There is a sign on the entrance to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky that tells you that they reserve the right to remove from the property anyone who wears offensive clothing, among other things. Well I braved it anyway, and ran into no problems for the duration of my visit. I suspect that when deeply religious people (of the type who might visit the Creation Museum) see written words their first impulse is not to read them. Avoid knowledge at all costs! Such seemed to be the case on the day I was there, at any rate. To be fair, there was a preponderance of Mennonites, who are likely more used to ignoring what people's T-Shirts might say.
mu·se·um
noun. a building or place where works of art, scientific specimens, or other objects of permanent value are kept and displayed.
So right off the bat, the Creation Museum fails to meet the requirements of actually being, you know, a museum. All that is there are dioramas of Bible scenes, and placards which lay out the anti-science of Creationism. Also, they have a huge dinosaur fetish. In the old days, Creationists denied that dinosaurs ever existed. They used to say that dinosaur bones were deliberately placed by God to test our Faith. Well, they must have finally conceded that this would make God a huge asshole, and so to quite a large extent the Creation Museum is a Christian Apology, where they are now saying that dinosaurs are in the Bible, and that Fossils actually prove that the Bible is true. This is a popular reverse-position tactic used by Christian Apologists all throughout history, and it was entertaining to see the results of the latest Christian Backpedalist thinking.
There is this whole thing that they keep saying there that the conclusions that people come to change depending on what point you start your assumptions from. They divide the only two possible starting points, apparently, between "Man's Word" and "God's Word."
This is an example of the kind of "scientific specimen" they have there. They list certain scientific ideas, devoid of context or explanation as though it's insane to "believe" in the "priesthood" of Science, and right next to it they list certain vaguely congruous Biblical ideas, devoid of any context, evidence, or logic other than Biblical authority itself.
So God is apparently Popeye now. Sorry, cheap shot, but goodness gracious. I yam what I yam. At any rate, what they've done here, right from the get-go, is to set up a false equivalency, a straw man argument that carries them through their twisted line of logic. Before I explain the false equivalency, allow me to digress on that point. When you go to a real museum, which is full of actual specimens and scientific conclusions arrived at through careful examination of evidence, the museum is usually an open floor plan. You can go from room to room, willy-nilly, and decide what section you want to peruse as your own whim takes you. This is because real evidence supports itself, it can stand on its own and is supported by other evidence from other disciplines, or at the very least remains uncontradictory. The creation museum, interestingly, is physically laid out as a single, twisty road which you follow from beginning to end in order to be exposed to certain ideas at proper moments. They start you off with faulty assumptions and build on them from there, until by the end of the walk you are asked to accept as the Creation-version of truth some pretty outrageous claims, and you hopefully ignore the contradictory and hypocritical statements they've fed you along the way. We'll get to that stuff.
So back to the false equivalency. This whole "Man's Word" vs. "God's Word" business. It reveals a severe lack of understanding of what science actually is. Science is NOT man's word. It IS man's understanding of nature, as revealed through observation, experiment, the cataloging of verifiable fact, and the careful consideration of facts in conjunction with each other based, yet again, on further experiment. We arrive at scientific conclusions based on THINGS THAT ACTUALLY CAN BE MEASURED by other people, even people from different cultural, religious, or linguistic backgrounds, and they will all arrive at the same answers because physics always works the same way under similar conditions, in all places. Science is not just some dudes getting together and making shit up based on fancy. So calling science "Man's Word" sets up a false idea in the minds of the gullible. In reality it is "Nature's Word" vs. "Bible's (written by many different people, from goat farmers to pubescent scribes, who had less idea of what was really going on in the world than most 2nd graders do today) Word."
"But because we never have all the evidence, different scientists can reach very different conclusions, depending on their starting assumptions." ARGH. This is just stupidity. The scientific method actually rules out starting assumptions. Experimenters have all manner of ways to eliminate Confirmation bias from their results. Is it always successful? No. Scientists actually can come to incorrect answers, yes. BUT, that is why science demands rigor, repeat experimentation, and PEER REVIEW before it will ever accept any particular idea from any particular scientist. If Richard Dawkins, a very respected biologist and champion of the modern atheist movement, came out and said that he had discovered evidence that Christian's brains were smaller than atheist's, the scientific community would not accept it as a fact just because he said so. They would say "That's preposterous. Prove it." And no one would accept his claim as fact until he could verifiably demonstrate it. Which of course he couldn't, because it's a lie I just made up. And it shows that if even someone like Dawkins made an erroneous claim, it would still not become scientific fact, because science does not allow false ideas to remain once evidence proves them wrong.
This, however, is an example of the type of evidence that Creationists require and the type of reasoning they use. Atrocious, just atrocious. They think they've proved that the world is 6000 years old by adding up the ages of the sons of Adam in the Bible. This right here is the poster-child poster for what this museum is all about. A literal interpretation of the Bible and unquestioning trust in its authority, and a severe misunderstanding of science.
And hopefully, you never will hear this in school. This is the garbage that they want taught in public education.
This, for instance, is an outright lie! "Scientists are puzzled how so many finch species could arise?" NO THEY'RE NOT! They know exactly how. Natural Selection. Oh but wait, later on in the museum you want to talk about Darwin's Finches?
