A Museum That Lies Far, Far Off the Path of Science (Earth, dinosaur)

[Pah]

A Museum That Lies Far, Far Off the Path of Science
Creationism is enough to create a fainting spell.
Patt Morrison, writing in the LATimes - The complete article here (subscription may be needed)

I wrapped up my little visit to the Museum of Creation and Earth History in Santee and walked into the gift shop in time to hear a customer assuring the clerk that the Smithsonian in Washington has actual pieces of Noah's ark but won't admit it and won't let anyone near them.

Keep in mind I'd just seen "proof" that the Earth is no older than about 10,000 years, that man and dinosaurs coexisted before a flood that not only created the Grand Canyon but put the final score at humans (Noah and kin) 1, dinosaurs 0. After all that, the bit about the Smithsonian nearly sent me into a faint. I needed someone to deliver a couple of "quick, snap out of it, girl" taps with a copy of Scientific American.

Santee is a long way from Los Angeles, in a lot of ways. I saw more Bush bumper stickers there in an hour than I had in all of last year in L.A. It's closer in spirit to Cobb County, Ga., where stickers applied to biology textbooks declared that evolution is a theory, not a fact. Or, they did until last week, when a federal judge told the school board to unstick them because they endorsed religious beliefs.

The Santee museum has been making the creationism argument for 33 years, with low-tech exhibits bearing the touching, dorky earnestness of middle-school science projects — plastic butterflies, blue-painted fake stalactites, piped-in music from some De Mille biblical epic. When I was there, a gaggle of schoolgirls was taking earnest notes in front of an exhibit on Noah's ark. In the artist's rendering of life below decks, the ark looked an awful lot like the dining room at Musso & Frank, except the booths were occupied by ostriches and bears