Science on Faith at the Creation Museum

by Leah Arroyo

This article was published in Museum News, November/December issue of 2007.

"Prepare to believe.” That’s the invitation—or challenge—of the new $27 million Creation Museum, which opened last Memorial Day weekend in Petersburg, Ky., about 10 miles from the Cincinnati airport. Run by Answers in Genesis (AiG), a nondenominational Christian ministry founded in 1994, the museum seeks to explain the origins of life.

How it’s going about this has stirred up more than a little controversy.

Far from rejecting traditional science and natural history, the Creation Museum contends that physics, geology, paleontology and so on actually confirm Christian biblical history—with some key caveats, voiced by a team of science PhDs. Harnessing those disciplines in service to an “unashamedly evangelical” mission has fueled a success museum planners never expected, according to Ken Ham, AiG’s president and co-founder, who is the museum’s president and founder as well. Visitorship was a reported 160,000 in the first 80 days, on projections of 250,000 for the first year of operation.

Here are the museum’s main points. Every word of the Bible—with a focus on Genesis, the first book of both the Christian and Jewish texts—is literally true. God created the universe, the earth and all life forms in six days about 6,000 years ago, as calculated by the 17th-century Anglican archbishop James Ussher. Dinosaurs—the dominant image of the museum’s website, bookstore and press materials, featured prominently throughout the property—were part of this picture as much as any other animal. (Said Ham: “Evolutionary Darwinists need to understand we are taking the dinosaurs back.”) About 4,300 years ago, Noah and his ark survived a global flood. Some two millennia later, Jesus, through his crucifixion, redeemed humankind from the fall of Adam and Eve.

Moving up to modern times: Science is highly useful, but it must start with the Bible and apply discoveries accordingly. The concept of “intelligent design”—that the workings of the universe are too complex and brilliantly functional not to have been designed by a higher being—is on the right track, but it falls short in not identifying that higher being as the Christian God.

And evolution is wrong. Way wrong.

But visitors aren’t to stop there. The next step is to act on what they learn. The museum’s “main theme and vision statement” calls on them to see how Genesis “addresses modern cultural issues such as racism, same-sex marriage and abortion.” The core of the mission is to “exalt Jesus Christ,” “equip Christians to better evangelize the lost” and “challenge visitors to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and to accept the authority of the Bible.”

Adam and Eve in a Garden of Eden diorama.

Photo by Angie Eason

Is this a museum? And if so, what kind?

If you travel to the area by plane, a shop on the way to baggage claim quickly lets you know you’re in the Bible Belt. (The airport, which serves both Cincinnati and northern Kentucky, is located in the latter.) A display offers “Inspirational Reading . . . to Enrich Your Life”: The Little Book of Where to Find It in the Bible; Answers to the Objections of Atheists, Agnostics, & Skeptics; Daily Devotions from the Psalms.

But entering the Creation Museum property might surprise you. On the stone walls of the gate are stegosauruses, which you might have thought too old for the museum’s cut-off date. The circular walkway to the entrance also features life-size models of dinosaurs, posed with models of a modern giraffe and rhino. The juxtaposition hints at what you’ll find inside.

The impressive facility was designed by Patrick Marsh, who created the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Florida’s Universal Studios. It boasts 65,000 square feet, with ceilings up to 40 feet high; admission is $19.95, $9.95 for kids. The design evokes the earth’s early history, however you date it, from the stone-like walls and floors to the ancient-looking pillars between exhibit cases.

From the entrance you take a long, curving hallway. High floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a three-acre pond and botanical gardens with nature trails. The shirts on your fellow visitors indicate unsurprisingly that many are churchgoers: Calvary Church, Tuscarora Baptist. As you round a corner to enter the main hall, the museum displays the standard features: a store, dioramas, glassed-in exhibit cases, theaters with timed admission. It looks like the usual natural history museum.

Then it doesn’t.

The first exhibit, standing alone to your right, is a fossil of a woolly rhinoceros. A sign instructs, “Thou Shalt Not Touch! Please.” The accompanying text reads:

This extinct species of woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) once roamed Asia and Europe. Its remains have been found in Pleistocene deposits associated with the Ice Age, which occurred a few centuries after Noah’s Flood.

At one time, the only rhinoceroses on earth were the ones who survived on Noah’s Ark while a catastrophic Flood destroyed the earth (~2348 BC). The variety of rhinoceros fossils that we find in post-Flood deposits suggests that they quickly spread over the earth, just as God had commanded.

Biology research suggests that the pair of rhinoceroses on the Ark diversified into perhaps 200–300 species in the first couple centuries after the Flood. God probably placed the potential for this variety in the original creation.

Pairs of animals-including dinosaurs-board a model of Noah's ark.

Photo by Jessie Rausch-Dickson.

You’ve been told to prepare to believe, but how the museum strikes you will likely depend on whether you already do.

