Part 2: My Day Inside the Creation Museum

Honestly I am beginning to think that this museum should be required for all children to see. Sooner or later all of them will come face to face with real scientific explanations in books, school, or at legitimate museums and they’ll have to reconcile their beliefs with that. It will be like the first time as a child you noticed that little wisp of black hair underneath Santa’s white wig and you wondered what the hell was going on. The blowback will be enough for them to seriously reconsider everything they’ve been told in church.

Well, with all of the blatant religious bullshit, at least it’s pretty clear that this is NOT a science museum. I’d much rather see a “creationist” museum than a pseudo-scientific ID museum that is trying to pretend it’s not religious.

The Da Vinci Code? An attack on Christianity? Damn, these folks can’t even take criticism in fiction, can they?

BTW, I’m Mikel–I met you at the Rally for Reason. Heard you mention your website so I thought I’d take a look. Good stuff here

I find it ironic that the “Wall of Fear and Loathing” displays an article with the title “Gay Bishop”.

Richard Wade wrote:

Probably because two dromeosaurids weren’t tearing him into bite-sized chunks with those mouths full of edged fangs. So good for chewing up veggies.

No, he’s wearing clothes. That means it’s post-fall and meatasaurus time!

And there was a dinosaur eating a pineapple.

LOL! For some reason, that line cracked me up.

The whole experience sounds like theater of the absurd. Dinos eating pineapples just fits right in to the insane mindset – no explanations needed.

The thing that’s not funny is that the craziness isn’t absurd to many ignorant, deceived people out there. I’d love to get some good stats on how many people really, truly believe this stuff. Anybody know of a good number for young-earth creationists?

46%. Ugh, every time I hear that I get just as dumbfounded and aggravated as the first time I heard it.

When is this country going to wake up and realize that we are the laughing stock of the greater science community?? It’s horrifying.

Thanks for the link Siamang. I’m saddened…

The sad thing is that I haven’t figured out a surefire way to take all their money.

I guess Ken Ham has. Why didn’t I think of that?

That was bad. I feel for you Hemant. I’m not a scientist, unless you classify psychology in that area, but I felt like I was looking at a bad rendention of the Flintstones. No wonder you felt dumber when you left. I feel the same way just looking at the pics. Either your brain fell asleep or it said, “Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here.”

The whole museum was structured so that the 7 Cs (Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation) were explained in order. While each of the first four Cs got their own section, we were whisked into a small movie theater to watch a movie about everything else, including Christ’s death and resurrection. The group I was with joked that they must have ran out of money after the first four Cs so they decided to lump the last three together.

Even more disturbingly (from a theological perspective) is that their first four C’s all come from the first 11 chapters of Genesis. They skip the bulk of the OT (the whole history of Israel) and jump straight from the tower of Babel to Jesus. I wonder if there’s some latent anti-Semitism going on there.

If that dinosaur in the picture is an Iguanodon, (Siamang, I think you’re right, who the heck else among dinosaurs had thumb-spikes), then it was possible that they did eat fruit: fruit are conclusively known from the fossil record ~125 Ma, Iguanodon was around then…

Of course this fruit wouldn’t be a modern pineapple but the creationists at least almost were scientific.

The only other photo I feel like commenting on is the stratigraphic record that places up fossils with their “secular” geological time periods. A display like this serves creationism perfectly, by

1) only showing fossils of organisms that don’t show much morphological change
2) only showing fossils of organisms still existant
3) not showing age
4) most importantly, not showing when taxa first appear

For instance, ok fine Creation Museum, sand dollars of today look similar to those of the past. But how come, according to my evil secular timescale, they don’t show up until ~60 million years ago? If the fossil record occurred in one geological event, than how come sand dollars are not all over the fossil record?

I point this out because it’s really boggling to me how museums and museums full of fossils could all be ignored by creationists. But I think I get it: the authority figures (the museum makers) only show the public a distorted glimmer of the fossil record. The public believes the authority figures. The public now believes this falsehood, unless they learn to disbelieve the authority figure.

…my only question I still have is that, as a scientist, can I go see their fossil collections for free? They do have fossil collections, right?

…my only question I still have is that, as a scientist, can I go see their fossil collections for free? They do have fossil collections, right?

I’d be astonished if they do. As a kid growing up in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History I poured over hundreds of thousands of fossils in their vast collections on the research floors. Most people don’t realize that genuine natural history museums are like icebergs; only a small portion is shown to the public.

