Dr. Jason Wiles- “Creationist Museum”

Dr. Jason Wiles teaches biology at Syracuse Univerity. Having become mindful how misunderstandings about evolution hamper many students in studying biology, Dr. Wiles has focused attention on the teaching of evolution. His presentation was a photo tour of Kentucky’s Creation Museum.

Actually located near Cincinnati, this 70,000 square foot, $30 million facility was opened in 2007 by “Answers in Genesis Ministries.” Dr. Wiles’s photos showed it to be no cheesy joke but, in its way, an impressive and seductive attraction. It has the world’s largest collection of life-size dinosaur models, many of them animatronic (and often accompanied by early humans). With a $24 ticket price, the museum quickly racked up its millionth visitor. Dr. Wiles reported observing virtually all visitors finding the museum very persuasive, with no skeptical remarks being heard.

He quoted Jerry Falwell, deeming the museum “a wonderful alternative to the evolutionist natural history museums that Satan is using to influence so many minds.” (It’s not just about belief in God; the other guy is equally real and almost as important.)

Part of Satan’s snare is the pernicious notion that the Earth is millions of years old (never mind billions). Everything in the Creation Museum testifies to the truth that the whole shebang started just 6,000 years ago. For example, it does recognize all the different geological eras of Satan-inspired conventional science, but shows them to have been really really short.

A key historical juncture was The Fall (eating the one thing God said not to eat; though Eve surely had some role in this, the museum generally labels it “Adam’s sin”). Numerous exhibits compare “before” and “after” – before Adam’s sin, all of Creation was “good,” but Adam’s little mis-step brought into the world everything that’s been bad ever since: natural disasters, crimes, suffering, and death itself. Yes, before Adam’s boo-boo, there was no death. (All those dinosaurs with sharp teeth? Vegetarians, in the “before” time.) Since we are all tainted by Adam’s sin, we are all in a sense guilty for every evil in the world.

Then in 2348 BC, God was again miffed at humanity, and pretty nearly wiped the slate clean with The Flood. Noah’s Ark is very important in understanding today’s global environment and its fauna, all of which, of course, derived therefrom. The museum elucidates that the Ark did not have to contain every species – just every “kind” – and each “kind” subsequently diversified into today’s plethora of varied but related species (e.g., horses and zebras). Obviously, this happened much faster than the supposed processes of Darwinian/Satanic evolution theory.

Likewise rapid was the worldwide proliferation of cultures and languages – God’s way of dealing with that Tower of Babel episode where, yet again, humans got uppity and needed slapping down. People never seem to learn.

The museum includes a splendid planetarium, showing other galaxies billions of light years distant. Creation scientists are currently engaged in ascertaining how God managed to get the light from those galaxies to us in only 6,000 years (demonstrating that creationism really does constitute an active enterprise of scientific inquiry).

All of this may seem pathetically absurd to humanists, who are confident they know the truth. But creationists are just as confident that they know the truth, and that humanist beliefs are pathetically absurd.