Fundamentalists re-create Eden, with dinosaurs

The Sunday Times (U.K.) ^ | 03/10/2002 | Oliver Poole

[Pokey78]

AMERICAN scientists are outraged over plans for a multi-million-dollar museum dedicated to telling the nation's schoolchildren that God made the world in seven days and that Darwin is a fraud.

The backers of the $14 million (£10 million) Creation Museum and Family Centre, which is to open in 2004 close to the Ohio River in Kentucky, boast that the structure will act as an antidote to the "brainwashing" taught in science museums worldwide.

Exhibits will include re-creations of the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark. A giant double helix of DNA will be suspended in the middle of the hall in order to argue that living creatures are so complex that they could not have evolved by random mutation.

Real fossils will be used to demonstrate how scientific methods such as carbon dating can be wildly inaccurate, and life-sized dinosaurs will illustrate the belief that they lived alongside Adam and Eve in a period before the Fall, when animals, man and dinosaurs cohabited, free from violence.

Ken Ham, whose Answers in Genesis ministry is behind the project, said that the museum was a long overdue offensive against the scientific establishment.

"This is a cultural war," he said. "They need to know we're coming. We're not doing this to say: 'Here's the evidence for and against, now you decide.' We admit our bias right from the start.

"The Bible is not a science textbook. But where it touches on science, we can trust it. This is the truth."

The only other museum in America dedicated to "creationism" - the theory that the Bible's Genesis story is both literal and accurate - is at the Institute for Creation Research near San Diego in California.

It covers 3,500 sq ft and will be dwarfed by Mr Ham's Creation Museum, which will include a 50,000 sq ft exhibition hall and 47 acres of outdoor trails and displays. Some exhibits have already been purchased, including the DNA and dinosaur models, in addition to a walk-through replica of a human cell.

Answers in Genesis already puts out a faith-based family magazine, a technical journal detailing the "science of creation", a daily radio programme that is broadcast on 400 stations across the United States, and pamphlets distributed worldwide on subjects such as "Where Did the Races Come From?".

A recent survey in the magazine Scientific American reported that 45 per cent of Americans believe that God created life some time in the past 10,000 years, despite the vast majority of scientists maintaining that life in its simplest form first appeared 3.9 billion years ago and has been evolving ever since.

Eugenie Scott, the director of the National Centre for Science Education, said that the new creationist museum was a sermon disguised as scientific study intended to hoodwink the public. "The authoritarian presentation of this information is likely to confuse people into thinking that these are scientifically valid views," she said.

"Science is not a democratic process. Once an idea is proved wrong, you don't continue to present it. The idea that everything on Earth appeared all at once 10,000 years ago has been disproved."

In recent years Christian fundamentalists have been accused of targeting small towns and placing supporters onto the local boards of education in a campaign for more teaching time to be spent on creationism. Two years ago the Kansas Board of Education reversed a decision to ban mentions of Darwin in schools after a public revolt voted a number of its members out.

To the outrage of the state's scientific community, Ohio is proposing a similar initiative to forbid teaching of scientific evolution. Similar propositions are also to be debated soon in New York State and Massachusetts.

[medved]

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

• Wistar Symposia: Mathematics vs Evolution
• From Bearfabrique: Evolution vs Logic
• Natural Selection an Agency of Stasis, not Change
• Evolution's quadrillion-year time requirements
• The few thousand years the evolutionists actually have...
• Evolution as Anti-Science
• Critique of Gould

Evol-U-Sham dot Com

Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."

Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

• Malthus and evolutionists
• Darwin's Environment
• Darwin, Racism, Evil
• Ascent of Racism
• Talk.Origins and the Darwin/Hitler Test
• Chuc k Darwin's Family: Social Clymers and Worse
• D arwin at Nuremberg I
• Darwin at Nuremberg II
• Darwin at Nuremberg III
• Darwin's Racism

Creation and Intelligent Design Links

• Dembski on Intelligent Design
• Dembski: No Free Lunch
• E volution or Christianity: Pick One...
• IDEA Club
• Fossil Record Quote collection
• Ev olution Deceit
• Answers in Genesis
• Faith Facts
• Center for Renewal of Science and Culture
• Micro vs Macroevolution
• Science Design Kit
• Behe's Book
• Do gmatic Darwinism
• ICR
• Dembski/Origins
• Center for Scientific Creation
• Creation Research Society
• Biblical Creation Society
• Christian Apologetics
• Phillip Johnson's Page
• Intelligent Design Network
• Torah and Science
• 50 Reasons to Leave Evolutionism
• Darwin Papers (Jim foard)
• Evolution Deceit
• Jack Chick (Making the Truth Simple Enough for Evolutionists and other Feebs...)

