My Visit to Creation Museum

[dirwid]

Back in August, I went to Ken Ham’s Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter with my young earth creationist family.

I meant to write about this trip sooner, but college had me busy (and I was too lazy to write about it ).

We made it a two day trip. The first day, we visited the Creation Museum, and the 2^nd day we visited the Ark Encounter. This post describes my visit to the Creation Museum on the first day of the trip. I don’t know how much you guys know about the museum or how many of you have actually visited it, so I’m hoping this post isn’t full of things you already know.

At the start of the museum, visitors are presented with the idea that scientists and creationists have the same evidence (in the form of fossils and whatnot), but the reason they arrive at different conclusions is because they have different starting points. Fair enough, I suppose. There is a whole room dedicated to this idea. However, they hint that the purpose of the museum isn’t about science at all by asking “Do different starting points matter in our personal lives?”

They then go from 0 to 100 on the stupid meter right off the bat by referring to the starting point for legitimate science as “Man’s Word” and then comparing it to what the bible says - “God’s Word”, the starting point for creationism. They start off by assuming that the bible is “God’s Word” and is completely factual, as if it is not also “man’s word”. They also ignore the thousands of other religions that also claim to possess “God’s Word”, making their “Man’s Word vs. God’s Word” comparison a false dichotomy.  

Presently, they try to defend these huge assumptions about the bible in a display titled “God’s Word is True”. Here is what that display said (everything is copied word-for-word, including the capitalization):

 

Quote

 

God’s Word is True

•           40 authors, writing over 2,000 years, spoke the SAME MESSAGE.

•           Scrolls, discovered in the last century, confirm that the ORIGINAL WORDS have been preserved.

•           Archeology has repeatedly confirmed that the Bible’s HISTORICAL DETAILS are accurate.

•           Hundreds of BIBLE PROPHECIES have been fulfilled, and none has failed.

ABOVE ALL, the GOD of TRUTH, the CREATOR of heaven and earth, inspired the men who penned the words.  

 

The first three of these bullet points are not even totally true, and even if they were, they are completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not the bible is true. The last one isn’t true, but at least it is actually relevant to proposition they are trying to support.

When I was a Christian, I agreed with conclusions such as “God’s Word is True”, but when I started questioning the faith, seeing supposed “proofs” of the bible like these scared me because I saw how terribly flawed and nonsensical they were. I was scared that after 2000+ years of apologetics, this was some of the best “proof” we had for a book which is the foundation for the entire religion. So once you start thinking critically about your religion, seeing the arguments of apologists such as Answers in Genesis should actually accelerate your deconversion if anything.

In the next room, the displays focused on how the bible is under attack on all sides today.  

I kid you not, one of the first displays in this room read:

Quote

 

The First Attack:

                Question God’s Word

 

And underneath this, they mention Satan’s “Did God really say…?” temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. So yes, people who have the audacity to even question whether the bible is totally inerrant are playing the part of the devil.

There were a series of displays following this one, with the following titles:

“Attempts to Question”

“Attempts to Destroy”

“Attempts to Discredit”

“Attempts to Criticize”  

”Attempts to Replace”  

“Attempts to Poison”  

All these displays narrate how the bible triumphantly survived through all kinds of attacks by non-believers over thousands of years, as if the fact that the bible exists and is believed by billions today is somehow proof that it is true and should be believed.

                In the “Attempts to Replace” display, they claim that “In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the philosopher Voltaire forecast that within a century no Bibles would be left on earth.” This seemed to me like quite a ridiculous thing for a famous philosopher to say, so I looked it up and was unable to find a source for this claim except on various Christian apologetics websites. So it is probably a total fabrication. Not much thought or fact-checking went into any of the displays in the Creation Museum.

After all these displays, the exhibit ended with:

Quote

 

The Latest Attack:

Question Biblical Time

 

(Referring to how people don’t believe the universe is 6000 years old anymore.)

 

The next few rooms were dark and scary urban-themed areas that were supposed to show people the terrible consequences of rejecting the bible. The rooms were decorated with hellish graffiti, scary sound effects, and eerie messages in capital letters listing all the supposed horrors of rejecting the bible. They weren’t even subtle about the emotional tricks they were playing on the visitors, but I don’t doubt that many of the visitors are stupid enough to fall for them.

On the walls were black-and-white photos of a wolf baring its teeth, a mushroom cloud, a pile of human skulls, a woman screaming in pain from childbirth, etc.

On a door with a ridiculous number of locks, the words “THE WORLD’S NOT SAFE ANYMORE” were carved with a knife.