Knowing museums inside and out and loving them as I do, I could never bring myself to visit this Disneyland of Superstition. I’d either be carried out crying or thrown out raving.

cautious, your joke isn’t any worse than my “bio-curious” pun above. We should write “badaboom pshhh” after some of these.
Yes, how the creationists explain fossils being at entirely different levels in the strata, reflecting entirely different terrain is… well I keep forgetting they don’t actually try to explain such pesky details. Once a woman was admiring my fossil collection and she told me how she found fossil seashells high on a mountain top. She said she thought the Great Flood must have left them way up there. I said, “That’s an interesting idea, but shell fish don’t float.” At first she looked puzzled, then enlightened, then pissed and she left. Another time someone told me they thought the K-T boundary was silt left by the Great Flood. I thought about the lengthy explanation about the fallacy of all that, but it’s not my area of expertise so I just said, “That’s an interesting idea. Why is there in many places another two thousand feet of layers of sandstone, limestone, shale, limestone, sandstone, shale, lava, sandstone, shale, limestone and dirt on top of it, each layer with fossils of organisms that could only live in utterly different environments?” Again the expressions of puzzlement, enlightenment and being pissed, and he left.

I know we should keep trying to educate people wherever we can, but sometimes I just want to say, “That’s an interesting idea,” and I’ll be the one to leave.

Great stuff Hemant!! Thanks for checking it out for me, so I don’t have to go myself. I love a good freak show, but I don’t think I can give them any of my money.

Hi,

I’m a new visitor here, just discovered Hemant’s site a few days ago, and it’s a great site. My compliments to the chef!

Wanted to address a comment by Becky Robinson above. Becky wrote: “When is this country going to wake up and realize that we are the laughing stock of the greater science community?? It’s horrifying.”

The only response I can think of at this time is that it may be that a (significant?) portion of the national population isn’t interested in not being the laughing stock of the greater science community. That is to say, until a widespread cultural change occurs in which the national sentiment sways toward a desire to scale the heights of rigorous scientific endeavor (and as a caution, I would say there are, no doubt, examples of plenty of Americans attempting to do just that), we, as a country, remain behind those nations or areas of the world (and generalization gets hazy, so we have to be careful) that aspire to greater and greater scientific achievement and education. Not that we’re less intelligent, but more that there may not be a national interest that has been cultivated in such development.

To put it another way, knowledge has to be desired and desirable. One of the questions I’m interested in is how do we, at a personal and national level, engender a real thirst for knowledge, questions, doubts, exploration, investigation, experimentation, and the self-discipline (and humility) to check our methods and findings and reevaluate, across a variety of disciplines?

I’ve rambled too much, but thanks again for your work Mr. Mehta, and commenters here. I look forward to stopping by as often as I can. Thanks.

No kings,

Robert

The “Holy Land Experience?”

Come one, come all! Bombings! Shootings! Kidnappings! Occupation! Non-stop tension, hatred and despair! And everybody but everybody thinks they own the road! Fun, fun, fun for the whole family! No need to fly twelve thousand miles for the true Holy Land Experience! It’s right here in Orlando, Florida!

What’s that? Oh, you mean the Holy Land as it was long ago? Oh.

Cometh one, Cometh all! Disease! Sword stabbing! Torture! Occupation! Non stop tension, hatred and despair! And everybody but everybody thinks they own the Roman via! Fun, fun, fun for the whole family! No need to ride a donkey twelve thousand miles for the true Holy Land Experience! It’s right here in Orlando, Florida!

Things sure have changed since the good old days in the Holy Land.

I personally enjoy the picture of their collage. I mean what other museum would you find pictures of magazines that were drawn on.

He thinks that the reason why the US has so many…religious adherents (compared to other western democracies) is because our country lacks a good deal of the social welfare that other western democracies have.

That’s an interesting hypothesis. But I’ve also heard in phrased in the opposite direction: religionists expect god to take care of stuff and use that as a justification for opposing reforms like social welfare programs. Since religiosity is correlated with so many different social problems, it’s probable that the causality goes in both directions. For example, higher STD and abortion rates in the US are caused by preachers condemning contraceptives. Higher violent crime rates are caused by people thinking that a violent book like the Bible is the exemplar of morality. On the other hand, correlations like belief in god to high infant mortality rates are more difficult to explain.

(people who can’t afford to pay for medical bills would be more likely to pray that God would keep them healthy)

Definitely something to this. In China, for example, the rich get Western medicine and the poor get reassured that traditional Chinese medicine is effective.

Greg seems to be conflating creationism with religious faith

Seeing as no atheist is a creationist (that’s an asbolute statement, but I’m fairly confident in it), this isn’t such a big mistake. The study I linked above shows that the correlation between religion and creationism is just as strong as you’d expect it to be. Thus, since religious belief is correlated to both poor social health and to creationism, creationism is correlated to poor social health by transitivity.

I do think that education plays a huge role. Kids today are simply not taught critical thinking.

They haven’t been ever since Abelard was declared a heretic for writing Sic et Non.

They are told to listen to what their parents, teachers, ministers, etc. say and just accept it.

According to a recent cognitive study, even that’s starting to fail. Nowadays, they seem only to listen to what cartoon characters say. Naturally, instead of seeing this as a serious problem with the students, the researchers concluded that we should try to integrate more cartoons into their education.

I don’t personally know of many people who were specifically taught to think critically. It seems that people have to be self-taught critical thinkers.

