Of dinosaurs and men

It wasn’t your typical natural history exhibit.

Animatronic models of humans coexisted with friendly dinosaurs. Though one might have expected the dinosaurs to make a snack of people lazing about nearby, Jurassic Park-style, they seemed perfectly content eating carrots or other vegetables. The whole scene might have recalled The Flintstones, but this, the exhibit told us, was the early history of the human species.

At any other museum, such an exhibit could only be presented as a joke, but at the Creation Museum in Petersburgh, KY, they take human-dinosaur relations very seriously.

The Museum is the brainchild of Ken Ham and was created by his fundamentalist non-profit organization Answers in Genesis. The museum’s opening in 2007 attracted significant media attention. I had first read several accounts of it in mainstream publications such as the Economist. Reading about the museum, I couldn’t help but be curious about a museum that teaches that the world is 6,000 years old, that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time and that all the world’s animals had been stored on Noah’s Ark.

My visit to the Creation Museum was a prologue to a Secular Student Association (SSA) conference in Columbus. Someone planning the conference had floated the suggestion of an optional visit to the Creation Museum. About 300 atheists and skeptics descended on the museum. It was the biggest event at the museum since the opening, earning coverage by many news outlets, including a big story on ABC news. Blogs compared the atheists’ visit to the stand of 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. I admit I have difficulty seeing an exact parallel, but the metaphor made me feel heroic.
I arrived with the president of the University of Michigan SSA several hours late. I had been unable to sleep the previous night, and we had just traveled over several states to be there. Unfortunately, the group rate on deals hinged on being there on time. We attempted to find the right people from our group to get in. Gradually, it dawned on us that we would not be getting the special deal, and would indeed need to buy ourselves new tickets. I walked with my compatriot into the line to buy a ticket.

The lobby of the Creation Museum gave us the first impression. It had a very faux-natural history museum feel. It was adorned with models of dinosaurs, fake mammoth bones, and creepy animatronic people, a throwback to 80s puppetry. “I’ve been awake for more than a day,” I thought, “and now this?”

One of the first exhibits shows two scientists on a paleontological dig. One scientist says the bones are roughly 100 million years old. The second sees the same thing, but says the bones are about 4400 years old (just the idea of a creationist on a dig like this should raise some eyebrows). What is happening here is not two “interpretations” as the museum claims. Instead, the latter scientist has hocked back the facts provided by the find, and made up his own.
The museum is at least consistent. It “teaches the controversy,” the thing that evolution deniers have been encouraging school boards to do.  A whole section compares the alternative interpretations of “Human Reason” and “God’s Word.” In a series of displays, we are shown both the fundamentalist interpretation on one hand and on the other hand, the scientific world-view is displayed.

The creationists do in fact believe in evolution; indeed, they believe in an evolution several factors of magnitude faster than what a true scholar of the subject would ever propose. To the creationists, every animal evolved from several base types over a period of several thousand years since the great flood. This fact allowed Noah to only take on board the basic “types” and thus fit all the animals on the Ark.

Of course, the creationists can’t just leave us with the appearance that both ideas might be equal, so we are then led in to what might be called “Atheistland,” a representation of our dystopian present., We walk through what could be a recreation of a seedy New York City back alley, replete with newspaper clippings emphasizing various hot-button issues.  Answers in Genesis seems to think of evolution as a sort of Pandora’s Box out of which, when opened, horrible things emerge. Abortion, euthanasia, acceptance of gays – all these are results of evolutionary theory.

Then the real fun begins. From the alley, we are invited to take a “Time Tunnel” and travel back to the beginning of time, about 6000 years according to the museum. A series of life-sized models and animatronics illustrated the various Biblical stories you may be familiar with. You probably do not remember the role that dinosaurs played in these stories, but according to the museum, it was sizable. When God brings all the animals to Adam to be named, all sorts of dinosaurs are among them. In a diorama of Noah’s Ark, which looks about the size of the Titanic, we see an apataurus waiting amiably in line behind the elephants and the giraffes. I was disappointed that Jesus did not ride a velociraptor into Jerusalem, but this museum did everything but.

After viewing the main part of the museum, we explored other creation-oriented exhibits. A planetarium offers a presentation similar to what you would find at a planetarium in a legitimate museum, only with a few lines of nonsense about God’s plan thrown in. A petting zoo displays adorable hybrid animals, supposedly showing that the species were both parts of general “types,” but actually demonstration nothing of the sort. Once we finished with the petting zoo, my friend and I were done.

As we left, a conference organizer asked us what we’d learned. At first, we had a little trouble answering this question, but we quickly realized that the biggest lesson of this visit is what a scary place our country can be.