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."
"Duplication of a sequence adds a bit of information. (Later mutations may add more.)"
I am not sure information is the right term, as it tends to play into AIG creationist crapsite talking points.
One thing that bothers me in the background of this:
Creationists do not understand the concept that DNA change may not immediately transfer to some phenotypic characteristic. It may not change anything about the organism or population. It just sits there getting spread until some other change activates it. This is how a characteristic can "suddenly" appear when it serves survival of the population.
I assume some passages are literal. What does that have to do with the fact that some passages are not?
And what does it have to do with the fact that we determine which is which by the simple test of whether a passage conforms to reality?
That's correct. There is the phenotype filter (philtre?) of the genetic information. Selection acts on entities roughly according to phenotype (except for location problema, tsunamis, volcanos) but mutation acts on genotypes.
The bit point is that Creationists continually claim that duplication of a structure adds no information. Duplication of a chain does add one bit of information. Mutation of one of the chains can add much information (or even "Prisoner Number Six" style information) without losing anything as the other chain stays intact.
Information (as I keep trying to point out in the big thread about Plato....) is about counting. "Meaning" or what I call "#6" information (from the show "The Prisoner") is essentially arbitrary.
Is there interaction between the natural (what can seen, felt, touched, tasted or bought down at the 7-11) and the supernatural (that which cannot be explained by science) on this planet we inhabit?
More specifically:
Did Jesus walk on water, raise truly dead people to life, restore sight to truly blind people, etc.?
Did Jesus speak to the elements and they obey Him when He calmed the storm?
Did God use Peter, in Acts 9, to raise a truly dead person to life.
Were the handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul in Acts 19 used to actually heal people who were sick and to drive actual demons from those afflicted by them?
If yes again, do these incidents, as described in scripture, qualify as supernatural events, God acting in ways that appear to circumvent natural law as we understand it?
Meaning, in DNA, is conferred by selection, which is either complex or chaotic or both. In any case, selection is the sculptor.
Science can study claims of miracles to the extent that evidence is available. The cases you mention have left no evidence other than the report.
Quacks and charlatans are common in our world, and science does investigate some claims of supernatural and paranormal phenomena. There is a rather large standing prize available for anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal event under scrutiny.
Whether one believes Bible stories is mostly irrelevant to science, except where there is sufficient evidence. there is sufficient evidence to determine the age of the earth, the age of the geologic strata, the age of fossils, the relationship of species as seen in their DNA.
One would presume the former (information) is context free; the latter (meaning) is context dependent.
"Be seeing you..."*
* I vaguely recall that this was the standard departing phrase used by Prisoner #6, but I could be mistaken... or maybe I was attacked by a weather ballon......
"We want information..."
"We're sorry, that number is no longer in service."
I don't really like the concept of "supernatural". Jesus did what he did so it was "natural".
But none of this has anything to do with the fact that AIG is a bunch of nonsense, that makes its owners wealthy on the backs of the ignorant.
"Is the above posit a sufficient challenge to the current theory of evolution in your estimate?"
No. You can't just pull numbers out of your posterior and think it is science.
During the precambrian, as life was evolving, it took a good long time for one celled animules to turn into primitive organisms (involving multicellular organization).
We don't have much evidence because of the nature of the animules and the very old age of the rock you have to find to get any fossils. Also, we can't assume that life was all that widespread for a good length of time. If fumeroles under the ocean, as some postulate, were where life first formed, it might have taken eons to spread from there.
But when you do falsify evolution, let me know. I will be your press agent for a 10% cut.
Evolution is defined as I have stated by scientists. The definition in your dictionary is more along the lines of what scientists refer to as the theory of evolution. Whether or not "species" can be adequately defined (or whether it is even a fundamentally important concept) isn't particularly relevant. "Different species are formed by the process of evolution" is equivalent to saying that the changing allele frequencies in the gene pools of populations of organisms are sufficient to produce the diversity of life observed today and in the fossil record. As far as your challenge to evolution goes, it is a legitimate challenge, but it falls short. Any argument based on probabilities, no matter how good, is only sufficient to show that an occurrance is unlikely, not that it didn't happen. Analogously, I can show that the particular sequence of the last 50 powerball drawings was even more unlikely than what your argument shows the precambrian explosion to be. I don't think that anyone will argue that the last 50 powerball drawings didn't happen, though. Given enough trials of a probabilistic occurrance and some very unlikely things will happen. I once had a statistics professor assign the class to flip a coin 10000 times and record the results. He could always tell who did it and who just made up results. How? Most people think that flipping a coin and having heads come up 10 times in a row is pretty unlikely. However the probability of this happening is 1 in 1024. So in 10000 real coin flips, it's actually pretty likely to happen. People who make up the results very rarely write down sequences of heads (or tails) longer than 3 or 4 in a row. It would be exceedingly unlikely that there would not be sequences of at least 7 or 8 in a row in a series of 10000 flips. The point is that you shouldn't discount randomness when looking at an event. People think they know what random processes look like intuitively, but their intuition is usually faulty. I am not an expert on precambrian (or any other type) of biology, so I don't know if the numbers you use are reasonable or not. However, I don't think that they rule out an evolutionary process.
Re #2: Not all genes have the same mutatation rate.
Re #3: Beneficial cannot be determined ex ante, only ex post. Most mutations are neutral and thus not selected for or against.
Re #4: False premises again. Bacteria need not find mates. Even with sexual reproduction, chromosomes with mutated genes work fine (in general) with the original from the mate.
Re #5: This claim is just false, even if it fits your intuition. The math is wrong too, there are more than 10**14 bacteria just hanging around in your gut thus something with a 10**(-10) chance of happening will happen to you about 10000 times.
Re #6: Millions of years gives 10**10 times for things like #5 to happen, and that's only in your gut.
You need to get the mechanisms and arithmetic correct.
Shubi, I'll cut to the chase with 2 questions - granting that they have nothing to do with AIG.
Is there a human being sitting on the throne of God as you are reading this question?
Is that human being the man, Jesus, the Christ?
I am a biologist not a math guy, but nothing you conjured up here is science. Just because you took some stats from various papers doesn't mean that your admitted estimates and calculations have any merit. If you think they do, submit them to a scientific journal. If they publish your article, I will take it more seriously.
There are no serious reservations to the fact of evolution.
Are you talking a literal throne or a figurative throne?
To think that Jesus is all human is heresy.
Actually there is perfect consensus in science of what a species is. It just doesn't conform to the box that creationists want to put it in. Species are frequently in transition as we observe them, with many gradations of separation from each other. As we would expect from the theory of evolution.
How old is the earth?
Heresy is pretty much the same thing as thinking.
I consider myself a Christian, but I car not a hoot about the politics of theology. There are a lot of tin drums out there who actually believe people will be tormented forever because they don't say the right words or don't get exactly the right interpretation of some obscure word in an obsolete language. It is possible to worship God with your mouth and Satan with your heart.
To argue that you must believe nonsense to be a Christian is a sin against reality and truth.
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