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."
Before you proceed much further, you really must acquaint yourself with the way these terms are used in science:
The scientific method.
What's a Scientific Theory? Encyclopedia article.
The theory explains how, the natural history of our world is the fact.
There are respected authorities who posed intelligent design as an alternative scientific theory to evolution.
Correction: There are respected authorities who posed intelligent design as an alternative scientific theory to evolution. See The Raelians
The current theory of evolution leaves some serious scientific questions unanswered (see post #468).
All answered now. Will that change your argument? Are you capable of learning?
Wonderful. They are entitled to believe their own interpretation. That still doesn't take anything away that there are plenty of respectable, real scientists, who do have peer-reviewed materials in respected scientific journals. I also would be careful to tout Nobel Laureates. ;-)
Having a belief isn't the same thing as that belief being logical.
I wholeheartedly agree!!
You didn't answer my specific point: If a mutation can remove information why can the same mutation in reverse not add information?
Although this is not the best analogy, this is similar to saying I have letters ABCDEFG. They've now mutated to AACDBFG. Where's the new information? This is dealt more thoroughly here.
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?
This is dealt with and fits the YEC framework.
As already stated, it appears that we will agree to disagree
BUUUUZZZZZZZZ! Wrong again.
Go look up "closed system", "heat transfer", and "The Sun" and you just might learn why it doesn't apply to the Earth, the sustainment of life, or the process of evolution.
Theories have some requirements to be considered as such. This has been explained many times. Creationism has no falsification possibility. Anything can be explained by pointing out that "That's the way Zeus did it." ID is essentiallythe same as Creationism with Wotan replacing Zeus. Likewise, Creationism (and its various other incarnations) make no predictions that can distinguish between them and any other theory.
A theory (as science uses that term) does far more than that. Anyone can speculate. Every swami speculates. Every drunk in every bar speculates. Speculation is the cheapest coinage in the realm. Ah, but a theory ... it not only provides a cause-and-effect explanation of the observable, verifiable data, it also makes testable predictions.
I see you didn't understand. Supposing I start with AACDEFG and mutate to ABCDEFG (equally possible to your example). In this case if your example redults in a loss of phenotype my example results in a gain of phenotype.
And he's a Scientist and a Biology Instructor, for cripes sakes! Heck, if the science educators keep running around telling everyone Evolution is a Fact, then what are the children to believe? What about the kids?
I guess we will, as long as you persist in believing in AIG stuff that has been falsified many times over. The YEC framework is a particularly abject example of non-science that simply makes a stack of unsupportable assertions whilst ignoring the multi-disciplinary crushing evidence against its model.
This has been done many times here. Example: rabbit fossils in pre-cambrian strate. Another example: a cat giving birth to a bird would falsify evolutionary theory.
What would falsify Creationism? Just give the outlines of an experiment or observation.
—Antony Flew, former atheist, in an interview in Philosophia Christi (Winter 2004).
Sorry, I have to physically depart the debate to attend to other duties. Perhaps we can continue it later.
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