So HERE NOW they are saying that Natural Selection (or as they are trying to rename it "created kinds", which are studied by a type of creation pseudo-scientist called a "Baraminologist") is now acceptable! Just like dinosaur bones, Creationists are finally coming around to the idea of Natural Selection, but it is still not proof of Evolution, they say. So in the previous picture, they say that Scientists are puzzled by finches, when in reality they are not because Darwin, Natural Selection; the many-finch problem SOLVED over a hundred years ago. Boom, lie. And in this one they are saying oh well, natural selection as told in the Bible is perfectly reasonable! Gah! Do you see the mental disconnect? Do you see how they take what they want, use it when they want it, and discard it when it is not convenient for a different argument they want to make?!
"There is not enough time--even in billions of years" for man to evolve from microbe. This again is, if not exactly a lie (though it is), at the very least a simple bold statement with no context, and no evidence presented either way. ABSOLUTELY there is enough time for a microbe to evolve into a man... in the 3.5 to 3.9 Billion years that scientists think it may actually have taken. Again, this reveals the stupidity of creation scientists. They cannot conceive of a billion years, so therefore evolution could not have happened.
Going back to Natural Selection, which apparently creationists now concede as true (though note the subtle switch from "Man's Word" to "man's opinion"); The fact that in our own minuscule lifetimes we can observe natural selection occurring in various species is a compelling argument for much larger changes occurring over much larger stretches of time. Simply saying "There is not enough time" is meaningless. How do they know there is not enough time? They are happy to add up all the sons of Adam, after all, why don't they want to add up the time it takes for natural selection to occur, and apply that function from 100 years to 3.5 billion years? There is definitely enough time. Also they are saying, again apropos of nothing with no facts or evidence, that mutation does not have the ability to create new genetic information. IDIOT, that's what mutation IS. A mutation IS a change in genetic information. Since that is what it IS, it most certainly HAS the ability to be what it IS. Fucking infantile word games with these people.
So... because poison dart frogs aren't naturally poisonous, this is evidence that the Garden of Eden actually existed? What about Rattlesnakes? Black Widows? Scorpions? Jellyfish? Pfeffer's Flamboyant Cuttlefishes? This is cherry picking one instance to back up your argument while ignoring all other instances which contradict it, and is known as Confirmation Bias. And in any case, the "evidence" of the Poison Dart Frog is evidence of nothing except that Poison Dart Frogs can synthesize their poisons from the alkaloids in the food they eat in the wild. In no way does this "evidence" in any way prove or even imply that someplace named Eden existed, though it doesn't stop them from trying to imply it anyway.
Biblical diorama of Adam fucking a sheep from behind in the garden of fuckin'. "Holy Me, Adam, knock that shit off! I said name them, not rape them! Man, I need to give you something to fuck. Go to sleep, will you? Even though I created the entire Universe out of nothing, I need your rib to create just one more thing. You dirty sheep-fucker."
Adam: "Awwwww yeah. Thanks God, but you know, the sheep didn't make so many mouth noises. Maybe this woman-thing ought to be subservient and silent, hey? Hmm, apples."
Anyway, another big thing in the Creation Museum, obviously, is a literal interpretation of the Wholly Babble. They had this urban section dedicated to the dangers of what happens when culture abandons scripture. This was a 7-fucking minute video of a kid fidgeting in church. They claim that when a literal interpretation of the Babble is given up in exchange for liberal Christianity, the damn kids lose respect for religious authority and, you know, do drugs and whores and fidget in church and stuff. The real point Ken Ham wants to make here is that when you stop terrifying children with the real, literal possibility of hellfire and damnation, because actual science has shown that it's totally, ridiculously impossible for the Bible to be literally true, that they will no longer respect his religious authority! Wah! This actually is evidence of the authoritarian nature of religious control, and nothing else.
"The Big Bang is just a theory! Scientists don't have all the evidence, they're just guessing! Man's Word! I mean, Man's opinion! Oh wait, we can't find any timber from Noah's Ark, which should definitely still be there if the Flood only happened a few thousand years ago? WELLLLL, we can't be sure that the Ararat in the Babble is the same Ararat as the Ararat in Turkey! The Earth's crust was probably unstable! Guess, obfuscate, theory! BUT DAMN YOU TO HELL, THE BIBLE IS LITERALLY THE TRUTH YOU FUCKIN' HEATHEN!" Now see, here is where an actual museum might have, say, some actual timbers from Noah's ark, or a leg to stand on.
Nope. Some nice models though, with a subtle reminder that all you damn unbelievers are gettin' they asses left behind. And oh, wait, perhaps some more apology and supposition?
"With a jug maybe like this, Noah's family could simply... With a cage system similar to this one, Noah's family could simply..." In other words, we don't know shit, because there is no evidence that anything in the Bible ever happened, but we're going to twist science to mean what we want it to mean, abuse English to say what we want it to say, and attack facts as mere suppositions and imply that suppositions are facts until your head is so fucked you won't think straight 'till Sunday, when we can fuck your brainhole in Church, too.
Oh yeah. And Dragons. They had this whole movie about how even though every scholar on earth regards dragons as mythical, that the fact that they are such a prevalent myth means that Dragons actually existed... as dinosaurs. PROOF OF DINOSAURS AND HUMANS, LIVING TOGETHER, THEREFORE BIBLE. BITCHES. That was pretty much when my head exploded, and the Lord forced me to reveal my inner four-eyed demon, and I had to run before the Christians pitchforked me.
So that was my Creation "Museum" adventure. At its conclusion, I had to admit that it is in fact a museum, if not in the way its creators intend: A museum dedicated to human stupidity and willful ignorance. 2 Peter 3:3-6 - 3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,4 And
saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell
asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the
creation.5 For
this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the
heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the
water:6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: I love that they highlight 'willingly Ignorant.' Oh how they twist and twist!
The Bible mentioned me!
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