Creation Museum Opens
This past weekend the Creation Museum opened it's doors in Petersburg Kentucky (just outside of Cincinnati).
While some have said that "creationists cannot be real scientists" and "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" this museum is one answer AiG has to that claim. It has areas for geology, biology, anthropology, cosmology, and more; all from a Biblical based perspective. Their main theme is, "The Bible is true from Genesis to Revelation!"
The facility is a 60,000 square foot building that includes a planetarium and "Murals and realistic scenery, computer-generated visual effects, over fifty exotic animals, life-sized people and dinosaur animatronics, and a special-effects theater complete with misty sea breezes and rumbling seats."
Is anyone else thinking, "Road Trip"????
Comments
#1 Admittance
I wonder...does one have to be a believer to be admitted to the museum?
#2 doubt it
I sure doubt it. Don't see a reason they would exclude anyone.
#3 Creationism is an insult to peoples inteligence
I find it hard to beleive that in the 21st centuary certain deluded individuals still believe in the teachings of a mad Irish clergy man, one Bishop John Usher who calculated that the world is only 6000 years old and was created on October 24, 4004 B.C at 9 a.m. I am an archaeologist and I have spent the last 10 years studying the British Neolithic, an event that begins 8-10,000 years BC and I am yet to find any evidence of a dinosaur on any of the excavations that I have worked on in Britain or the European mainland. Anybody that can claim that they have evidence of man walking with dinosaurs has obviously falsiefied the evidence, or to put it bluntly they are lieing. Even though the majority of the worlds population would like to see this deluded nonsense banned we must let them have their freedom of speech, and as sensible forward thinking intelligent people we can continue to laugh at their antics. Unfortunatly these mad people have friends in high places like certain leaders of countries, Tony Blair War Criminal Extrodinare is one of these mad deluded people, and the City Acadamies which are opening all over Britain is [by law], having to teach this nonsense as a science. It is well possible that the good old Tzarist system of the Gulags should be opened next so that these mad deluded people can be re-educated.
#4 I Agree....
Sadly, there are people who wish to not educate themselves, but blindly believe what has been told to them all of their lives. As individuals, we should always keep our minds open to see both sides. It is only by doing this that we do not breed ignorance and stupidity.
#5 A lot of qualified....
Even though you may not sign up for it there are a lot of highly qualified archaeologists and other scientists from hard sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, etc.) that sign up for creationism.
Sadly, many people insult creationism rather than understand and learn about the arguments. Our society has been flooded with a view of history that is based in one philosophical view. So much so that other points aren't even considered but insulted as stupidity. It's really sad to see so many people who have been told what to think and don't have enough knowledge and understanding to look at what we know and make an assessment for themselves. Instead they insult other points of view and the people who have them.
#6 Insulting and openness
Yes, it is sad that the creationism discussion (in general) is filled with insults. However, it is inherent in theological discussions that understanding someone's argument doesn't mean you accept it.(*) Blaming someone for not understanding the argument is not useful when the argument is well understood but not accepted.
The same thing goes for both parties - creationists call scientists names for not really trying to understand creationsm. Scientists call creationists names for not understanding science.
I don't think we will ever agree on a natural history that is acceptable to both scientists and creationsists. But there are other things to learn.
Many people are absolutely scientific in one area (e.g. computer science) and absolute belivers in another area (creationsim, weapon regulation, drugs and alcohol regulation etc). Once we see that just because we share views in one area doesn't mean we agree in another, we can grow.
(*) I classify creationism as theology as it has yet to present falsifiable theories as are required of anything claiming to be science. This does not mean that theology is less valuable than natural science. Just that they are very different. In this post, I use the word science as a short form of natural science.
#7 I agree that there are
I agree that there are creationist scientists who point fingers, are rude to their non-creationist counterparts, and do that whole blame game. In life I have never personally met anyone who hasn't at some time and often it seems to come out in those things we are passionate about.
Now, creationism is a mix of theology and science (science being the observation of our natural world). But, so is the big bang, for example. Yup, the big bang is a combo of theology and science. They don't call it theology but Stephen Hawking has called it ideology. To quote his book The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time:
However we are not able to make cosmological models without some admixture of ideology.
