Posted on 03/09/2002 4:05:28 PM PST by 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.
My faith in evolution= a grain of salt
My faith in Christ=my eternal soul...
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I think ICR has something like this out in California, near San Diego. Now the AIG types are putting one on the Ohio River in Kentucky.
They should put the next one in France and call it "Euro-YEC-o."
They are described in accurate detail in the book of Job.
The Theory of Evolution (as correct as I personally thing it is) does NOT negate the First Amendment to the US Constitution!
Gravity sucks.
I have never seen this invisible force called gravity. I only see that objects don't like to get too far away from each other before they change their mind and reverse direction.
Actually I believe that newton has been debunked. Newtonian physics has been replaced with the current quantum physics. Which someday will be replace by something else.
Pierre Pachet--Professor of Physiology--Toulouse University.
As soon as scientists get the weather forcast 100% correct I might fall for the old Australopithicus routine.
There are too many unknowns,the jury is still out.
Who made us? And for that matter why are we here?
Granted that's outside the scope of this thread, but something
doesn't come from nothing. And since we're talking about it,
something had to have got this whole thing a rollin.
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?
Hey now. Computers and airplanes were never mentioned in the Bible, so they must not exist either. The Bible doesn't mention Coca-Cola or cheeseburgers; yikes! Out they go, too.
Conversely, if all those dinosaurs existed in the garden of Eden, it must have been too crowded to include all the other animals - modern animals, ice age animals, all those giant mammals that existed after the dinosaurs were gone; not to mention all the dinosaur and non-dinsosaur species of the Jurassic, Triassic, Cretaceous, etc., and then all the species which existed long before the dinosaurs. Nope; not even if the entire earth was Eden could it hold them all, all of them alive at the same time.
Fundamentalists seem to have a problem dealing with any kind of chronology over 6,000 years; but then they don't realize they borrowed that time span from the Zoroastrians.
Bovine effluvia. El toro poopoo. In other words, bullexcrement.
If American scientists are "outraged," it had certainly escaped my attention up till now. My guess is, to the extent they're aware of the museum plans, 99.99% of them don't give a rat's hindparts.
It is obvious what this article is about. From the distinguished Times to the sleaziest tabloid, it is the greatest of sport, in the British press, to portray America as a land of clueless rubes. But it's a cherished American right to be just as damn stupid as we want to be, and to spend as much money doing so as we wish. Millions of people, for example, believe Bill Clinton was the greatest President of the 20th Century, and many of them are donating for the construction of a Presidential library in Little Rock which will cost many times what the creationists' museum will cost.
The proper reaction to any such expenditure (providing that one we should protest the use of tax revenues for such projects) is not outrage, but laughter.
Truth stands by itself.
Lies require the force of law to stand.
Which grey-bearded old man with a book do you trust? Do any of them know ultimate truth? Is there such a thing?
LOL! I don't see it either. These scientific fundamentalists believe in some unseen force holding the universe together. I want them to prove it exists.
I'm a creationist too, but an "old earth" creationist (I think God took his sweet time, of which he had plenty). Of course, since that goes against a literal reading of Genesis, I guess I'll also "see you in hell" (to paraphrase Jim Carey in a classic SNL skit).
If they do, they need to remember that neither Eve nor Adam had navels.
From an old Sherlock Holmes pastiche. (;^)
Who made us? And for that matter why are we here? Granted that's outside the scope of this thread, but something doesn't come from nothing. And since we're talking about it, something had to have got this whole thing a rollin.
If something could not come from nothing, how could God create the universe out of nothing? An observation of phenomena which does not require a God does not, however, require "something out of nothing", either. If everything always exists, and has always existed, it is not necessary to speak of "creation" but merely of change over time: to wit, endless change over infinite time. There need be no beginning, and therefore, no creator. There is no need to posulate something to have got things rolling, because "things" have always been "rolling".
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