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."
Creationist credibility is an oxymoron, like Army Intelligence.
The last time I can recall a a FReeper with a denial of reality this brazen was the late, great "Gore3000" who claimed that most planets had "wildly elliptical orbits" and was taken to the woodshed for it; similarly, he claimed shortly thereafter that "a circle is not an ellipse," and on yet another occasion he claimed that "infrared light" caused sunburn. In every instance he denied he had made the mistakes, which were quoted back to him via hyper-links.
I don't know what causes anti-evolutionaries to engage in this sort of brazen denial of their own behavior, though G3k offered the best clue I've seen: he once wrote that no matter what, he would never admit a mistake to anyone from the "pro-evolution" side of the argument.
Such is the level of intellectual honesty, and scientific knowledge, we so often see from that anti-evolution side.
Thank you. Thank you.
s--Why is it that creationists, like communists, project their world view to others?
m--Is it not the evo's who use Gov't funds and the power of the ACLU to force school boards to teach Origins a certain way?
First, the ACLU is a communist organization and I hate it.
Second, the teaching of "origins" is fine if taught as religion or theology, but it is not biology. Keep your religious speculations in your literalist Christian schools that will never produce a competent biologist if their life depended on it.
It might help if you would list a small syllabus of what you think the curriculum for "origins" should be. Thank you so much.
Please state the "Theory of Intelligent" design. Then we will be able to discuss the syllogisms you posed.
For your information, here is a widely accepted summary of the Theory of Evolution:
The theory of evolution
A number of theories that explain, to the best of current knowledge, by what mechanisms evolution occurs. (This translates into the technical definition of changes in allele frequencies in populations over time.) The theory can be falsified by showing that allele frequencies do not change over time or by showing that humans and dinos are fossilized in the same strata and date from the same time.
(The reason we must ask you for the state of the "Theory of Intelligent Design is because we don't know what it says.
While you are at it, you can mention how the theory you present can be falsified.)
And he claims not to know anything about the subject of that article. Or he forgot.
" 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."
I never said the theory is an "absolute fact". I said that evolution is a fact and the theory of evolution explains that fact.
You have created a strawman to argue against me similar to the strawman you create when you put creation into the TOE when it is NOT THERE!!!!! That's right, you are arguing against a theory you do not understand because you modify it to argue against it.
Please don't put words in my mouth to ridicule me, again. It is not Christian.
twisting in the wind placemarker.
"Or he forgot."
Senior moment? ;-)
Well, for large entities (animals of course), on can use interbreed but that isn't transitive. Of course, species (and genus and family, etc.) is only a classification of a group of entities, not a property of an entity. This seems to conflict with the Creationist word "kind" which they treat as a property.
Or whether.
"This seems to conflict with the Creationist word "kind" which they treat as a property."
Yes, but you give them too much credit in an attempt to be kind. ;-)
"This seems to conflict with the Creationist word "kind" which they treat as a property."
Yes, but you give them too much credit in an attempt to be kind. ;-)
It probably isn't Christian to ambush people over slight variations in wording, or to refuse to acknowledge things that others have said over and over. But then I suppose once you are saved you don't need to worry about mere behavior. Belief is enough.
That may be so - some are by far too closed to view creation and science do not have to conflict. Example: the literalist will read "God formed man of the dust of the ground" but never think beyond the dirt to consider minute cellular function. Five thousand years ago, I'm almost sure single-celled life forms would have been considered "dust of the earth" - not that life was FORMED then, but the technology to understand single-celled organisms differently didn't exist....
See 503.
Correction: 507
Yes, and a truly comprehensive theory of physics must bridge quantum theory and relativity. But what happens in the meantime.
You know very well that currently biology has no theory of abiogenesis, but that isn't what you are arguing about. You are merely dragging a red herring across the path of common descent -- which is among the most thouroughly agreed upon facts in science.
"It probably isn't Christian to ambush people over slight variations in wording, or to refuse to acknowledge things that others have said over and over. But then I suppose once you are saved you don't need to worry about mere behavior. Belief is enough."
The variations you stuck in my mouth were not "slight variations" That you do not understand that is telling.
Creationists say all their talking points over and over. I don't acknowledge nonsense.
It is your behavior that is in question. Strawman arguments are small evils that creationists have built into a big idolatry.
Just wanted to tell you that your theology is way off. What you should search your soul for is some openmindedness to the miracle God provided us when he thought of evolution.
My take on "dust of the ground" is God was trying to inspire the notion of atoms or molecules and it was misapprehended by the authors of the text.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.