Tudamorf
05-27-2007, 05:35 PM
http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=new_creation_museum_mostly_illustr ates_t<b>New Creation Museum Mostly Illustrates that Creationists Have Lots of Cash</b>
The guy who developed the Jaws and King Kong rides at Universal Studios is behind the new Creation Museum, which is set to open May 28 just south of Cincinnati. (The Times has a great review.)
Pro: Now Cincinnati will be known for something other than race riots.
Con: Now Young Earth Creationism, which one would hope would be recognized as both bad theology and bad science, has its Mecca. (Can a Hajj be far behind?)
(For those of you unfamiliar with Young Earth Creationism, it's worth noting that one of its central tenets is that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, and that dinosaurs are in fact Dragons. Really!)A snippet from the review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/arts/24crea.html<b>Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs</b>
PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.
What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.
For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.
It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.
Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.If we aren't already the laughing stock of the global scientific community, we should be.
The guy who developed the Jaws and King Kong rides at Universal Studios is behind the new Creation Museum, which is set to open May 28 just south of Cincinnati. (The Times has a great review.)
Pro: Now Cincinnati will be known for something other than race riots.
Con: Now Young Earth Creationism, which one would hope would be recognized as both bad theology and bad science, has its Mecca. (Can a Hajj be far behind?)
(For those of you unfamiliar with Young Earth Creationism, it's worth noting that one of its central tenets is that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, and that dinosaurs are in fact Dragons. Really!)A snippet from the review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/arts/24crea.html<b>Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs</b>
PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.
What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.
For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.
It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.
Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.If we aren't already the laughing stock of the global scientific community, we should be.