PETERSBURG, Ky. - Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve.

That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that’s the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky.

Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago.

“If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that’s our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there,” museum founder Ken Ham said during recent tour of the sleek and modern facility, which is due to open next year.

Ham, an Australian native who started the Christian publishing company Answers in Genesis in the late 1970s, said the goal of his privately funded museum is to change minds and rebut the scientific point of view.

“We’re going to show you that we can make sense of the different people groups, we can make sense of fossils, we can make sense of what you see in the world,” he said.

Visitors to the museum, a few miles from Cincinnati, will be able to watch the story of creation unfold in a 180-seat special-effects theater, see a 40-foot-tall (12-meter-tall) re-creation of a section of Noah’s Ark and stare into the jaws of robotic dinosaurs.

Ken Ham, founder of the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum, points out features in the museum's Dragon Hall bookstore during a tour.
“It’s education, but it’s also doing it in an entertaining way,” Ham said.

Scientists say fossils and sophisticated nuclear dating technology show that Earth is more than 4 billion years old, the first dinosaurs appeared around 200 million years ago, and they died out well before the first human ancestors arose a few million years ago.

“Genesis is not science,” said Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. “Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and certainly knew nothing about what fossils were.”

Ham said he believes most fossils are the result of the Great Flood described in Genesis.

Super.
Will there be a sign at the entrance, "You must have an IQ this small to ride this ride."?

$25 million, huh?
I wonder how much Mark gave.
Maybe he owns the diorama of the pile of dust that God created Adam from.

Super.
Will there be a sign at the entrance, "You must have an IQ this small to ride this ride."?

Or a straight jacket... either will get you in.

"A good scientist, in the absence of data, simply says, "we don't know" rather than proposing an unfalsifiable, untestable explanation." --Robert Bruce Thompson

I saw this article on yahoo a few days ago

yahoo is a hopelessly biased news outlet that spits out a pro "millions of years" article essentially every day



no, it contradicts atheistic evolutionary speculations/philosophy, based primarily on radioisochron dating, which Creationists have shown for many years to be highly erratic and essentially worthless

the Biblical account is not contradicted by any empirical evidence, rather, the empirical evidence supports the Biblical model of sudden creation about 6,000 years ago, followed by the global flood about 1500 years later



no, the point of the museum is to show that the Biblical model fits the empircal data infinitely better than "nobody x nothing = the universe" and "goo to you" evolution



radioisotope dating is not particuarly "sophisticated", but it is subject to a series of assumptions that cannot possibly be verified...first and foremost, that the rate of decay has been constant through history, and that the ratio of parent to daughter isotope at the beginning is known....who can make definitive statements about these things?



again, these wild assertions rest entirely on the supposed infallibility of radiometric dating, which is nonsense



and neither is what you believe, Ms. Dawson! one origins model is not necessarily better than another, unless the empirical data supports it! the empirical data does NOT support microbes to man evolution, given ANY period of time!



no, the Bible is the very Word of God...and God trumps pitiful human understanding of the created universe ("science")....God revealed basic details of the Creation account to Moses, and Moses recorded those words



the Genesis flood explains many geological features, aside from the fossil record

So, your argument is that your 2000 year old book is better than data that has a +/- factor.

I disagree. I don't think it's possible that any of the creationist stories are true. I think they are all myths, just like every other story or theory about the beginning of the universe. Bottom line, NONE of them can be proven.

if the Bible is true, there is much at stake

OK, there are hundreds, thousands, even millions of possibilities for the creation of the universe.... It could be ANY number of things, it could be a God that isn't the Biblical God. You said it yourself, "if the Bible is true". But, there's much better odds the Bible is NOT true.

when you look at the 3500 year history of the Bible, artifacts like the dead sea scrolls, the history of Israel, the archeological evidence...there is good reason to believe in the God of the Bible, the God of Israel...what is the relevance of Zeus in 2006, for example? Christianity is still the dominant belief system, by no coincidence (despite the many false cults of Christianity)

OK, that's great. But, there is just as much archeological evidence of Greek and Roman mythology, which are basically interchangeable, and that doesn't make those any more true. Sure, the relevance of Zeus now isn't what it was 2,000 years ago... But, history has shown that religions and civilizations generally follow a cycle. Notice how many people are turning away from the Church... It's just the natural cycle.