Catastrophism

• Kronia
• Catastrophism dot Com
• Aeon
• Global Flood(s)
• Velikovsky Page, Links
• Saturn Thesis
• Al DeGrazia's web site, Quantavolution, Solaria Binaria etc.
• Venus and Differing Paradigms
• Holden WWW Site, Main Page
• American Indians and Dinosaurs
• Wal Thornhill home page
• Electric Universe
• Tony Peratt, Los Alamos; plasma cosmology etc.
• Don Scott's Version of Electric Sun Theory
• DragonScience: Arp, Demise of Big Bang etc.

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

• Quantum intelligence in the universe?
• Message Theory/Remine
• Rupert Sheldrake, Morphogenic fields, resonances etc.
• Bruce Lipton, Cells and Computer components etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities

• True Origins WWW site under construction
• Splifford FAQ (How talk.origins and sci.bio.evolution really work

[TransOxus]

The Creator. If we can exist, why can't God exist? It is pure arrogance to think we have all the answers to the Universe. Better to believe in something good in the unknown than in something bad because then Man strives to be better and do good. The short-sighted ludditeness of the evolution cranks is for self serving purposes. Nothing wrong in coming up with theories as it makes one think and some good does come out of it. Look at the the two World Wars which were destructive but ironically it accelerated exponentially the technologically advances of the Industrial Age which we are now enjoying. In trying to kill each other with better and newer weapons of destruction, the offshoot was advances in medicine, aviation, communications, sciences, transportation, engineering, consumer goods, etc.

[medved]

Well that's interesting. Carl Everett, the short-fused Red Sox outfielder who has thankfully gone to the Rangers, said the dinosaurs never existed, because there is no mention of them in the Bible.

Which is it?

From what I can gather reading ancient literature and from other evidence, there appears to have been a tiny handful of large dinosaurs left over at a time just prior to the flood and those apparently did not survive the flood or the hard year or two after it. The main age of dinosaurs appears to have been a few thousand or a couple of tens of thousands of years back, but not 65 million.

Evolution, and the Redneck Watermelon Truck

The story goes that two old boys named Luke and Ray-Bob had themselves a truck and were buying watermelons in Fla. and Ga. for $2 and trucking them to Chicago and Detroit and selling them for $2. After awhile, they noticed that they were not making any money; naturally enough, they had a big business meeting and came to the conclusion that they needed a bigger truck.

Evolutionists, of course, are using time in precisely the same manner in which the two rednecks are using truck size, and there is no real reason for anybody to take them any more seriously than they would take the two rednecks.

Now, You couldn't easily prove that Luke and Ray-Bob couldn't possibly make money buying and selling for $2 since they could always say they merely needed the next size bigger truck. There is one thing which would really demolish their case however: that, God forbid, would be for somebody like Algor to get elected president and immediately outlaw the internal combustion engine; after THAT, guaranteed, nobody would ever make money trucking watermelons from Florida to Chicago and selling them for what they paid for them.

Likewise, If comebody could provide a coercive case for the fact that American Indians dealt with dinosaurs on a regular basis, then the time-frames which evolutionists so love to use as a magic wand to enable their doctrines would be demolished, the entire doctrine of evolutionism, broken. Not that there is any lack of logical proofs that no amount of time would suffice for macro-evolution but, without those time scales, no version of evolution is even thinkable, much less possible.

---

In this regard, evolutionists and geologists would appear to have developed a sort of a dinosaur-in-the-livingroom problem over the last few years. Take the case of Mishipishu, the "Water panther" for instance.

Petroglyphs show him with the dorsal blades of the stegosaur and Indian legends speak of him using his "great spiked tail" as a weapon. Remarkably, the Canadian national parks which maintain these pictographs are unaware of the notion of interpreting Mishipishu as a stegosaur, and refer to him only as a "manatou", or water spirit.

Vine Deloria is probably the best known native American author of the last half century or so. He is a past president of the National Council of American Indians, and several of his books, including the familiar "Custer Died for Your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian affairs.

One of Vine's books, "Red Earth, White Lies", is a book about catastrophism and about the great North American megaufauna extinctions which occurred around 12000 years ago (using conventional dating). In this book, Vine utterly destroys the standard "overkill" and "blitzkrieg" hypotheses which are used to explain these die-outs.