The truth is that no one was there when the start of it all happened and the theology/ideologies we directly affect how we look at the evidence we have. Looking at the evidence from a creationist standpoint is something that has given me an eye opening experience into how we as a people look at the world. I am constantly amazed at how many geologists are young Earthers and see it in the rock layers. Or, experts radiometric dating see things being much younger than reported for some very scientific reasons. It's really given me a view on how science is presented and taught to us as a people when it comes to the past we were not there to observe.
Sadly, many people have been told what to believe and not taught how to think and given the info for long enough that we debate sides (and even bag on others who don't sign-up for what we do) rather than talk about the science, the ideology and theology, how it all mixes, and what that means.
If your curious to the creationist scientific side poke around http://www.answersingenesis.org/ and read some of the science articles. I was surprised at how honest, eye opening, transparent, expert driven they are.
#8 by Carl Wieland [Ed. note:
by Carl Wieland
[Ed. note: In late 2005, a report in TJ provided an update on the scientific appraisal of some of the bones discussed in this article. See John H. Whitmore, ‘Unfossilized’ Alaskan dinosaur bones? TJ 19(3):60.]
Actual red blood cells in fossil bones from a Tyrannosaurus rex? With traces of the blood protein hemoglobin (which makes blood red and carries oxygen)? It sounds preposterous—to those who believe that these dinosaur remains are at least 65 million years old.
It is of course much less of a surprise to those who believe Genesis, in which case dinosaur remains are at most only a few thousand years old.
In a recent article,1 scientists from Montana State University, seemingly struggling to allow professional caution to restrain their obvious excitement at the findings, report on the evidence which seems to strongly suggest that traces of real blood from a T. rex have actually been found.
The story starts with a beautifully preserved T. rex skeleton unearthed in the United States in 1990. When the bones were brought to the Montana State University’s lab, it was noticed that ‘some parts deep inside the long bone of the leg had not completely fossilized.’ To find unfossilized dinosaur bone is already an indication more consistent with a young age for the fossils (see More on fresh dino bone, below).
Let Mary Schweitzer, the scientist most involved with this find, take up the story of when her co-workers took turns looking through a microscope at a thin section of this T. rex bone, complete with blood vessel channels.
‘The lab filled with murmurs of amazement, for I had focused on something inside the vessels that none of us had ever noticed before: tiny round objects, translucent red with a dark center. Then a colleague took one look at them and shouted, “You’ve got red blood cells. You’ve got red blood cells!”’2
Schweitzer confronted her boss, famous paleontologist ‘Dinosaur’ Jack Horner, with her doubts about how these could really be blood cells. Horner suggested she try to prove they were not red blood cells, and she says, ‘So far, we haven’t been able to.’
Looking for dinosaur DNA in such a specimen was obviously tempting. However, fragments of DNA can be found almost everywhere—from fungi, bacteria, human fingerprints—and so it is hard to be sure that one has DNA from the specimen. The Montana team did find, along with DNA from fungi, insects and bacteria, unidentifiable DNA sequences, but could not say that these could not have been jumbled sequences from present-day organisms. However, the same problem would not be there for hemoglobin, the protein which makes blood red and carries oxygen, so they looked for this substance in the fossil bone.
The evidence that hemoglobin has indeed survived in this dinosaur bone (which casts immense doubt upon the ‘millions of years’ idea) is, to date, as follows:
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The tissue was coloured reddish brown, the colour of hemoglobin, as was liquid extracted from the dinosaur tissue.
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Hemoglobin contains heme units. Chemical signatures unique to heme were found in the specimens when certain wavelengths of laser light were applied.
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Because it contains iron, heme reacts to magnetic fields differently from other proteins—extracts from this specimen reacted in the same way as modem heme compounds.
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To ensure that the samples had not been contaminated with certain bacteria which have heme (but never the protein hemoglobin), extracts of the dinosaur fossil were injected over several weeks into rats. If there was even a minute amount of hemoglobin present in the T. Rex sample, the rats’ immune system should build up detectable antibodies against this compound. This is exactly what happened in carefully controlled experiments.
Evidence of hemoglobin, and the still-recognizable shapes of red blood cells, in unfossilized dinosaur bone is powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.
#9 Interesting
This is an interesting article. Some good information to know.
At the same time I think that we cannot debate or discuss this type of issue at this level until we have dealt with some higher level issues which form the basis of how we look at this information. For example, the young Earth creationist assumes an all powerful God. Someone who believes the Big Bang assumes naturalism. Both are different belief systems about the universe that affect the way we study the information.
This is good to know but we have to be careful when and how we use this with others.