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."
If he says that then he is not quite correct though maybe you have misunderstood him because I think Shubi is well aware of the difference between a scientific theory and a fact. The theory of evolution is science's current explanation of the observed fact that evolution has occurred. So evolution is both a theory and a fact, but the theory of evolution is not a fact in itself, because no scientific theory ever acquires the status of fact; theories merely pile up supporting evidence where continuing observations match the predictions of the theory (a vast amount of observations support ToE) (and occasionally conflicting evidence appears that requires modification or abandonment of the theory). Scientific theories explain observed facts.
Yes. DNA makes degree of relationship quantifiable.
Species has always been a fuzzy concept. Darwin called species a strong variety.
The concept of species is nearly meaningless when aplied to single-celled organisms. Among multi-celled organisms there are species that cannot produce viable offspring when mated with their closest relatives; there are species that produce mostly sterile hybrids; species that produce only sterile hybrids; species that never interbreed without human intervention, always produce fertile hybrids; species of plants that produce healthy hybrids with seeds too small to germinate without human intervention; species that produce healthy, fertile hybrids that do not breed true; ring species; and others.
The only common charcteristic of all these definitions is that species do not interbreed in the wild.
All this confusion is a perfectly predictable result of the fact that many living species are, in fact, transitionals. That thing that doesn't exist.
You do realise that Anthony Flew is talking about abiogenesis in that article don't you? And that Anthony Flew still wholeheartedly endorses the theory of evolution?
Ok then. What resources would you recommend that have conclusively falsified "AIG stuff" directly that I can review? If it has been definitively falsified then I'm obligated to adjust my position. The level of evidence for the opposing position has appeared to be about as crushing as a pillow.
I've never heard of this "Antony Flew" nor have I ever posted anything about this individual - especially since I have NEVER heard of this person before in my life ... so your ridiculous accusation remains just that...
I will grant that you didn't type his name. But you certainly posted opinions about him and encouraged others to read about him.
We simply question your motives, your education, and/or your native intelligence. And for obvious (to us, anyway) reasons.
As an opportune example, let us consider you. You have demonstrated, time and again, that you are incapable of reading and understanding a college physics book but "feel" qualified to question it's conclusions. You have yet to demonstrate that you can even look up and understand the scientific meaning of the term "theory". You reject the conclusions of practically the entire scientific establishment in physics, geology, cosmology, paleontology, archeology, etc. without understanding them.
Also, you seem to believe that if anyone simply states "ID/IOT" or "GODDIDIT" that it puts such statements on some kind of scientific footing.
Finally, I note that you have shown no desire to correct these deficiencies in your own education but somehow hold us responsible for your own lack of initiative in seeking out the knowledge you profess to seek.
Other than your manners (generally meaning a lack of the usual foaming-at-the-mouth outrage that anyone with a lick o' sense could ever espouse the godless, liberal, atheist-causing, basic-communist-principle, Nazi-belief-inducing, Quetzoquatl-producing, Yog-Sothoth-aligned theory of evolution) and your vocabulary and writing style, you sound like the run of the mill, Creationoid, fundamentalist, nutjob to me.
I take it you don't like his quote?
Try this. It discusses predictions, etc. Short & sweet: Is Evolution Science?.
I know. Ken Ham gives his minions rhetorical tricks to use in fighting the good fight against science. St. Ken, as we call him, is one of the finest examples of profiting from ignorance short of Hovind and Jesse Jackson.
Apparently he did not read the article about which he was posting.
You need to stop lying.
Let's hope he doesn't; the entertainment value alone of his bald-faced denials makes them priceless.
You need to stop lying.
Let's hope he doesn't; the entertainment value alone of his bald-faced denials makes them priceless.
True. True.
After reviewing LD's reply I have to falsify my Theory of there Never is a Stupid Question ;-)
Perhaps he is admitting that he ignorantly spouts off without actually reading that to which he is replying. Of course, that wouldn't help his credibility either, so who knows.
Since the theory of evolution doesn't care what or who designed DNA etc., this is irrelevant to the fact of evolution.
Why not? Dead DUmocrats vote. ;-)
The definition of species is a scientific definition, which is subject to some gray areas because of such things as unicellular organisms that use asexual reproduction.
You can't use the unable to breed with each other standard.
Bible literalists do not understand the concept of "gray area" and are unable to fathom scientific discussions, in part, because of this mindset.
It will be a cold day in H E double hockeysticks before he will be able to post a theory for you. But, I am sure he will be able to tell you a theory that isn't one that Ken Ham or Behe has fabricated.
LD won't depart from the AIG talking points on experimental data. They have cleverly discounted mountains of discovered data.
It is almost useless to debate with someone who is using words as relativist while holding to an absolutist mindset.
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