Kentucky to Open Creation Museum

I'm sure this new museum will come in for a huge amount of criticism, and much of it will be warranted:

A new museum being built in Kentucky will have some of the classic staples of natural history museums — dinosaurs, fossils and a mineral collection. But it will also have something most museums don't: a viewpoint based solely on the Bible.

"We wanted to present an alternative, a scientific alternative to the natural history museums, which present evolution as fact," explained Mark Looy, spokesman for Answers in Genesis, the Australia-based group building the Creation Museum.

Challenging a widely held belief of modern scientists, the museum founders aim to counter the notion that man evolved from apes.

"We believe that dinosaurs were created alongside of man on day six of creation," said Looy. "They did not die out 65 million years ago."

Among those who believe in creation there are basically two camps: new earth and old earth. The new earth folks, like those putting together this museum, believe in a very narrow and literal 6 day creation which occured about 6,000 years ago. This belief requires all kinds of "creative" theories about how and when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and how the current geology came to pass. A new earth theory also leaves no room for evolution of any kind, either macro (one species to another) or micro (within species). There just isn't enough time for that to happen. To me, it takes more faith than I've got to believe that narrow an interpretation of the Biblical creation.

The old earth types, of which I am one, believe that God's creation of the universe occurred much longer ago and that the Bible isn't clear exactly how long those six days of creation really were and if there might have been some time gaps in-between. There is just such a huge amount of physical and geological evidence to indicate that the earth is far older than 6,000 years, it makes it very hard for me to believe that everything we know from geological evidence happened in such a short period of time. My own denomination teaches the "new earth" approach, but I just can't get past the overwhelming evidence of a much older earth.

I do not believe in macro evolution and certainly don't buy the monkey-to-man version, though there is plenty of evidence for evolution within species. We have lots of examples of species evolving and adapting to changing climates and environments.

Of course the main opposition to this museum will be from the die-hard evolution types who believe that everything basically occured by accident and that there was no God or "intelligent creator" of any kind. That, to me, takes the most faith of all and a lot more than I've got. The chance that random atoms could smack together and result in the splendid diversity we see today just seems to over-stretch the bounds of mathematical probability.

Pure evolution also suffers from a number of other defects, such as the absence of evidence of the "missing links" or intermediate species which would have to occur as one species evolves into another. Scientists can always identify what they consider the ancestor species to be, and what they consider the modern species to be, but in-between there had to have been hundreds of intermediate varieties to tie the two together, and they can't seem to find fossil records of those.

It's an interesting discussion, but one which won't really be advanced by this new museum.