Museum of creation

The Creation Museum is the tiny-brainchild of Ken Ham, grand poobah of AiG. This $27 million mess opened in 2007 outside Petersburg to raucous laughter from actual scientists.

One such is P.Z. Myers, biology professor at the University of Minnesota - Morris and author of the popular science blog Pharyngula. Myers was in Ohio on Aug. 7 for a Secular Student Alliance conference, so he took a side trip to tour Ham’s fortress of denial. Myers invited his readers - including me - and conference attendees to come along, expecting maybe a few dozen. He got more than 300, with most wearing science-themed or skeptical T-shirts for identification.

Ham made himself scarce, pleading a prior out-of-town commitment. But he left a swarm of armed guards, some with dogs. I’ve been to a lot of museums, and though most of them have security, I’ve never seen anything like this. What were they afraid of? Well, before the trip, the museum security manager sent Myers a letter listing all the things they were afraid we’d do, including “overtly homosexual” behavior.

Everyone did manage to refrain from that, but we couldn’t help laughing.

The museum’s first exhibit set the tone: it’s a fake. Billed as the Burning Tree Mastodon, it looms over the lobby. But the fine print reveals that it’s only a cast of the skeleton.

It also places the mastodon - and the ice age in which it lived - not 11,000 years ago, but “a few centuries after the Genesis Flood.”

And when did that supposedly occur? Ham’s museum adheres to the chronology concocted by James Ussher, the Anglican archbishop of Ireland, back in 1650. According to that, the flood occurred around 4,350 years ago, which puts the last ice age maybe 4,000 years back.

At that time, the Egyptians and Sumerians had been keeping written records for nearly 1,000 years. Funny that they don’t mention any such contemporary incidents. Or any of the long-extinct animals that Ham claims were still roaming around at the time.

There are lots of dinosaurs in the museum, some cavorting with an animatronic Adam and Eve, others in faux-skeletal form. It’s amusing to see that even young-Earthers have ceded that field to real scientists, admitting that such animals did, in fact, exist. I’ve heard many declarations that supposed dinosaur bones were only fakes concocted by God to test our faith.

What Ham’s exhibits test, however, is credulity. One early display sets up the museum’s basic premise: that every word of the Bible, especially the Book of Genesis, must be taken as literally true in all respects. No allegory, no caveats, no possibility for scribal error before 1611. In fact, it’s to be taken as ultimately authoritative on all subjects, not just morality.

“I start with the Bible. My colleague does not,” says a pseudo-paleontologist in an introductory video. Right from the start, Ham and company commit what Bertrand Russell called the cardinal sin of philosophy: starting from the desired conclusion, and disregarding anything that might imperil that, rather than reasoning from all available evidence and following where that leads.

Not that the creation museum can be trusted to even state its premises honestly. “Joe the paleontologist” isn’t a paleontologist at all. A display in the gift shop identifies him as Buddy Davis, a “singer-songwriter, adventurer and paleo-artist.” He’s got a CD of inane Ham-worshipping ditties.

The place devotes a huge amount of its 70,000 square feet to justifying a literal worldwide flood, and to explaining away the extensive geologic evidence of a 4.6-billion-year-old Earth. Most of those problems are just ignored, but the exhibits make ludicrous attempts at a few. Rivers slowly eroded canyons? Nope. Volcanoes can move rock, too. In short, they can’t tell the difference between the effects of water and explosions. So if your house ever catches on fire, don’t ask a young-Earth creationist to put it out.

Problems with a worldwide flood are similarly glossed over. The Bible says Noah had to take seven each (or maybe 14) of all birds and ritually “clean” animals, and two (or four) of all others. Noah’s instructions leave out plants, which can’t survive months underwater; fish, which can’t survive mixing salt and fresh; and probably bugs, which drown just as easily as humans. But that still leaves at least 60,000 species on his hands.

According to AiG’s calculations, the ark was 510 feet long, 51 feet high and 85 feet wide. The museum narrative says they were on there for a year. Incredibly, Ham even admits “dinosaurs and other animals that are now extinct” to the ark. He thinks some dinosaurs survived to spark medieval legends of dragons.

So how’d they fit? They didn’t all have to. The big Ham says Noah only took a few.

But they evolved.

Yes, that’s right. To squeeze in all those critters, the Creation Museum accepts the reality of evolution. It just refuses to call it that.

Instead, Hammy engages in elaborate semantic gymnastics, saying that Noah took “kinds” of animals that later morphed into today’s species, but refusing to define how a “kind” differs from a regular ol’ ancestral species. Young-Earthers reluctantly acknowledge that creatures change through “microevolution,” but they denounce “macroevolution” as impossible.

That, of course, is a false distinction. Microevolution is macroevolution, over an extremely long period of time. Instead of very gradual divergence over millions of years, the Hamseum presses great changes into an absurdly short period, then denies that any serious change took place.

It’s very funny to consider the family trees Ham’s acolytes construct to explain the profusion of modern animals - and people - from just a few prototypes 4,350 years ago. All the illustrations show the greatest growth at the bottom, so it’s curious that the Bible - and the other extensive written records from 4,000 years ago - fail to mention the necessary centuries-long orgy.

Maybe it’s because so many of those couplings turned out badly. Consider Lucy, the famous 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus Afarensis skeleton. Turns out she was really Noah’s granddaughter, according to the Creation Museum. Perhaps Noah forbore to mention his midget, deformed, tiny-brained granddaughter, but Ham happily claims her as a near relation.

And speaking of relatives, the most disturbing part of the museum is Ham’s willingness to endorse incest.

He tackles the old stumper, “Where did Cain get his wife?” Locked into their narrow narrative, Ham and company don’t flinch before the conclusion: Cain married his sister, one of Eve’s later children. And God was just fine with that.

We can’t do that anymore, Ham says, because sinning “corrupts” the genome to cause birth defects. I have heard this bizarre argument before - always unsupported by any evidence - that naughty thoughts cause genetic mutations. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Ultimately, Ham is arguing that there’s nothing inherently wrong with diddling your sister, if you can just avoid birth defects. Think about that for a while, then tell me again that literal creationists are champions of morality.

Yet morality is what it’s all about. Exhibit after exhibit makes explicit the real concern: that not accepting every bit of Genesis as literally true causes the breakdown of all moral standards.

“Scripture abandoned in the culture leads to relative morality, hopelessness and meaninglessness,” one sign says. What’s that got to do with cosmology, geology or biology?

Nothing. And that’s my point: what’s really worshipped at the “Creation Museum” is fear.

Ham insists that his carnival attraction is about real science, not religion, but he can’t keep his message straight. Using your brain causes genocide, slavery and anti-Semitism, the museum proclaims. Of course, no reasoning or evidence backs up those assertions. Nor will you catch Ham admitting that his version of Christianity has been used to justify exactly those things, by reference to massacring the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15:2-3, the cursing of Noah’s son Ham (not, unfortunately, Ken) in Genesis 9:20-27, and the supposed Jewish acceptance of eternal guilt in Matthew 27:25.

Far from saving Christianity, Ken Ham and his minions are damaging it by making it look ridiculous. They’re devaluing the Bible by trying to make it something it’s not.

Science describes the physical world around us and how it works. The Bible talks about morality, about why, not how. But it’s no more a biology book than it is a car repair manual; and proclaiming that Leviticus is the perfect guide to changing oil filters should only provoke laughter.

Not everyone will laugh, of course. Those who fear motorized vehicles, have never seen a car, or have never learned anything about mechanics, might consider Levitical filtering plausible. And those people are Ham’s victims. That’s all his “museum” does: it preys on the anti-science, the young and uninformed. They all deserve better.