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A Guided Tour of the Museum of Creation
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/pennock.htm#PENNOCK
The Museum of Creation and Earth History is located on the outskirts of San Diego, in Santee, in the same building that houses the Institute for Creation Research. ICR has expanded the museum over the years and they have clearly put a large investment into making it an impressive facility. Entrance to the exhibits is free, as is the regular tour, which I took with a group of about a dozen enthusiastic creationists. Our tour guide took every opportunity to stress the special status of human beings, how different humans are from the animals, and how absurd it is to think we could be related to apes. It was evolution theory, she said, that led people to think that we were animals, and when people think they are animals it is not surprising that they start behaving like animals. Evolutionist thinking is the reason for the terrible state our society is in today. Evolutionism leads people to think that animals have rights but that unborn babies do not. "I learned recently," she mentioned, nodding her head significantly toward a photo on the wall, "that Hitler believed in animal rights."
Most of these final comments came at the end of the tour in the exhibits that pressed home what was really at stake in the choice between evolution and creationism. The debate is not just about deciding between two views about the history of life, it is about a choice of worldviews that determines whether we will head on the upward or the downward path. We will hear this warning echoed and amplified by the new creationists. But this gets ahead of our story; we will consider these issues in the chapters to come. For now let us return to the origin of the controversy.
The tour began where it should begin, our docent had told us, namely at the beginning, which of course was "In the beginning..." with the creation of the world by God on the first day of Creation. ICR interpreters put a scientific spin on the opening passages of Genesis. When the Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth on the first day they take this to refer respectively to three-dimensional space and to matter, and so they claim that the very first phrase tells us that God also started time at Creation. On the second day God created the waters below and also above the firmament -- a water vapor canopy that they claim would be the source of the forty days and nights of rain to come. They suggest, however, that until that time, this canopy would have made the world's climate consistently warm, thus allowing organisms to grow to large sizes and to live to hundreds of years of age after being created, starting from day three onward. This explains, of course, the "giants" that lived in those times and the remarkable longevity of Old Testament figures. The first plants that were created included complex fruiting plants, they claim, not simple ones that later evolved into such complexity. Furthermore, plants, and animals on subsequent days, were created "according to their kind," indicating that they did not descend from some other kind, as evolution holds. The guide emphasized that God created life only on the earth. Astronauts returning from the moon were kept in quarantine because evolutionists, thinking that life could have arisen elsewhere, worried about the possibility of hostile moon germs, but of course these did not exist. A park bench lets the visitors take a breather on the seventh "day of rest," as the guide asked us to consider how absolutely perfect the design of the world must have been at every level for God to have pronounced His Creation "very good." Only a supreme intelligent designer, not chance, could ever have produced such perfection and complexity.
The rooms we passed through as we walked through the days illustrated these and other points with large colorful murals, photographs of planets, nebula, and comets, and cages of birds, rodents, and snakes. Many of the exhibits have a professional look to them. However, because of the antiscientific content of much of the material, the religious framework that is stressed, and the copious quotations from Scripture, there is no mistaking this for a science museum. That it is theology and not science that drives the picture being presented is especially clear in the next room, in which we learn the effects that sin had when it entered this perfect world upon Adam's and Eve's disobedience of God. Death, violence, disease, and mutations are all the result of the curse God set upon the world as punishment for their sin. God's curse also introduced into the world the second law of thermodynamics, which they call the "death principle," which says that everything without exception must fall inevitably into decay. Prior to the Fall, no animals died since all were vegetarians; the struggle among animals and their carnivorous behavior began only after the loss of Eden's peaceable kingdom. Henry and John Morris speculate that "God performed genetic engineering on animals [to give them sharp teeth for eating flesh] to forever remind Adam and Eve of the awful consequences of sin."[2] Eventually, though, God became so disgusted with the violence and sin of the world that he decided to wipe the slate clean with a global flood and to allow only a pair of representatives of each kind of being to survive in an Ark built by the righteous Noah.
The Noah's Ark room is crafted to make one feel as though one is below deck on the great ship. Sounds of wind, thunder, and creaking boards add to the effect, and a carefully painted mural one sees in perspective upon entering gives one the unmistakable impression of looking down an immensely long row of animal stalls. Is that the back of a stegosaurus we see in one of the stalls? Yes, our guide explained, dinosaurs were certainly on board the Ark, since the Bible tells us that Noah took two of every kind of animal. Another wall includes reproductions of dozens of sketches and descriptions from explorers who claimed to have glimpsed or uncovered portions of the remains of the Ark. Part of ICR's "scientific research" is to continue that search. At a "Back to Genesis" seminar I attended, John Morris said he had been on over a dozen expeditions to the Middle East looking for the Ark. "I haven't found it yet," he admitted. "When I get up to heaven I'm going to ask Noah where he parked that thing!"
