In northern Kentucky, you can find the Creation Museum, a museum dedicated to explaining the Earth’s history, geology, and paleontology through the lens of the Bible. In other words, the Creation Museum argues that the Earth has existed only 6,000 years and was created in just 6 days by God.

An example of the museum’s exhibits includes one dedicated to dinosaurs. The many fossils displayed are explained to have originated during different periods, such as the Lower Jurassic and Upper Cretaceous. However, all those same dinosaurs are said to have gone extinct in 2348 B.C.—the year of the flood in which God is said to have wiped the Earth clean of all but the animals kept safe on Noah’s ark. The museum addresses the issue of the movement of the tectonic plates once again using the biblical flood, claiming that the turmoil caused by the water broke the plates apart and washed them across the globe.

Scientists who have visited the Creation Museum—and a brave few have out of pure curiosity—are baffled by these explanations. Another exhibit near the museum’s entrance displays a girl feeding a carrot while two dinosaurs loiter nearby. Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, who visited the museum with a group of other scientists, could find no words to describe this scene beyond, “It’s rather scary.”

Since Noah’s arc could not possibly have fit all of the world’s animals, the Creation Museum explains that he just took two of each similar animal. So rather than taking two wolves, two cocker spaniels, and two golden retrievers, Noah had just two dog-like animals on this boat. From these two generic dogs, all of our current dog-like animals diversified. The museum even claims that foxes descended from Noah’s two dogs.

The differences between dogs and foxes are profound and no one would argue them as the same species. Beyond their physical differences, dogs and wolves have 78 chromosomes while a fox has only 34. The museum claims that all the diversification of Noah’s dog occurred in around 4,200 years, much faster than an evolutionist would ever believe possible.

To explain this rapid change, the Creation Museum says only, “God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly.” To which Dr. Bengtson, a professor of paleozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, responded, “Thus in one sentence they admit that evolution is real, and that they have to invoke magic to explain how it works.”

And that brings me to my point: creationists are welcome to provide a counterargument to evolution. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. But a theory such as creationism that has no scientific evidence to back it up cannot be claimed as scientifically sound. Nor should believers in creationism expect that it be taught on the same level in schools as the well-developed and explained theory of evolution. Until places like the Creation Museum, which as a museum should by all rights have endless evidence for its claims, can back creationism with true empirical evidence, creationists should not expect evolutionists to give creationism real consideration.

~Katelyn Larson

To read more about the Creation Museum feel free to visit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/science/30muse.html?pagewanted=1

and

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/creationism-evolution/#