He said that his aim was to use tourism, and the theme park's striking exhibits, to convert more people to the view that the world and its creatures, including dinosaurs, were created by God 6,000 years ago.
"We want people to be confronted by the dinosaurs," said Mr Ham. "It's going to be a first class experience. Visitors are going to be hit by the professionalism of this place. It is not going to be done in an amateurish way. We are making a statement."
The museum's main building was completed recently, and work on the entrance exhibit starts this week. The first phase of the museum, which lies on a 47-acre site 10 miles from Cincinatti on the border of Kentucky and Ohio, will open in the spring.
Market research companies hired by the museum are predicting at least 300,000 visitors in the first year, who will pay $10 (£5.80) each.
Among the projects still to be finished is a reconstruction of the Grand Canyon, purportedly formed by the swirling waters of the Great Flood – where visitors will "gape" at the bones of dinosaurs that "hint of a terrible catastrophe", according to the museum's publicity.
Mr Ham is particularly proud of a planned reconstruction of the interior of Noah's Ark. "You will hear the water lapping, feel the Ark rocking and perhaps even hear people outside screaming," he said.
More controversial exhibits deal with diseases and famine, which are portrayed not as random disasters, but as the result of mankind's sin. Mr Ham's Answers in Genesis movement blames the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves, on evolutionist teaching, claiming that the perpetrators believed in Darwin's survival of the fittest.
Other exhibits in the museum will blame homosexuals for Aids. In a "Bible Authority Room" visitors are warned: "Everyone who rejects his history – including six-day creation and Noah's flood – is `wilfully' ignorant.''
Elsewhere, animated figures will be used to recreate the Garden of Eden, while in another room, visitors will see a tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve after their fall from grace. "That's the real terror that Adam's sin unleashed," visitors will be warned.
A display showing ancient Babylon will deal with the Tower of Babel and "unravel the origin of so-called races'', while the final section will show the life of Christ, as an animated angel proclaims the coming of the Saviour and a 3D depiction of the crucifixion.
In keeping with modern museum trends, there will also be a cafe with a terrace to "breathe in the fresh air of God's creation'', and a shop "crammed'' with creationist souvenirs, including T-shirts and books such as A is for Adam and Dinky Dinosaur: Creation Days.
The museum's opening will reinforce the burgeoning creationist movement and evangelical Christianity in the US, which gained further strength with the re-election of President Bush in November.
Followers of creationism have been pushing for their theories to be reintegrated into American schoolroom teaching ever since the celebrated 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial", when US courts upheld the right of a teacher to use textbooks that included evolutionary theory.
In 1987, the US Supreme Court reinforced that position by banning the teaching of creationism in public schools on the grounds of laws that separate state and Church.
Since then, however, many schools – particularly in America's religious Deep South – have got around the ban by teaching the theory of "intelligent design", which claims that evolutionary ideas alone still leave large gaps in understanding.
"Since President Bush's re-election we have been getting more membership applications than we can handle,'' said Mr Ham, who expects not just the devout, but also the curious, to flock through the turnstiles. "The evolutionary elite will be getting a wake-up call."
Actually, even a literal six day creation is compatible with modern science (speaking solely of the time frame, not necessarily any theological implications). If God saying "let there be light" corresponded to the big bang, and our understanding of big bang theory is correct, then the universe was much smaller than it is now. The total mass-energy present in that smaller universe should be the same as that present today, by the law of conservation of mass-energy. Therefore the gravitational fields present in the early universe would have been extremely large. However, the general theory of relativity tells us that a time interval that passes between two events, measured by an observer in a large gravitational field will be shorter than the interval between the same two events measured by an observer in a low gravitational field. Therefore, when God created the universe, since the gravitational field was large, He measured the time between "let there be light" and the final act of creation as six days. Observers today would measure a much longer time interval, and a time of 10-15 billion years is not unreasonable. (I am not personally enough of an expert on either big bang cosmology or the general theory of relativity to perform a detailed calculation of how long an interval would actually be measured today, but I have seen such calculations on the web; sorry can't remember the URL right now)
My point is directed to your insistance upon the need for experimentally re-creating the long sequence of innumerable instances of micro-evolution (which you do accept), and which sequence would extend through thousands of generations, to convince you of the phenomenon you call macro-evolution.
