The New Creation Museum: A $25,000,000 Monument to Stupidity

The Creation Museum, a state-of-the-art interactive 60,000 square-foot facility, had its grand opening May 28 in Petersburg, Kentucky, not far from Cincinnati, Ohio. The museum cost over $25,000,000 to construct, collected entirely through donations from private investors. It is the brainchild of Ken Ham, who is also the founder and head-honcho of the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis. Ken is a native Australian with, according to his bio, a B.S. in applied science from Queensland Institute of Technology.[1] Either the Queensland Institute of Technology is not a very good school, or Ken Ham wasn’t paying attention in class.

As you might intuit from the name of his ministry (and the titles of the books he has authored or co-authored, including The Lie: Evolution), Ken Ham is a creationist, meaning he believes the Earth and the rest of the universe was created by the hand of God. But that is too general a description; Ken is a young Earth creationist, meaning he believes the universe to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000-10,000 years old. Ken is also a biblical literalist—he thinks the Earth was created exactly as described in the Book of Genesis. It is this model of the universe that is represented in the Creation Museum.

Ken Ham might be a nice guy—I don’t know him personally—but scientifically speaking, he’s an idiot. The fact that he seems to have a legitimate scientific education makes him stubborn and willfully ignorant, as well. Consider that he’s just spent an enormous amount of money building a facility to proclaim his plainly wrong theories to potentially hundreds of thousands of gullible visitors a year, and we may also add “irresponsible” to the list.

The “science” presented at the Creation Museum is a feeble imitation of the real thing. Some creationists talk a good game, but most of their claims are preposterous, and some of their explanations are elaborately contrived in order to force uncooperative facts to agree with the creation myth of Genesis. “The Bible is true. No doubt about it!” decrees the entry describing the museum’s Bible Authority Room on an online walkthrough. The entry then declares the ignorance of anyone who rejects the biblical version of history, "including literal six-day creation.”[2]

Ignorance is not rejecting the Genesis account; ignorance is using the Bible as a basis for science when it is an unfit foundation for anything—its history is convoluted and unreliable, its morality is confused and often repugnant, and it contains no science as we now define the term. It brims over with pseudoscience and mysticism, astrology, numerology, so-called prophecy, has all the hallmarks of mythology, but contains none of the objective observation and critical analysis on which legitimate modern scientific inquiry depends.

Creationists like Ken Ham tether their pale simulacrum of actual science to the Bible because they believe it to be God’s Word, inerrant and perfect; yet to anyone who reads the Bible honestly and objectively, this is self-evidently false. Christians turn to the Bible for moral guidance, but (to cite just one example) in Numbers chapter 31 we read how Moses, great hero of the faith and supposed author of the Torah, angrily rebuked officers in his army following a battle with the Midianites where, following God’s orders, they had killed every man. Why was Moses angry? I’ll let him speak for himself: “And Moses said to them: “Have you kept all the women alive? Look, these women caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to trespass against the LORD in the incident of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man intimately. But keep alive for yourselves all the young girls who have not known a man intimately.” (Numbers 31:15-18, NKJV)

Some hero, ordering his men to slaughter all the male children and their mothers, but to keep the virgins for themselves. If the Bible is so warped that a degenerate murderer like Moses is portrayed as a role model, why should we trust its so-called science any more than its morality?

The various exhibits at Ken Ham’s museum depict, through models, life-size recreations, animatronics, and a much-touted special-effects theater, several important episodes in the Biblical account of history. Visitors get to walk through a replica of the Garden of Eden, stand before the Tree of Knowledge, and learn the answer to the oft-asked question, “Where did Cain’s wife come from?” (Answer: he, like the rest of his brothers, married one of his sisters.[3]) They learn how Adam named all the animals, how children in the first generation played outside with nearby dinosaurs (all of whom were apparently friendly herbivores), and how Eve ate an apple and caused everything bad that has happened since.

After that, you can visit Noah’s workshop and tour a full-scale “historically accurate” model of the ark, and learn how Noah and his family fed and cared for the tens of thousands of animals kept onboard for over a year during the Great Flood. Then see how the people of ancient Babel offended God by trying to build a tower tall enough to reach him, forcing the omnipotent and omniscient creator of everything to destroy the tower and confuse their languages so the people of Earth could never try such a wacky stunt again.

Describing these attractions only reinforces how utterly ridiculous it is that anyone in the civilized world believes any of this actually happened, especially those who claim to be scientists. I don’t deny that some stories found in the Bible have some value as myths or as literature, but to insist that it is the authority on everything is deranged. Creationism is not science. Most of the time it doesn’t even look like science. Its supporters have struggled for decades to establish it as an equally valid alternative theory to evolution to be taught to children in science classrooms; they have always failed, because what they propose to teach is the opposite of science.

The first step in the scientific method is observation. But creationists don’t start there; they begin with their conclusion. Creationists assume that God created the universe exactly like the Bible says he did, and work backwards to prove it. It’s intellectual dishonesty of the worst kind. When subjected to actual scientific rigor, creationist explanations disintegrate. To be scientifically useful, a hypothesis must be falsifiable, and in this way the creationist theories do at least serve a minor function; we may not know exactly how the universe was created, or all the details of the mechanisms of evolution, but we do know—for a fact—that the universe was not made in six 24-hour days less than 10,000 years ago by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The biggest shame of all about the Creation Museum is that it sounds like a pretty neat place, gross scientific inaccuracies aside. Who wouldn’t want to visit a place with animatronic dinosaurs, for God’s sake? The exhibits were designed by Patrick Marsh, who also built the Jaws and King Kong rides at Universal Studios.[4] That slick, compelling presentation will probably convince many of those who visit, especially young children who don’t know any better, that what they are seeing is the truth. That ignorance, generated and upheld by religious dogma masquerading as real science, will remain with many of them for the rest of their lives.

I’m glad my parents took me to the Smithsonian.