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."
I am afraid it is you who are playing games with words.
You must understand allele frequency change in populations to understand evolution. Evolution is not simply "change".
So that we can continue this discussion at a higher level, it would be beneficial to tell us your understanding of alleles and how they work in individuals and populations.
I've had a post deleted for that reason. Sometimes the temptation to be witty overcomes our good judgement.
I am not perfect like the eggman lol
Then you no doubt know the exact coordinates.
My question is, how do you know it is figurative?
what do the prophets have to say about the gap between Gen 1:1 and Gen 1.2 ?
(I personally know a missionary living in Turkey who has been to it and seen it with his own eyes. )
Wow, thats amazing!
Sounds like lotsa fun. Zzzzzzzzzzt.
Isn't your screen name about 2/3 figurative an 1/3 literal?
If you post the coordinates, I'll try to get a picture.
Isa 28:10 For precept [must be] upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, [and] there a little:
2Ti 3:16 All scripture [is] given by inspiration of God, and [is] profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:
Gen 3:1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.
Gen 3:13-14
14 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What [is] this [that] thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou [art] cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
2Cr 11:3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
Rev 12:9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Rev 20:2 And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,
Eze 28:13
13 Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone [was] thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.
14 Thou [art] the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee [so]: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.
15 Thou [wast] perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.
16 By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.
17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.
Rev 12:4 And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
Rev 12:9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
And I have the Brooklyn Bridge for sale right here, one day only, cash offers only. First decent offer gets it. Buyer collects.
Unfortunately it is both, because the same word is used for two things. The fact of evolution is what we see in the fossil record, DNA comparisons with the phylogenetic tree, nested hierarchy, homologies, common inherited junk DNA across species boundaries etc etc. The evidence for this fact is considered absolutely overwhelming by biologists. Like the fact of gravity where we see objects all over our solar system obeying Newtons laws of motion as modified by Einsteins theory of relativity.
For gravity until recently there was no corresponding theory to go with the facts observed by Newton. Darwin's contribution was to both point out the fact of evolution, and explain it with a theory that was pretty good for the state of knowledge at that time; ie fundamentally correct as far as we can see, descent with modification through natural selection and geographic isolation. That theory has been revised in detail as more data has come in (eg Darwin knew nothing of the genetic mechanism whereby favourable changes are not diluted in the population, that contribution came from Mendel, and Mendel's work was further explained by our modern knowledge of DNA).
Biologists continue to debate the exact mechanisms of the theory a lot (as happens with all scientific theories as we continually improve our understanding of the universe), and sometimes creationists mischievously or mistakenly misinterpret such debates as implying lack of confidence in the fact of evolution.
I hope that makes the fact/theory issue a little clearer for you.
"Rev 12:9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Rev 20:2 And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,"
AH HAH!!!! FIGURATIVELY speaking that OLD SERPENT is the DEVIL.
Cute, but rather adolescent. Now go do your homework, son, then come back and talk to me.
Let me know when you've got some physical evidence that Noah's ark ever existed, and when you've got some physical evidence that a global inundation happened in the last 6,000 years, and when you've managed to explain the numerous logical absurdities in the Noah myth. I'll recap some of them for you (and please don't waste everyone's bandwidth by posting non-answers from AiG in reply):
. Where did the water come from?
. Where did it go to?
. Why is there no evidence of the flood?
. How could a 450ft boat conceivably store a global ecology, along with food for a year?
. How could 8 people look after all the creatures? (exercise, feeding, mucking out etc) Check your answer with a zoo-keeper, and bear in mind that a zoo uses a huge number of external contractors for many of its services.
. How did the species get to the ark? (with particular reference to special diets, climate requirements etc)
. How did the species get back from the ark to their current location? (with particular reference to the above + ocean crossings)
. How did 4 men and 4 women build a 450ft wooden boat?
. Why didn't it rot while they were building it (if it took more than a few months)?
. Why didn't a 450ft wooden boat fall apart the moment it encountered a light swell? (even now with modern naval engineering techniques such a thing could not be built)
. Why didn't everybody die in the noxious atmosphere with all those animals in a completely enclosed space with no signiificant ventilation?
. How were the vast quantities of animal faeces and urine disposed of?
. How did Noah + family look after between 2,000,000 and 30,000,000 insect species?
. Were there dinosaurs on the ark?
. If not why did Noah disobey God and not load them?
. Whose job was it to muck out the Sauropods? (My money is on Ham)
. Was the flood fresh or salt?
. Depending on your answer to the above how did Noah look after the fresh/salt fish?
. If the flood was fresh and Noah was looking after the salt fish how did he cope with the ones that require enormous pressure to survive?
. If the flood was salt then how quickly did the land become fertile as the waters receded?
. Where did the new topsoil come from? (hint, topsoil requires live earthworms)
. What did the herbivores eat immediately after the waters receded?
. What did the animals whose diet grows on trees eat after the waters receded?
. What did the predators eat for the first few years after the waters receded whilst the prey animals were rebuilding their population level?
. Why is there no DNA bottleneck evident in the last 10,000 years?
. If you believe that the geological column was laid down by the flood then how did coral beds get into the middle of it, and how do you explain angular uncormities?
. Why do several independent techniques used by geologists, paleontologists, physicists, astronomers, and biologists to determine the history of the earth give concordant answers that are in complete conflict with the flood story?
Harry Harrison has a series of books based on this premise.
West of Eden, Winter in Eden and Return to Eden.
How do you know if this is literal or figurative?
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