A couple of the displays read:

Quote

“SCRIPTURE ABANDONED IN THE CULTURE LEADS TO… RELATIVE MORALITY, HOPELESSNESS, AND MEANINGLESSNESS”

Quote

“SCRIPTURE ABANDONED IN THE HOME LEADS TO… A GENERATION NO DIFFERENT THAN THE WORLD”

This whole exhibit is a prime example of one thing I hate about Christianity, particularly the extreme fundamentalist kind: It divides everyone up into “Christians” and *gasp* “The World”. Kids are taught to hate, fear, and be distrustful of the world outside their bubble of indoctrination. It keeps them feeling dependent on Christianity and discourages them from considering leaving the faith. However, the good thing about this is that when kids grow up, if they manage to leave their Christian bubble and see the world for themselves, they will see how terribly wrong their parents (and this exhibit) were and hopefully begin to question other religious things their parents taught them.

There was also an exhibit of a church with a wrecking ball smashing into it. On the wrecking ball was written “Millions of Years”. Next to it was a display describing the dangers of the church compromising with the findings of evolutionary science – the “effects of replacing God’s truth with man’s fallible ideas.”

There was another room showing the effects of disobeying God according to the bible. They compared their speculation of what the world was like in the Garden of Eden before the Adam and Eve disobeyed God by sinning with what it was like afterwards.

At the end of this tunnel of horrors, there was a display reading “There IS an answer to the sin problem…”

I’m sure you can guess where they take this.

 

Farther along, there was an area discussing evolution and natural selection. Creationist theories about natural selection and Noah’s Flood were given and compared with the actual scientific explanations.  

One thing about the museum that made an impression on me was that they had displays or depictions of dinosaurs almost everywhere. It seemed like they were almost obsessed with them, which is kind of funny considering that they are young earth creationists. It’s like the more ridiculous some component of their faith is, the more proud and showy they are about it. When reading Christian apologist articles online, it seems like this is a common tactic – to act unusually confident when it comes to some argument that is particularly damaging to their faith. They give some rambling nonsensical rebuttal while reassuring their Christians readers that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Their readers probably end up being convinced by their confidence and authoritative tone.

It seemed like most of the people visiting the Creation Museum were families with young kids. I thought that was the saddest part about my whole time at the place – seeing all the little kids mostly incapable of critical thinking being fed a bunch of nonsense. They will probably remember all the visuals and special effects and go home with the impression that the Old Testament stories are true as if they saw them happen with their own eyes, because that’s how it will probably feel to them after the experience.

While the Creation Museum was really bad, I think the Ark Encounter was even dumber in a few ways. If you guys want, I can write about what that was like in another post. But I'm done ranting for now.

-         -   Dirwid

[buffettphan]

Yours was probably the most detailed and I'd venture to say - accurate - description I've read of that museum place.   Everything else I've seen is either christian propaganda or a lot of  .   So thanks for taking the time to post.

 

10 hours ago, dirwid said:

While the Creation Museum was really bad, I think the Ark Encounter was even dumber in a few ways. If you guys want, I can write about what that was like in another post.

 

I'd like to hear about your experience at the Ark Encounter -- if/when you're ready for another rant.  

 

I agree that the saddest part of it all is the indoctrination of the kids.  Ham and his cronies know how to appeal to the kids - DINOSAURS!

 

 

[MOHO]

18 minutes ago, buffettphan said:

Ham and his cronies know how to appeal to the kid

 

The bastages know that if they get them young they stand a better chance of sustained revenue for life.

[L.B.]

It's really impressive to note how just using the hot-button language is enough to convince millions of people of the utter bullshit that they are selling.

 

What amazes me is that whether it's on a personal, one-to-one scale or on the order of a huge "museum", as long as people are being propped up in their prejudices and beliefs, they will support whatever 100% and ask no questions.

 

It takes the Feds and the tax man to shut these things down; Christards will overlook or hide just about anything in order to maintain their little delusions.

[disillusioned]

So, did you ride the dinosaurs?

[Casey]

How did he get permission to build that so called "Museum?" Did he get it under the Old Pals Act, or did it come under The Ham Bacon and Baloney Act?

 

Casey

[RealityCheck]

Didn't that place go bankrupt and close due to lack of attendance?  I guess I've been misinformed.

[Casey]

26 minutes ago, RealityCheck said:

Didn't that place go bankrupt and close due to lack of attendance?  I guess I've been misinformed.

 

IT didn't go broke, but:

[T]he project’s single largest source of funding was actually $62 million in junk bonds floated by the town of Willamstown, population less than 4,000, home to the Ark Encounter and the county seat of Grant County, which faced bankruptcy this spring.

“In terms of revenue for the county, we don’t get too much from them,” says the county’s chief executive, Stephen Wood. The Ark Encounter negotiated a vastly discounted 30-year rate on property taxes in 2013 under a previous administration. “I hate it, but that’s the deal,” says Wood.

From which it would appear the County nearly went broke.

 

From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-giant-ark-is-just-the-start-these-creationists-have-a-bigger

 

Casey