This obsession with the Ark is understandable, given the key theological role that God's destruction of the world in the Noachian deluge plays for creationists, and because it is a central explanatory element of creation-science. Our guide explained that this global catastrophic flood was the cause of all the major geological features of the earth. Mountains arose by sudden upthrusting as the fountains of the deep broke open. The Flood itself scooped out valleys and canyons, deposited gravel and rocks in the layers as we find them, destroyed almost all life on earth, and was the origin of most fossils. As John Morris explains it in a videotaped tour of the museum, all the supposed evidence for evolution comes from looking at fossils in the layers of rock, but when we recognize that these were all laid down at once in the Flood then "there is no evidence left for evolution and an old earth."[3]
http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/pennock.htm#PENNOCK
The Museum of Creation and Earth History is located on the outskirts of San Diego, in Santee, in the same building that houses the Institute for Creation Research. ICR has expanded the museum over the years and they have clearly put a large investment into making it an impressive facility. Entrance to the exhibits is free, as is the regular tour, which I took with a group of about a dozen enthusiastic creationists. Our tour guide took every opportunity to stress the special status of human beings, how different humans are from the animals, and how absurd it is to think we could be related to apes. It was evolution theory, she said, that led people to think that we were animals, and when people think they are animals it is not surprising that they start behaving like animals. Evolutionist thinking is the reason for the terrible state our society is in today. Evolutionism leads people to think that animals have rights but that unborn babies do not. "I learned recently," she mentioned, nodding her head significantly toward a photo on the wall, "that Hitler believed in animal rights."
Most of these final comments came at the end of the tour in the exhibits that pressed home what was really at stake in the choice between evolution and creationism. The debate is not just about deciding between two views about the history of life, it is about a choice of worldviews that determines whether we will head on the upward or the downward path. We will hear this warning echoed and amplified by the new creationists. But this gets ahead of our story; we will consider these issues in the chapters to come. For now let us return to the origin of the controversy.
The tour began where it should begin, our docent had told us, namely at the beginning, which of course was "In the beginning..." with the creation of the world by God on the first day of Creation. ICR interpreters put a scientific spin on the opening passages of Genesis. When the Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth on the first day they take this to refer respectively to three-dimensional space and to matter, and so they claim that the very first phrase tells us that God also started time at Creation. On the second day God created the waters below and also above the firmament -- a water vapor canopy that they claim would be the source of the forty days and nights of rain to come. They suggest, however, that until that time, this canopy would have made the world's climate consistently warm, thus allowing organisms to grow to large sizes and to live to hundreds of years of age after being created, starting from day three onward. This explains, of course, the "giants" that lived in those times and the remarkable longevity of Old Testament figures. The first plants that were created included complex fruiting plants, they claim, not simple ones that later evolved into such complexity. Furthermore, plants, and animals on subsequent days, were created "according to their kind," indicating that they did not descend from some other kind, as evolution holds. The guide emphasized that God created life only on the earth. Astronauts returning from the moon were kept in quarantine because evolutionists, thinking that life could have arisen elsewhere, worried about the possibility of hostile moon germs, but of course these did not exist. A park bench lets the visitors take a breather on the seventh "day of rest," as the guide asked us to consider how absolutely perfect the design of the world must have been at every level for God to have pronounced His Creation "very good." Only a supreme intelligent designer, not chance, could ever have produced such perfection and complexity.
The rooms we passed through as we walked through the days illustrated these and other points with large colorful murals, photographs of planets, nebula, and comets, and cages of birds, rodents, and snakes. Many of the exhibits have a professional look to them. However, because of the antiscientific content of much of the material, the religious framework that is stressed, and the copious quotations from Scripture, there is no mistaking this for a science museum. That it is theology and not science that drives the picture being presented is especially clear in the next room, in which we learn the effects that sin had when it entered this perfect world upon Adam's and Eve's disobedience of God. Death, violence, disease, and mutations are all the result of the curse God set upon the world as punishment for their sin. God's curse also introduced into the world the second law of thermodynamics, which they call the "death principle," which says that everything without exception must fall inevitably into decay. Prior to the Fall, no animals died since all were vegetarians; the struggle among animals and their carnivorous behavior began only after the loss of Eden's peaceable kingdom. Henry and John Morris speculate that "God performed genetic engineering on animals [to give them sharp teeth for eating flesh] to forever remind Adam and Eve of the awful consequences of sin."[2] Eventually, though, God became so disgusted with the violence and sin of the world that he decided to wipe the slate clean with a global flood and to allow only a pair of representatives of each kind of being to survive in an Ark built by the righteous Noah.
The Noah's Ark room is crafted to make one feel as though one is below deck on the great ship. Sounds of wind, thunder, and creaking boards add to the effect, and a carefully painted mural one sees in perspective upon entering gives one the unmistakable impression of looking down an immensely long row of animal stalls. Is that the back of a stegosaurus we see in one of the stalls? Yes, our guide explained, dinosaurs were certainly on board the Ark, since the Bible tells us that Noah took two of every kind of animal. Another wall includes reproductions of dozens of sketches and descriptions from explorers who claimed to have glimpsed or uncovered portions of the remains of the Ark. Part of ICR's "scientific research" is to continue that search. At a "Back to Genesis" seminar I attended, John Morris said he had been on over a dozen expeditions to the Middle East looking for the Ark. "I haven't found it yet," he admitted. "When I get up to heaven I'm going to ask Noah where he parked that thing!"
This obsession with the Ark is understandable, given the key theological role that God's destruction of the world in the Noachian deluge plays for creationists, and because it is a central explanatory element of creation-science. Our guide explained that this global catastrophic flood was the cause of all the major geological features of the earth. Mountains arose by sudden upthrusting as the fountains of the deep broke open. The Flood itself scooped out valleys and canyons, deposited gravel and rocks in the layers as we find them, destroyed almost all life on earth, and was the origin of most fossils. As John Morris explains it in a videotaped tour of the museum, all the supposed evidence for evolution comes from looking at fossils in the layers of rock, but when we recognize that these were all laid down at once in the Flood then "there is no evidence left for evolution and an old earth."[3]
