Tuesday, May 29, 2007

The Science of Selling Lies

The $27 million Creationism Museum opened yesterday in Petersburg, Kentucky. The brain child of anit-science group Answers in Genesis, the museum's mission statement (according to their web site) is as follows:

*Exalt Jesus Christ as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer through a safe, wholesome, family-friendly center for learning and discovery that clearly presents major biblical themes from Genesis to Revelation.
*This center will equip Christians to better evangelize the lost with a sense of urgency, through a combination of exhibits, research and educational presentations that uphold the inerrancy of the Bible.
*This center will also challenge visitors to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and to accept the authority of the Bible by providing culturally relevant biblical and scientific answers from a biblical worldview.

Main theme

The Bible is true from Genesis to Revelation!


The museum is is deeply rooted in the Young Earth theory of Creationism which states that the Earth is only about 6000 years old, that roughly 4000-5000 years ago dinosaurs, and man walked along side each other, and that there were even dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. The museum even goes one step beyond the simple 6000 year rhetoric and takes the position that the science based belief that the world is 4.6 billion years old is responsible for the disintegration of morality in America. Stephen Asma, a professor at Columbia College Chicago, reviews one exhibit at the new museum thusly:

...the coup de grace is the “Culture in Crisis” exhibit. Here the museum gives us a “natural history” of the breakdown of the American family. Visitors are invited to look through three windows of a contemporary American home. Videos loop to show two young boys looking at porn on the computer and experimenting with drugs. Another window shows a young girl crying, surrounded by abortion pamphlets. And finally the parents are shown arguing. A recreated church facade stands at the other end of the room, but the foundation of the church has been damaged by a large wrecking-ball labeled "millions of years." The signage explains that the cause of all this misery is our move away from Genesis and toward the scientific ideas of geology and evolution. Ideas about an old earth make people feel small and insignificant, so naturally they do drugs and have abortions.


The rest of Asma's evaluation of the museum is available here.

This museum, and its anti-science agenda, is both ludicrous and insidious, but I have to hand it to them on one major point...

ANIMATRONIC DINOSAURS!!!!

Designed by the same guy who built the King Kong ride at Universal studios, a number of the museum's dioramas depicting man and Thunder Lizard cavorting hand in claw do so through the use of full sized, audio-animatronic dinosaur robots. Check our these pics...




COOL!!!



AWESOME!!!



SO SWEET!!!

Goddamn you, Creationism Museum. Goddamn you for presenting your bullshit wanton ignorance as verifiable fact and double goddamn you for making me want to travel to Kentucky and shell out $19.95 so I can see your awesome looking bullshit.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that bottom picture implying that man had t-shirts and cardboard boxes in the time of the dinosaurs? And had to keep those pesky dinosaurs out of his graden?

Jeff said...

Man, when I was a kid if you told me animatronic dinosaurs were available somewhere in the city, I would kill to get to them. And I did. Oh, how I did.

Ben said...

I think the bottom photo is actually positing that dinosaurs mostly ate large textured styrofoam cylinders.

Anonymous said...

The creation museum has its first sex scandal!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/06/07/national/a175033D34.DTL