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In the beginning . . . Adam walked with dinosaurs [Creationist Park]
Telegraph.co.uk ^ | 02 January 2005 | James Langton

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."


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Miscellaneous; Philosophy; US: Kentucky
KEYWORDS: creationism; cretinism; crevolist; darwin; evolution; kenham; themepark
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To: Michael_Michaelangelo
I suggest you refer to a number of posters [such as shubi] on this thread who maintained that the theory of evolution is nothing less than absolute fact.

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.

501 posted on 01/04/2005 11:57:05 AM PST by Thatcherite (Conservative and Biblical Literalist are not synonymous)
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To: Michael_Michaelangelo
Are they quantifiable?

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.

502 posted on 01/04/2005 11:57:48 AM PST by js1138 (D*mn, I Missed!)
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To: Michael_Michaelangelo

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?


503 posted on 01/04/2005 12:01:14 PM PST by Thatcherite (Conservative and Biblical Literalist are not synonymous)
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To: Thatcherite

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.


504 posted on 01/04/2005 12:03:41 PM PST by Hawkeye
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To: nmh
Again, in NONE of my replies have I acknowledged knowing this Anthony kook. All you can do is point to my criticism of ANY evolutionist. Post my replies all you like but understand that anyone who wastes their time reading your links to any of my replies on FR will easily see that I don't know this individual and my criticism is aimed at evolutionists at large.

Here's a challenge for you. Go through ALL the FR archives and find a reply by me where I mention this kooks name.

All you have proven is how evolutionists, such as yourself have an unhealthy imagination and wish to believe what is not true. You will go to great lengths to believe a lie. In your rabid emotional state paranoia has taken over to the extreme of speaking for me and stating I know this individual where I have absolutely NO knowledge of this person.

All I can deduct is he is probably another evolutionist. I know this maybe hard from your delusional state, but I am the best spokes person for myself so that when I state I don't know this individual, never heard of this individual - I mean just that. All the replies you highlight indicate that as well.

So have a ball, imagine evolution is something to take seriously. Imagine whatever you like about me. In either case, don't let reality get you down - evolution is a farce and you are delusional.

 

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.

505 posted on 01/04/2005 12:05:05 PM PST by js1138 (D*mn, I Missed!)
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To: Lucky Dog
It is absolutely amazing that so many advocates of a theory that apparently can never be experimentally verified [at least according the advocates posting on this thread] find it necessary to try to personally insult those who disagree with them.

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.

506 posted on 01/04/2005 12:11:30 PM PST by balrog666 (I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.)
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To: Thatcherite
There was earlier discussion of ID on this thread. I just tossed it out there for the heck of it.

I take it you don't like his quote?

507 posted on 01/04/2005 12:13:18 PM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo (The best theory is not ipso facto a good theory.)
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To: Lucky Dog
Perhaps you could enlighten me on the testible predictions on experimental data of the the theory of evolution, particularly those not subject to valid refutation or explanation by an alternate mechanism.

Try this. It discusses predictions, etc. Short & sweet: Is Evolution Science?.

508 posted on 01/04/2005 12:13:50 PM PST by PatrickHenry (The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: Hawkeye

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.


509 posted on 01/04/2005 12:21:14 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: js1138

Apparently he did not read the article about which he was posting.


510 posted on 01/04/2005 12:22:29 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: Dimensio
Moreover, when I corrected you on the claim that you made about Flew, you posted again and said "He rejects it". If you weren't talking about Flew then, just who were you talking about? Who did you mean when you said "he"? Why did you make a post that contained a specific claim about a specific person in reply to the original article if you weren't talking about Flew?

You need to stop lying.

Let's hope he doesn't; the entertainment value alone of his bald-faced denials makes them priceless.

511 posted on 01/04/2005 12:25:54 PM PST by longshadow
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To: Dimensio
Moreover, when I corrected you on the claim that you made about Flew, you posted again and said "He rejects it". If you weren't talking about Flew then, just who were you talking about? Who did you mean when you said "he"? Why did you make a post that contained a specific claim about a specific person in reply to the original article if you weren't talking about Flew?

You need to stop lying.

Let's hope he doesn't; the entertainment value alone of his bald-faced denials makes them priceless.

512 posted on 01/04/2005 12:25:57 PM PST by longshadow
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To: longshadow

True. True.


513 posted on 01/04/2005 12:26:43 PM PST by PatrickHenry (The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: stremba

After reviewing LD's reply I have to falsify my Theory of there Never is a Stupid Question ;-)


514 posted on 01/04/2005 12:28:40 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: js1138; nmh

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.


515 posted on 01/04/2005 12:29:16 PM PST by Dimensio (http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif <-- required reading before you use your next apostrophe!Ah, but)
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To: Michael_Michaelangelo

Since the theory of evolution doesn't care what or who designed DNA etc., this is irrelevant to the fact of evolution.


516 posted on 01/04/2005 12:30:44 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: stremba

Why not? Dead DUmocrats vote. ;-)


517 posted on 01/04/2005 12:32:14 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: js1138

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.


518 posted on 01/04/2005 12:35:07 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: Thatcherite

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.


519 posted on 01/04/2005 12:37:26 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: PatrickHenry

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.


520 posted on 01/04/2005 12:40:07 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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