The Creation Museum is Horrifying

So Gina, Amber, and I are on a road trip from Jersey to Colorado and back. Today we passed through Kentucky on our way to Nashville, and we figured we had to stop at the Creation Museum. For those of you who don't know, the Creation Museum is a project by Ken Ham, which exists to evangelize young-Earth creationism and biblical literacy. The main draw to us was that we heard that much of the museum was dedicated to the idea that Adam and Eve coexisted with dinosaurs! We figured that we were in for some amusing scenes of biblical humans riding triceratopses, and the standard fire & brimstone about Jesus and Heaven. It started out innocuous enough:

The opening hallway was pretty much what we expected. Lots of preaching about how the Bible is the word of god, quotes about great beasts in the Bible, and about how evolution is wrong:

The main exhibit area starts out similarly. There are these charming lads:

Then there is a bunch of propaganda about how important biblical literacy is, and a room featuring a family engaging in drugs, pornography, abortions, and gossip! And then, PLOT TWIST! The family's preacher has decided that they should just leave the science to the scientists, and not worry about the age of the Earth or how people were created. No wonder the family is drowning in sin!

Then there is a room full of humans and dinosaurs! It's just as amusing as expected, despite the fact that you are not allowed to pet the raptors.

Adam and Eve frolic in the garden of Eden, joined by deer, rabbits, squirrels, and random dinosaurs. Also, there was a pretty impressive Noah's Ark diorama.

It's after this room that the museum gets truly disturbing. While everything up until this point was rather silly and amusing, the remainder of the museum is a true monument to ignornance. It replicates the look and feel of a natural history museum, with large, bright photos aside "scientific explanations" about how creationism is true. Each exhibit gives what "secular scientists" say, then gives the biblical interpretation, explaining that the only reason secular scientists and Christian scientists come to different conclusions is that they start with different assumptions.

The terrifying part is that so many of their explanations sounds plausible if you don't have a pretty sophisticated understanding of biology and ecology. How was the Grand Canyon formed? We don't know! But there have been events where large canyons were formed in just a matter of days due to volcanic eruptions.... Why are dinosaur fossils buried so deep? Because the global flood deposited massive amounts of sediment on top of them, of course! In fact, the global flood explains a lot of the state of the Earth's surface. How do we explain the fact that we can observe evolution in bacteria? Some convoluted explanation about how that's just natural selection, not evolution. You see, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are actually inferior to other bacteria (all mutations are mistakes), and would die out as soon as antibiotics were removed from their environment. And therefore evolution is false.

Secular scientists say that beetles evolved a mating call? Think critically! How could female beetles evolve the response to the mating call at the same time males evolved the call? Secular scientists say that Goliath beetles evolved the ability to fly? Think critically! How could something so heavy evolve that ability? Isn't it more likely that it was designed by an intelligent creator?

Rather than come out and say that the scientific community is wrong, Ham's museum instead takes the often-used strategy of sowing doubt and encouraging people to make up their own minds, along with heavily suggesting that the "secular scientists" aren't to be trusted. The last few rooms of the museum are dedicated not to promoting anything, but rather tearing down science.

It's scary because it works. The museum is hugely successful. Innumerable parents bring innumerable children to the museum every day to be indoctrinated against human reason. While we came in expecting amusement, we left fighting off depression at the deviousness of Ham's assault on progress. The whole museum seemed designed to worm into the heads of impressionable children (and adults) the idea that scientists know nothing, can prove nothing, and are advocating only for their own alternative faith-based worldview. The museum proceeds not by making straightforward arguments, but by pretending to approach the natural world in a scientific way. Ham's museum presents creationism as a science, the only goal of which is to accurately explain the natural world. Disagreements with the vast majority of the scientific community are presented as simply different schools of thought rather than fundamentally different approaches toward understanding the world.

The Creation Museum scares me. It is devastatingly effective at spreading misinformation and ignorance, and it is emblematic of a widespread backlash against the march of progress, which undermines holy truths at every turn. The Creation Museum looms as the proverbial conservative, standing before the tide of history and yelling "stop." Except rather than a single doomed figure, it is an army of soldiers for Christ, dedicated to dragging us all back into the 18th century.