Leaving aside the observed instances of bacteria and fruit flies, but staying within the confines of human observation, we do indeed have examples of ever-more obvious instances of speciation, or near-speciation. We have dog breeds, we have the well-documented farm-fox experiment. We have other Observed Instances of Speciation. But you seem to want an experimental re-creation of the whole tree of life, or you won't accept even the concept of evolution. I respectfully suggest that your demand is an unreasonable obstacle to even trying to understand the evidence.
The fallacy of Non Causa Pro Causa occurs when something is identified as the cause of an event, but it has not actually been shown to be the cause.
The difference between what you call macro-evolution and ID is that in the case of evolution there actually is an observed cause, and that's mutation (observed daily, and historically tracable through the DNA) plus natural selection. ID, on the other hand, proposes an invisible, never-seen, never-evidenced cause, one which is furthermore entirely unnecessary in view of the cause proposed by the theory of evolution. I respectfully suggest that the difference is not only readily apparent, but it's overwhelming.
I suppose where you and I clash is in what I perceive as your insistence that a theory (the theory of macro-evolution, specifically) is a fact rather than an explanation competing with other potentially valid explanations.
Nope. Evolution happens. It's observed. That's the fact. The theory of evolution explains what happened in the past and how it happened. Taking macro-evolution specifically, the theory of evolution is entirely sufficient to explain the sequence of observed facts (the fossils, the DNA, etc.). I gather, from your prior posts, that your objection to even considering the theory is that macro-evolution hasn't been experimentally re-created. This is a strained objection.
If you could establish, through DNA evidence, that you were a descendant of Napoleon, would you tolerate an objection of this nature?
I think that was a figure of speech. I could be mistaken, but I think the Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest copies of scripture.
Sometime in the 1800s scholars began to analyze the style of Old Testament writing and declared that there were several authors or sources. I think tortoise is saying that the style of the creation story indicates it was a later addition.
O. gigas me with a spoon. We're back to Primroses again. de vries, like many evolutionists, seemed to suffer from premature classification. Apparently there is no treatment.
Yet another possibility: more than one person is using that screen name to post, and is unaware of posts made by other users of the same screen name. It's a violation of FR policy to do this, but that never stopped the anti-science fanatics in the past.
Apparently yes, since a creationist on another thread declared that there was no evidence that Julius Caesar and Princes Diana were of the same species. Apparently, nothing that we consider evidence is really evidence.
I tried to read your post. I got through the first couple of words, but then you just lost me. I just can't accept this business of macro-words. Unless you can experimentally prove to me that all of your words are really strung together coherently, I just won't accept them.
That's also possible. I hadn't thought that he might actually be multiple personalities (as opposed to just having them.)
Many creationists will say, ‘We accept microevolution, but not macroevolution.’ As our main article points out, the ‘micro’ changes (i.e. observed genetic variation) are not capable of accumulating into macro ones, anyway.We suggest, however, that it would be wiser to avoid the use of the term ‘microevolution’. To most people, it sounds as if you are conceding that there is a ‘little bit of evolution’ going on. I.e. a little bit of the same process that, given enough time, will turn microbes into millipedes, magnolias and microbiologists. Thus, you will be seen as churlish or, as in Dr Coyne’s inverted ‘train’ example, as irrational for putting what they see as an arbitrary distinction between the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’.
If the use of such potentially misleading terminology is unavoidable, always take the opportunity to point out that the changes often labelled ‘microevolution’ cannot be the same process as the hypothetical ‘goo-to-you’ belief. They are all information-losing processes, which thus depend on there being a store of information to begin with.
ping to 452
In the last one he asks someone to read the article about Flew again.
