I just got back from taking my son to college. On the way back we
stopped off at the Creation Museum outside of Cincinnati in Kentucky.
It was a Thursday and for a time when school has already started for
many, there were quite a few people in attendance. It is a sad
comment on our times that armed security people were, likely
purposely, openly displayed. The people were friendly and helpful.
We were lucky enough to come when a tour group was going in and they
had extra two-for-one coupons that they handed out to other visitors,
so we got an instant discount to start the day off right. The full
price is around $23.00 a pop if you are thinking of going.
They have put a lot of effort into this facility, and we had a
pleasant walk through the garden outside the museum. It is sad that
if I have to sum up the fruit of their efforts it would be that it was
a monument to ignorance. The science content was minimal and
obfuscation and denial were prevalent. The main focus was
indoctrination of their specific theology with a view that they seemed
to deny with their efforts in putting up the physical displays. The
main message was that faith was more important than the physical
evidence. If you accepted their narrow literal interpretation of the
Bible then you had to deny everything contrary to that view. All
their “science” displays meant nothing, and that is about what anyone
would have gotten out of them besides “hey, this looks niffty” You
didn’t really learn anything. There were a lot of dinosaurs scattered
around, but you didn’t learn much about them except that they were all
vegetarians before the fall.
I hadn’t really thought about it before, but a lot of the old
patriarchs overlapped each other. One exhibit indicated that
Methuselah and Noah may have known each other. They coexisted for
around 400 years. The claim was that Methuselah died 200 years before
the flood, so he wasn’t among the unworthy. Noah was 600 when the
flood came. I recall Karl Crawford claiming that Noah was around 500
when he started building the ark and it took him around a hundred
years, so that fits his time line. There is apparently another
timeline in the septuagint that would have Methuselah living until
after the flood, and the claim is that, that timeline is in error.
They had one exhibit where they had some claim that meat wasn’t eaten
until after the flood. They seemed to be talking mainly about people,
but I don’t know how they interpret the story of Cain and Abel (Abel
was the shepherd and brought the best of his flock to the Lord) and
what people did with the carcasses after they made their clothes from
the animal skins. They had an interesting exhibit about the Ark.
They showed a three layered hull and an inner bracing configuration
similar to Comstock square set timber bracing. I don’t recall seeing
any specific number for the kinds that were on the Ark, but their
displays were woefully inadequate to portray taking care of the 30,000
different kinds (pairs of most and and 7 pairs of the birds and
ritually clean) that is the Woodmorappe estimate. There seemed to be
the hope that all the dinos and other animals on the ark were still
vegetarians. They acknowledged that God brought the animals, but Noah
was tasked with taking care of them. They claimed that the flood
lasted 5 ½ months, but my Bible says that Noah was on the ark from the
seventeenth day of the second month to the twenty seventh day of the
second month when God told Noah to come out of the ark. According to
Woodmorappe the median size of an animal on the ark was the size of a
sheep. No mention was made of the hellish conditions that must have
existed for 8 people trying to take care of 10s of thousands of
animals for a year. Someone should try to pack 60,000 plus sheep into
an ark sized volume and try to get 8 people to keep them alive for a
year. Even without the ventilation problems it would be a neat trick
to take care of the liquid and solid waste along with feeding each
pair in their individual pens.
They had a method of getting the animals spread across to the
continents that they needed to go to in order to get back to where the
fossils of their ancestors can be found. They claimed that there were
massive amounts of logs that would spend years floating around the
oceans moving with the currents that could have transported the ark
survivors to where they needed to go. These log rafts seemed to be
different from the “floating forests” that they claimed were
responsible for forming the coal deposits during the flood.
Apparently, during the flood there were living forests floating around
that grew and produced massive amounts of biomass that would sink and
form the coal deposits.
According to guys like Ray the people responsible for the Creation
Museum are not “true creationists.” My guess is that most of the
security is to take care of true believers that disagree with the
exhibits. There is no big tent atmosphere that is prevalent in the
intelligent design scam, only a narrow view of their literal
interpretation of the Bible. They had several panels indicating that
they believed in massive amounts of evolution before and after the
flood. The entire history of the earth has to be crammed into around
6,500 years. People might be surprised that all canids are derived
from one kind on the ark. They even listed foxes as being derived
from one dog kind. True foxes are more than twice the genetic
distance from wolves and domestic dogs as chimps are to humans. This
is a massive amount of genetic change in just a few thousand years.
Like Woodmorappe they have to limit the number of kinds on the ark as
much as they can, and so a kind seems to be anything that they think
that they can get away with on the genus or family level. According
to one display your house cat is descended from the same pair of cats
that gave rise to tigers, jaguars and probably those saber toothed
monsters that evolved during the cold period after the flood. Just a
few thousand kinds produced all the millions of species that exist
today and evolved after the flood, but are now extinct. They claim
that a lot of the fossil record is of the various species that evolved
after the flood. One display claimed that marsupials could travel
farther and faster from the ark than eutherian mammals (because they
could carry their young in pouches) and that is why you find marsupial
fossils in sedimentary layers under the layers containing most of the
eutherian mammalian fossils. I am not making this stuff up. This
would mean that in order to explain the fossil record they have to
claim that the evolution and extinction of the Eocene mammalian
megafauna, along with the Pliestocene megafauna had to occur after the
flood in just a few thousand years. The sedimentary layers that they
a likely talking about that hold the marsupial fossils are likely over
a hundred million years old.
The planetarium show likely contained more scientific information than
in the rest of the entire museum (worth the 7 or 8 dollars extra if
only to get some useful information out of the museum). They tried to
give an accurate portrayal of the vastness of the universe. Our
star’s place on the edge of one arm of a galaxy that is one of
hundreds of billions of other galaxies was depicted in an interesting
way. Then they discounted everything to claim that we are special.
They went to great lengths to explain about stars and stellar
progressions that should take millions of years, and then said nothing
about supernovas that have been observed that indicate that if it
really does take these young stars millions of years to die there have
been stars that reached that limit, and died as predicted. They were
trying to claim that because it only took millions of years for some
stars to blow up that the existence of such stars proved that the
universe could not be billions of years old. They discount any new
star formation, and of course ignore what supernova tell them about
how much time must have passed already.
My wife and I discussed the theology during the drive home and since
she teaches Sunday school at our church I asked if they teach the
basic theology portrayed in the museum. She claimed that they did
not. YEC interpretations isn’t mentioned. As far as I know
Methodists have no official stance on young earth creationism, and it
isn’t part of the Sunday school lesson program. It wasn’t part of
what we learned in Sunday school when I went decades ago, but for some
reason it is one of the most important parts of the theology of the
people responsible for this museum.
I was curious about what the museum was like and it was a nice way to
spend a few hours. I did not expect much and I was not disappointed.
I even learned a few things about what these guys believe. This is
hard to believe since I’ve read TO since around 1993. It indicates to
me that ignorance is a way of life for YECers, and that most of the
YEC posters do not even know what they are supposed to believe.
Ron Okimoto
