Natural history, Bible-style

Kentucky's Creation Museum, opening May 28, puts dinosaurs in the garden with Adam and Eve.

from the May 24, 2007 edition

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Erroneous, with 'great flash and dash'

Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, says, "This is freedom of speech, but it's unfortunate the public is going to be exposed to erroneous science presented with great flash and dash ... in an authoritative way. This is going to be detrimental to science literacy."

No doubt, AiG knew how to create an appealing experience, choosing a designer of amusement parks who created the Jaws and King Kong exhibits at Florida's Universal Studios. In a special-effects theater, the seats shake and visitors are sprinkled with water. There's a lush Garden of Eden, a partial re-creation of Noah's Ark, a slice of the Grand Canyon, lots of videos on plasma TVs, and a planetarium for exploring the universe. At Noah's Cafe, kids can saddle up on a triceratops.

Yet the main mission isn't entertainment; it's presenting a particular "biblical worldview" in which Genesis stands as literal history and true science.

"Genesis gives an account of the history of all basic entities ... from the One who knows everything," Ham says. "If you don't know everything, there could always be evidence that will lead to wrong conclusions."

And wrong conclusions is what AiG claims is behind evolution. Dividing science into "observational science" and "historical science," its theme is that the latter is simply interpretation based on one's presuppositions. In one exhibit, for instance, two paleontologists (a creationist and an evolutionist) are digging up a dinosaur skeleton, but they have two different interpretations – one from a perspective of thousands of years and the other, millions of years.

"Fossils don't have labels," Ham says. "You have different interpretations because you have different starting points – one starts with God's Word, one with human reason."

Dismissing the observational/historical dichotomy, Dr. Scott says "it's nonsense ... Nobody really thinks astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology ... go about testing their explanations in a way substantially different from other sciences."

Young-earth creationists believe the fossil record was entirely laid down during the "universal flood" of Noah's day. This view has taken hold just since 1961, when two fundamentalists, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, wrote "The Genesis Flood" (though the idea of "flood geology" had originated earlier among Seventh-Day Adventists).

"The evidence for geological ages became so overwhelming in the early 19th century that even evangelical Christ­ians embraced it and changed their understandings of Genesis to accommo­date it," says Ron Numbers, a science historian at the University of Wisconsin. But after the 1961 book, fundamentalists began gravitating to that position, which in 1970 was renamed creation science.

"If you take away the hundreds of millions of years the paleontological record gives to evolutionists, you've knocked out the biggest bulk of evidence for evolution," Dr. Numbers says. "They're trying to fit the scientific evidence into that model and for a period tried to market it as scientific to get it into the public schools." The US Supreme Court said it has a religious basis and couldn't be taught in science classrooms.

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Details: Stephanie Fazekas works on small pieces for a diorama. Melanie Stetson Freeman – Staff