It comes up in mathematics in the year after the Calculus sequence. And I imagine that other majors in college bring it up at some point as well–I can’t think of any area where one could do four years worth of college level work without needing to develop some sort of ability to think critically. Granted, it should be explicitly taught at least a decade earlier, but it’s better than nothing.

Thanks for your comments. I have to disagree that people aren’t taught critical thinking skills, though I do agree that it’s obviously not across the board and it’s frequently not in the classroom. It may be that, as a public institution, modern education in this country is, indeed, failing to arm students with the kind of intellectual curiosity and drive to attain knowledge through critical thinking.

Since some people are getting critical thinking skills, they must be coming from somewhere. But since many more people are not getting them, there must be some failure in the process as well.

Your example of breaking the problem of spelling a word with help from a dictionary into a series of subproblems is a perfect one. As a mathematics professor, this is exactly how I try to help students approach problems, by asking them to consider what step they could take that would make the problem simpler to solve, etc. Now, students entering college at the Calculus level are usually able to do this with a hint or two. But students entering a couple of math classes lower usually are not. I’m not suggesting this as a cause so much as a symptom of the problem, but the interesting fact remains that the first math class a person takes at the college level is a terrific predictor of how developed their critical thinking skills are. I have a limited perspective, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this same trend carried over to other areas of academic discourse.

This seems like a plausible cause:

One problem with modern standardized test systems is that many schools are teaching “to the test,” that is, rote instruction designed to get students to produce the expected answer on a given standardized form.

Rote instruction, among other problems, teaches students what they’re expected to know while totally ignoring why the ideas are true, how they can be verified, etc. But we should also note the fact that American children on average spend the least time outside of school on academic work of any 1st world country on the planet, and we have one of the shortest school years as well.

Coming from the other direction is a counter problem, and that is that many higher learning institutions demand a certain functional score on a test that ultimately only measures how well a student takes that kind of test, not what kind of productive student or intellectual contributor that candidate might ultimately be.

I’ll agree that the tests don’t directly measure these qualities, which is why admissions packets supplement them with letters of recommendation, personal statements, etc. That said, scores on certain tests can indicate more than an ability to do well on a certain test.

Personally, I’m surprised. Despite how much money they spent on it, this museum looks… well… cheap. (Hemant’s comments on the lack of amenities would seem to bear this out.) Normally, creationists are very slick and polished – they have plenty of time to practice, after all, what with all the science they’re not doing. Maybe $27 million doesn’t go as far as one would think?

An athiest cannot believe in anything beyond the material world – not even fairies as Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy.

As a non-theist, I see more than just the material world. I see love, compassion, awe and wonder, joy in children, and a lot of other things that are non-material. However, I do not attribute them to the god you do though. Even my 18 y.o. son knows of the energy we emit. Everything emits electrical energy. As a Buddhist, he attributes it to Chi. I’m not Buddhist, but he is.

If, as an athiest, you do not think that there is anything more than matter to the universe, you will not see God through arguments.

This leads me to your mentioning God. God is a human concept. Theism is only one definition of god. So many theists mistake even Spong for an atheist, but even he will tell you he is a non-theist and has his own non-theistic concept of god.

Again, since God is a human concept, one cannot judge as what is god to another person. I do look at the various human views of a deity- some are natural concepts and others are supernatural. The difference is how we label it. Not everyone has the same concept and some have no concept. Sometimes I think having no concept is better than having a personal concept, for it is more open to different possibilities.

So, let me get this straight. One museum showing biblical creation compared to how many “scientific” museums in this country? Why in the world would you waste your money on something you evidently know is false? If you already knew this museum was a waste of time, it doesn’t seem like a very smart move to pay money to see it, let alone have people come from all over the country to protest it. Paranoia willl destroy ya.

Your friend Herb Silverman said, ” Creationism is not good enough to be called “bad science.”

I find that interesting considering the THEORY of evolution is just that. It is not science by definition. It is not even based on information that is scientific, with the main ideas of the theory changing all the time. Only microevolution can be replicated today. The theory of evolution is the theory of macroevolution which is absurd.
Creationism is a better description of the human race and it’s beginnings. Life just doesn’t happen. The highly complex animals and beings did not slowly become themselves over time. What about the soul? Human beings are different than the animals in a way that you cannot attribute to evolutionary change.
Am I going against the mainstream of science? Yes. I can think for myself and not have to be fed all of my information from the so-called scientists. The Bible is a credible source of information for history and many other things. It has been studied for many years and nothing has brought it down as an indisputable source for so much important information that has changed the world.
Creationism is based upon this amazing history book. Evolution is based upon seeing some different looking birds. Evolution cannot be used to explain all of the different species. The genetic pool only has so much water. Ask yourself which idea is more credible. One from a history book, or one from “scientists” with an agenda? Creationism hasn’t changed. Evolutionary theories come and go…

Not sure when this guy went to the creation museum.  We went this month, August 2011, and it was actually cold in there.  The museum was awesome and very educational.  We highly recommend it to anyone with questions about evolution or creation by God.