Vine informs me that "Red Earth, White Lies" is one of several books which arise from decades of research including conversations with nearly every story-teller and keeper of oral traditions from Alaska down to Central and South America. He tells me that, if there was one thing which used to completely floor him early on in this research, it was the extent to which most of these tribes retain oral traditions of Indians having to deal not only with pleistocene megafauna, but with dinosaurs as well. In "Red Earth, White Lies", he notes (pages 242-243) that:

Indians generfly speak with a precise and literal imagery. As a rule, when trying to identify creatures of the old stories, they say they are "like" familiar neighborhood animals, but then carefully differentiate the perceived differences. I have found that if the animal being described was in any way comparable to modern animals, that similarity would be pointed out; the word "monster" would not be used.

Only in instances where the creature bears no resemblance to anything we know today will it be described as a monster. Since no dinosaur shape resembles any modern animal, and since the reports are to be given literal credibility I must suggest that we are identifying a dinosaur. Thus, in the story of large animals at Pomme de Terre prairie in southwestern Missouri, a variant of the story suggests that the western animals were megafauna and the creatures who crossed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and invaded the lands of the megafauna were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs thus easily displace the familiar, perhaps Pleistocene, megafauna and move west, where we find their remains in the Rocky Mountains today

In numerous places in the Great Lakes are found pictographs of a creature who has been described in the English translation as the "water panther" This animal has a saw-toothed back and a benign, catlike face in many of the carvings. Various deeds are attributed to this panther, and it seems likely that the pictographs of this creature which are frequently carved near streams and lakes are a warning to others that a water panther inhabits that body of water. The Sioux have a tale about such a monster in the Missouri River. According to reports, the monster had ". . . red hair all over its body . . . and its body was shaped like that of a buffalo. It had one eye and in the middle of its forehead was one horn. Its backbone was just like a cross- cut saw; it was flat and notched like a saw or cogwheel" I suspect that the dinosaur in question here must be a stegosaurus.

---

Then there is the case of the Brontosaur Pictograph on rough stone.

This petroglyph, in fact, first came to light with the Doheney Expedition to Java Supai, the report of which comes not from the National Enquirer, but from the Peabody Muscum of American Ethnology at Harvard University.

Then there is the case of the man and brontosaur petroglyph at the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah:

A book on Indian rock art sold atthe park visitors center notes:

"There is a petroglyph in Natural Bridges National Monument that bears a startling resemblance to dinosaur, specifically a Brontosaurus, with a long tail and neck, small head and all." (Prehistoric Indians, Barnes and Pendleton, 1995, p.201) The desert varnish, which indicates age, is especially heavy over this section.

Then again, there is the picture which the people at Bible.ca snapped of Don Patten with the petroglyph of the triceroptops:

And the pterodactyle at San Rafael Swell in Black Dragon Wash, Utah:

Like I say, it's never been easy to be an evolutionist, and it's not getting any easier.

[sirchtruth]

Simple chemistry. Organics form all over the place in space. We don't have an abiotic earth anymore...

Blah, blah, blah, blah, Why do you ignor the fundalmentals of the question?

See you know exactly what I am asking you from the context of my questions and you also know that in order for you to answer that question you HAVE to come to the conclusion that in the evolutionary process that is exspoused something had to come from nothing...just poof, it existed. All the explaination in the world can not hide this ultimate conclusion.

Ok, so how did THAT happen? How did matter come from nothing?

[VadeRetro]

You know, over a year ago I was complaining I'd already shot down your anti-Punk-Eek screed and you were still posting it unmodified.

Answered your Punk Eek stuff on the Divine Design Thread III. So here it is again, simply cut and pasted. My, my!

You're trolling for suckers and ignoring how poor the fishing has been.

[VadeRetro]

And, talking about spam, I thought I posted to the wrong thread, as your 103 recapitulates that January 2001 thread I just linked above.

Every once in a while I see some naive newcomer wondering why we're ignoring your extensive "fact-filled" posts. Anyone who hangs around a while quickly figures it out.

[VadeRetro]

Blah, blah, blah, blah, Why do you ignor the fundalmentals of the question?

I answered the questions you asked to the best of my understanding.

You have not shown how some big magic-yet-anthropic entity really makes things more probable or tidy. Who made that guy? Who programmed him? Where did he come from? Why can't we see him?

