Creationist museum stirs debate
Tyrannosaurus rex was a strict vegetarian, and lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
There were dinosaurs of every kind aboard Noah’s ark. Some dinosaurs managed to hang around until just a few hundred years ago.
Exhibits showing all this and more will be at the Creation Museum, a $27 million religious showcase nearing completion in northern Kentucky.
The museum, in Boone County, is being built by a non-profit group called Answers in Genesis. It is scheduled to open on Memorial Day. Museum and Northern Kentucky tourism officials expect it to be a boom to the region, bringing in 250,000 visitors in its first year.
It already is getting media attention. Newspapers and television stations from Europe, Asia and Australia have visited, and CNN was there last week.
But mainstream scientists, who have dubbed it The Fred and Wilma Flintstone Museum, say the museum’s message is just plain wrong.
The museum is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible: The world was created in six, 24-hour days, some time between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Humans appeared on Day 6, and they didn’t evolve from anything.
Ken Ham, an Australian who is Answers in Genesis’ $120,000-a-year founder and president, says the museum opening will be a significant event in Christendom.
"No one else has ever built a place where you can experience biblical history and merge it with the science,” he said.
But Eugenie Scott, a former University of Kentucky anthropologist who is director of the California-based National Center for Science Education, said the information provided in the museum “is not even close to standard science.”
Scott visited the museum recently as part of a British Broadcasting Corp. radio program. Although she didn’t get a tour, she saw enough to know that the museum will be professionally done. And, she says, that’s worrisome.
"There are going to be students coming into the classroom and saying, ‘I just went to this fancy museum and everything you’re telling me is rubbish,’” Scott said.