Creation Museum

September 3, 2012: Where The Earth is 6,000 Years Old

As part of a project for an anthropological writing class, I went to the Creation Museum in Petersberg, Kentucky. It is actually founded by Australians and is located there because it is next to a major airport, the Cincinnati Airport, and is within a day’s drive of 2/3 of the US population.

The museum is run by a church and everyone who works at the museum, no matter their job must believe in Creationism. Admission is just under $30, but is valid for 2 days. They had a discount if you are being home-schooled.

The exhibits themselves are, in terms of quality, as good as any museum in the country  and are use a lot of pseudo-science. This pseudo-science includes lots of graphs, charts, and maps that are completely inaccurate, but appear to give the exhibit legitimacy. One example is a map that describes the post-flood world and shows where the evidence of the Great Flood from the book of Genesis is. One place identified on the map as a remnant of the flood is the Salton Sea in southern California. While the Salton Sea was formed rapidly, it was actually formed in an engineering mishap in the early 1900s and not the flood. While nobody visiting the museum, save evolutionists in disguise (like myself), would know these facts. Truly, though, the exhibits are incredible and very convincing.

Most creationists do believe in evolution in addition to the six days of creation. The difference is that they believe it happened over a period of 5,700 years rather than billions. Thus, they think that fossils are planted there by God or formed very quickly. The also do not believe that humans evolved.

The main part of the museum takes about 2-3 hours to go through and includes a replica Garden of Eden, a section on Noah’s Ark, and lots of not so subtle messages on right-wing Christian values including pornography, drugs, homosexuality, evolution, and abortion (you can probably guess what they said). There is also a dinosaur exhibit equal to any natural history museum. The two differences are the dates (they believe the Jurassic period occured in the year 2,348 BC and the presence of humans (since creatures of the land and man were both created on the sixth day, they must have lived together). The museum also has a biblical zoo complete with the hybrid animals of zonkeys and zorses. This is to prove that evolution can occur at a rapid rate, thus proving creationism.

One of my favorite parts of the museum was the people-watching. I saw a lot of Jesus shirts and hats. At the dinosaur exhibit, I met a lady who said she was so inspired by the exhibit that she dressed up her daughter as a dinosaur for a week straight.

Final Thoughts:

Although, you probably do not believe in what the Creation Museum stands for and may hate giving them money, it is very worthwhile to see what a shockingly large chunk of America believes.