Imago Dei

I read a fantastic commentary on the new, controversial Creation Museum in Kentucky. A commentary written by someone who has actually been to the museum.

My family attended the grand opening of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum this past weekend and I saw what I expected to see: closed minded propagandists who don’t want any challenge to their narrow view of origins. But they weren’t in the Museum.

So we drove past the protesters and into a museum whose exhibits constantly reference both sides of the creation/evolution debate.

I’d love to go to this museum. If I ever drive through Kentucky again, I plan to stop. It sounds fascinating!

My three older boys were, quite literally, jumping up and down at the prospect of dinosaurs, and the animated creatures did not disappoint. The moving, roaring facsimile reptiles were big and (at least in the post-Fall exhibits) fierce. The 27 million dollar budget was obvious here, since the dinosaurs were more Jurassic Park quality than Land of the Lost. While my boys ran around on a lifesize replica of Noah’s Ark and pretended to sword-fight a T-Rex, their mother and I read the displays on ice ages, species development, and differing understandings of radiometric dating.

The planetarium inspired awe at the vastness of the universe, bringing to mind the Psalmist’s question “What is man that you are mindful of him?” while answering it as the New Testament does: with the Incarnation and atonement of the Redeemer-Ruler of the cosmos. I was pleasantly surprised that the planetarium exhibit acknowledges problems caused for any biblical historical timeline by the time it takes starlight to reach our field of vision. I was furthermore surprised that the exhibit didn’t take a dogmatic stance on any one of the possible creationist answers to the problem: whether the concept of starlight created already in transit or Russell Humphreys’ theory of the question resolved by relativity of space and time or any of the others.

And it seems that the museum presented both sides of the debate:

Speaking of Darwinism, it was everywhere, and fairly presented. In virtually every exhibit, on the “Lucy” fossil or on carbon-14 dating or on the fossil record or on the Big Bang, the information included both the Darwinist-materialist explanation for the scientific data along with how the same data are interpreted by the Museum’s biblical creationist grid.

You won’t find that anywhere else. And I love the conclusions Russell came to near the end of the article.

Inside the Museum, I was asked by a reporter to respond to the Darwinist protesters’ charge that I was “confusing” my children by bringing them into a museum that presents a markedly different view of cosmic history than that found in secular science textbooks. I am dumbfounded that groups with names such as “Free Inquiry” could believe that seeing viewpoints at variance with approved orthodoxy, whether religious or materialist, is “confusing.” After all, weren’t the Big Bang and natural selection “confusing” to a previous generation of schoolchildren?

It is remarkable that no Christian has ever asked me if I am “confusing” my children by taking them, as I did later this weekend, to the Cincinnati-area aquarium with exhibits everywhere assuming only a Darwinist/naturalist understanding of the origins of aquatic life. Most conservative Christians I know want their children to understand Darwin’s account of human evolution, and a fair representation of it, precisely so they will not be mystified by it later.

One would think the secularist free-thinkers would want everyone to see the creationist account of origins, for the very sake of the contrast with what they would see as a more viable model. I can even understand Darwinist ridicule of a narrative that is so strikingly at odds with the current scientific consensus. What I cannot understand is the attempt to suppress the debate itself, whether through attempted zoning regulation mischief or through noisy planes overhead on opening day. Whatever happened to postmodernism?

Whatever happened to postmodernism, indeed!

Some previous generations of creationists have spoken in ways that made it seem that the scientific data is on our side, that the debate can be won using the very same playing field as naturalism itself with an appeal to raw general revelation. The Creation Museum exhibits offer very little triumphalism of this sort. The exhibits quite often ask the questions “what if” and “could it be.” The exhibits honestly acknowledge that every viewpoint rests on some authority, with this viewpoint interpreting the data through the authority of divine revelation. The Museum designers also seem to understand that the debate with Darwinism will not be won ultimately with brute facts, but with an alternative narrative, a narrative that rings truer than the Darwinist story of a nature accidentally but perpetually red in tooth and claw.

I definitely want to go to this museum.

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