As you pass the rhinoceros, you face a large, open hall. You have several options before beginning the main tour, including a planetarium show and a theater with the film Men in White. (More on those in a moment.)

There is also the Dragon Hall Bookstore, so named for the prevalence of dragon stories around the world, which to museum staff indicates that ancient people were familiar with what are now known as dinosaurs. The store includes the usual items: T-shirts, toys and books. Of the 23 bestsellers, 11 were written or co-written by Ham. A woman perhaps in her 60s looked at one of them and asked, “Is this by the guy who started all this?” Assured that it was, she said, “Then I’d better get it, hadn’t I?”

There are DVDs: for example, Lucy: She’s No Lady! A Critique of One of the Supposed Ancestors of Man, “Featuring Dr. David Menton,” holder of a PhD in cell biology from Brown University or Image of God or Planet of the Apes?, with David DeWitt, a PhD in neuroscience from Case Western Reserve University who is associate professor of biology at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Other sections of the store include Layman, History Book of the Universe [the Bible] and Curricula, whose subcategories include Small Group and Home School.

Out in the main hall, one final feature is sure to grab your attention before you begin the main tour. A large diorama features dinosaurs, their heads moving in gentle animatronic motion, peacefully coexisting with a girl and a boy wearing vaguely ancient tunics. The tableau is in accordance with the sixth day of creation, as described in Genesis, when humans and land animals were made.

The main tour, or Museum Experience Walk-Thru, begins with several display cases and wanders through 16 exhibit areas on two floors—suggestively, you travel downward through human history to a lower level. The first case outlines the museum’s overall lesson, the “Seven C’s in God’s Eternal Plan”: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross and Consummation. The next few cases hold live animals—chameleons, finches (doubtless chosen for their impact on Darwin)—each with a creationist point to make: “It is a mystery if complex things come from simpler things by small, unguided steps. But it makes sense if all these parts were designed to work together right from the beginning.” The text about poison dart frogs notes that they are only poisonous in the wild: “According to the Bible, before Adam sinned, all living things were originally ‘very good.’ So, just as is the case today in captivity, poison dart frogs were not harmful before Adam’s sin.”

The tour winds into several galleries that set up a point-counterpoint between evolutionists and creationists. A video narrated by a genial creationist paleontologist also features his friend, a colleague who favors evolution. The narrator introduces a theme continued in other galleries: Creationist and evolutionist scientists look at the same evidence but from different starting points, so they end up interpreting it differently. For example, the two men discuss the same dinosaur fossil. The narrator says, “I believe this animal was killed in a global flood. The flood according to the Bible was 4,300 years ago, so that’s how old this fossil would be.” The evolutionist speaks to the camera as well, saying he thinks dinosaurs died more than 100 million years ago.

A series of wall texts suggests that evolutionary scientists focus on evidence that “is in the present” but don’t address a question that concerns creationists: “But what happened in the past?” One example states that evolutionists observe fossils but don’t answer how and where coal and plant fossils were formed and preserved. Another case is the famous “Lucy,” the partial fossil of an Australopithecus afarensis estimated by anthropologists to be a 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor. According to the text, only creationists ask what Lucy looked like, if she walked upright, if she was an ancestor of modern humans.

The next gallery, “Same Facts, but Different Views,” contrasts key points of evolution and creationism—“Starting with Human Reason” versus “Starting with God’s Word.” Among straightforward issues such as the age of the universe is a philosophical note: The evolutionist considers humans “only the latest ripple in the endless stream of evolution,” operating over the course of 14 billion years. Creationists put humans at the center of a divine plan: “God created man and woman to dwell with Him. God’s intervention at key periods of history explains most of the world we see today.”

A book sold in the store spells out the museum’s approach to the sciences. Museum Guide: A Bible-Based Handbook to Natural History Museums (there is also an Aquarium Guide, as well as a Zoo Guide) asks, “Is it possible for a Bible-believing Christian to visit such a place and yet leave with his faith intact?” The answer is “a resounding yes!” The guide points out that “The kind of science that we normally think of as science (called ‘operational science’) is a wonderful tool,” helping researchers discover vaccines and so on. But it has limits. “It can’t, for example, tell us where fish came from, where the rock formed in the first place, or how the bones of the creature came to be fossilized. Operational science deals with the world of today. It involves testing and repeating experiments.”

By contrast, “Origins science deals with the past. . . . Of course, the best method of reconstruction is to rely on the account of an accurate eyewitness. Naturalists have no such eyewitness to rely on. However, the Bible provides a written record of an eyewitness to (who was also intimately involved with) history—the Creator God. This eyewitness cannot lie, so His account is completely trustworthy. . . .” Rather than avoid typical natural history museums, visitors should simply remain on guard as to which statements fall under “operational science” and which constitute “origins science.”

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