Creation 'Museum'

Loyal readers of AFP may wonder why I detoured recently to lend my support to evolutionary biologist and atheist, Richard Dawkins. Partly, his views resonated deeply with thoughts of my own, that until reading his book I had not been able to articulate. More so though, his challenge to organised religion and particularly to religion’s growing role in government has come only just in time.

Don’t believe me? Think that the threat from religion trumping science is exaggerated? Perhaps you need to visit the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The $27 million museum opened its doors today, with the goal of righting the perceived wrongs taught by science and by Darwinian Evolution. The museum features model dinosaurs grazing in the Garden of Eden, side-by-side with human figures – and later aboard Noah’s Ark, escaping the Great Flood (the same flood which incidentally ‘created’ the Grand Canyon in 3 days). The overall premise of the museum, built by Young Earth Creationists, is that humans were created, pretty much in their current form by God, in the last 10,000 years.

This clearly flies in the face of generations of science, which estimate that the earth is more like 5 billion years old, with dinosaurs first popping up about 230 million years ago. Humans, for perspective as a species are about 200,000 years old (at most) – making it difficult for those dinosaurs to be aboard that Ark. The museum presents an untold number of fallacies, inaccuracies and outright lies, and is a scar on the face of science. It is abominations like this, which muddy the waters for an entire generation that moves me to favour atheists running things. Our faith, if we must have it, should be placed in science, in reason and in evidence.

Still, the extremists have the money and the power at present in the US as the moderate (and atheist) majorities lay dormant and unorganised. That may mean that the Creation Museum will persist for the time-being, but would a real museum need its employees to sign a statement saying: "no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record"? Their use of the word ‘museum’ devalues it for all of us. Let’s hope this scourge is stopped, before it inevitably reaches our shores.