I find it interesting that in the posts he didn't make on the thread that doesn't exist that discusses a person he's never heard of, he tells others to read the article.
Actually, he's telling dimensio to read the article that doesn't exist about the person he's never heard of.
Who said making sense of the "evidence" would be easy?
~Michael_Michaelangelo, FR, Jan 2005
“recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species”.
~John Rennie, Scientific American, “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense”, June 2002
Two points:
1. A theory as used in science has very little to do with any dictionary definitions which relate to the common usage of the term. A theory in science is a framework that explains a wide range of observational data. A law is a statement (sometimes mathematical) that simply describes a regularity in observational data. A theory never becomes a law no matter how much evidence is put forth. An example to make this clear is gravity. The law of gravity, put forth by Newton, states that there is an attractive force between any two massive bodies that is proportional to both masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. It thus describes a regularity of nature. It makes no attempt to explain why there's a force or why the force has the measured value that it has. An example of a theory of gravity came much later. It is the general theory of relativity proposed by Einstein. It explains the force measured between two objects by stating that space-time is warped by matter and that the measured force is a result of this warping. Furthermore, this theory showed that the old law did not accurately describe observations in some cases. Thus you have an example where a theory was used to correct a law, something that according to what you have previously said, I believe you don't think could happen.
2. The theory of evolution is an explanation for a range of observations within a limited scope. It's scope is limited solely to those times in which life existed. The theory of evolution has nothing to say about how life came to exist. Logically, the conclusions of evolution are independent of how life came to exist. It would make no difference for evolution if life were created by God, planted by aliens, or created through some materialistic abiogenesis. Evolution states that all of the diversity of life arises because the allele frequencies in the gene pools of organisms change over time. It says that these changes are sufficient to produce new species of organisms. This conclusion would hold regardless of where the first life came from. Does this mean that biologists don't try to figure out where life came from? Of course not, but these studies are not a part of evolution. This situation is similar to that in all other areas of science. To understand theories of gravity, it it necessary to determine where matter came from? No, but that would be an interesting field of study in its own right. To understand meteorology, must we also include atmospheric origins? No, but again the study of atmospheric origins is interesting also. But the origin of matter is not a part of the general theory of relativity and the origin of the atmosphere is not a part of the study of meteorology. Similarly, the origin of life, while an interesting topic of study, is not a part of the theory of evolution. (One possible source for this misconception may be that a process much like natural selection is one hypothesis that is being considered by scientists who study abiogenesis. It still isn't part of the theory of evolution, however.)
I think the original argument was that evidence that can't be experimentally reproduced is not valid evidence. Eyewitness testimony to the happenings of the Revolutionary War or the Civil War cannot be experimentally reproduced. Ie., no matter how many corpses of the founding fathers you exhume, you won't be able to have any of them write down their accounts today; therefore, their accounts are not experimentally reproducible. Since this eyewitness testimony fails the original standard, must we then conclude that the Revolution is "just a theory?"
Mmm, science is not a democracy, but I can produce in evidence more scientists who think IAG espouse nonsense whose first name is Steve (over 500 including current Nobel Laureates) than is in your AIG accreditation list (which includes numerous non-practicing-scientsts). It is the evidence that counts of course but you need to be aware that science as a whole considers those who support AIG ignore the evidence, not just about evolution, but about the whole of the rest of scientific knowledge; since AIG rejects not just evolution, but post 18th-century geology, paleontology, physics, cosmology, astronomy, and archeology.
It doesn't appear to be very bizarre to me nor to a host of others. As far as AiG is concerned:Answers in Genesis has always believed that ‘new information’ cannot arise by natural processes — It can only be explained by a Creator who pre-programmed specific traits in the genetic codes of all living things.
Having a belief isn't the same thing as that belief being logical. You didn't answer my specific point: If a mutation can remove information why can the same mutation in reverse not add information?
While you are about it, if you believe in a young earth what is your explanation for the total absence of modern fossil forms other than in the topmost, youngest strata? (a prediction of ToE, and a falsification for YEC)
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