[FreePaul]

They'll build it and people will laugh at them. A child in our family went to a "Christian" school where they taught that the earth was only four thousand years old and other silly stuff. The students knew better and actually spent time researching facts. The school became a joke.

[sirchtruth]

I answered the questions you asked to the best of my understanding.

Alright, I agree you did answer the paticular question as I posed it, quite well I have to admit, however what I was hoping for is that you would have picked up on the overall theme of my questions. You have not shown how some big magic-yet-anthropic entity really makes things more probable or tidy. Who made that guy? Who programmed him? Where did he come from? Why can't we see him?

What are you refering to? I never asked WHO, I am asking HOW? Are you interject the possibility of a WHO now? Futhermore, what is a "magic-yet-anthropic entity" (LOL) suppose to imply?

[VadeRetro]

I try to never be cagey. Here's what I mean.

My own mind (like that of many another) has trouble with the idea of the universe always having existed. It also has trouble with the idea that the universe has not always existed.

Funny thing is, it doesn't matter if you throw a God in there or not. It's still a problem.

[Windsong]

Patrick Henry...now theres an ironic handle..

[TransOxus]

Keep the blinkers on. There is the cycle of life and death. In death you return back to your basic elements and become inanimate. Why be dependent on external forces when you can be totally inanimate. Why is there the urge to procreate and have a rat race and what is that driving force? Why a male and a female when evolution should have made it unnecessary? Happiness must be true oblivion like being totally stone cold dead as a rock. For some to believe in far-fetched theories, happiness is a Machiavellian pipe dream.

[medved]

You know, over a year ago I was complaining I'd already shot down your anti-Punk-Eek screed and you were still posting it unmodified.

That's because I do not buy your claim to have shot anything down... Pretty simple, isn't it?

[medved]

The images you posted appear to be of a primitive bird, genetically re-engineered from some non-flying creature, i.e. a sort of a first cut. Details of how the creature also got the flow-through design heart and lungs, the light bone structure, the ability to rotate flight feathers etc. etc. which are all needed for birdlike flight are, of course per evolutionist fashion, left out.

[sirchtruth]

Funny thing is, it doesn't matter if you throw a God in there or not. It's still a problem.

See this is what I am trying to avoid. I am not the one throwing God into this at all, I wanted to see if this existence from NOTHING to SOMETHING could be explained without interjecting the "big magic-yet-anthropic entity" (That's Hillarious!)

See, some kind of entity HAS TO BE thrown in at some point because we have no concept of nonexistance or ever existance (No begining, no end) in a pure sence, and I believe we look at everything from the dimension of time/space which is not the end-all dimension. You can not explain or atleast reference this problem and logically conclude that Something comes from Nothing without interjecting "Something Exsisted". And when you have to conclude that, then you have to conclude an entity.

My own mind (like that of many another) has trouble with the idea of the universe always having existed. It also has trouble with the idea that the universe has not always existed.

Because you will not open your mind and bring yourself to conclude that there might be a "big magic-yet-anthropic entity" ;-)

[VadeRetro]

That's because I do not buy your claim to have shot anything down... Pretty simple, isn't it?

Nowhere at all have you directly addressed my arguments in that post (Note the feeble, question-begging nature of your 129), but my point is not so much to revive the discussion of prior threads as to point out that you're just doing the same dumb thing over and over and over and over.

[VadeRetro]

None of that helps at all. Where did HE come from? How does that magic stuff work? How can HE have always existed? Or maybe HE didn't?

HE's just another layer on the problem, a layer that isn't helping a bit.

[PatrickHenry]

Lurking ...

[American in Israel]

You guys are so silly. I once jumped out of a plane, the instructor said he could land a sack of horseshit on the bulleye. After the jump we all went to have a beer and I watched these same guys sit around getting drunk and congratulating themselves on how smart they were. I never jumped again.

I have studied both creationism and evolution and found far more junk science in Evolutionists than in true creationists. That is ok, if I am right you all can explain it all to the Creator. If you are right we are all fertilizer. Have a nice jump.

[sirchtruth]

I am confused you are either admitting a WHO or you're trying to turn the table here because you or no evolutionist can answer the NOTHING to SOMETHING question of HOW. Are you coming to a conclusion that a WHO might exist? Let's try to answer one question without jumping to the next first...How theoretically, could Something come from Nothing without a WHO?

Outside of space/time there is no begining and there is no end...it's just a theory.