I was shocked when we pulled up to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The place was mobbed. We had to search for a parking place. Somewhere I had read that they had upped the entertainment value by installing a zipline; apparently attendance was not reaching goals. This didn’t look like an organization with attendance problems, though. I had snickered and stopped for a picture of the stegosaurus-adorned gates up on Bullittsburg Church Road (itself something of a snarkworthy address). I had planned the adventure as a bit of comic relief during an otherwise high-culture itinerary.

Creation Museum

Creation Museum

But this was all just weird.

We walked past a woman brightening the metallic-bronze painted surface of a dinosaur statue; my Dear One asked if the color had faded from the sun and the woman working said no, from all the effects of weather. The hallway through which we entered had posters and displays suggesting that the tradition of dragons in history is evidence that dinosaurs existed within human memory. We bought our tickets (senior discounted but still $60 for the two) and moved with some trepidation toward the entry point of the main display.

re-bronzing the dinosaur

re-bronzing the dinosaur

From there it was one disturbing “fact” after another.

The “Museum” structures history as the “7 C’s in God’s Eternal Plan: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation.” This “history” purports to demonstrate that the world was Created by the god of fundamentalist Christians and ancient Hebrews in six twenty-four-hour days about six thousand years ago. Corruption came about with Adam’s disobedience and Catastrophe ensued with the Flood. This sequence is supported by a reading of the paleontological record that “explains” how geology and fossils prove the “fact” of the great deluge which only Noah, his family, and his selected pairs of animals survived.

dinosaur and prey

dinosaur and prey

And I had never realized that all animals were originally vegetarian. Meat-eating is, apparently, another ill-effect of the Fall. Lions, tigers and bears, and T-Rexes and vultures, oh my, wouldn’t have dreamed of such a protein-dense diet before Adam sinned.

After lengthy and complicated displays about the “scientific” record and the Garden of Eden, there was a major installation on the Flood and Noah’s Ark. We learned a lot about how the Ark was made, how the animals were cared for—and yes, we learned that there were dinosaurs on the Ark. Space limitations were explained away by pointing out that Noah would certainly have chosen young creatures rather than full-grown ones. The subsequent extinction of dinosaurs resulted from over-hunting.

Adam, Eve and the kids after The Fall

Adam, Eve and the kids after The Fall

There was no lingering over Confusion. The sons of Noah—Shem, Ham and Japheth—headed out to Asia, Africa and Europe respectively but apparently failed to procreate in numbers that pleased God so the next round of punishment involved the shattering of the Tower of Babel into the babble of languages. Somewhere along, my concern about where this limited population was finding mates was addressed. All people, as descendants of Adam and Eve, are related and it was perfectly okay for the children and grandchildren of the Founding Couple to make babies with each other because their genetic material was nearly perfect, only slightly sullied from the matter of Original Sin. Nowadays, though, we are far removed from Eden and so our DNA is so damaged that breeding with “close relatives” will result in terrible birth defects. Today, sensibly, breeding with “close” relatives is discouraged.

The World's Not Safe Anymore

The World’s Not Safe Anymore

The dénouement was a stroll through dark and dismal precincts that illustrated the depth of human depravity. This is where Christ and Cross come in but we opted to skip to film that covered this post-diluvian narrative of salvation. Consummation—the final “C” could as easily be attached to Second Coming—will bring the cycle back to Creation. God gets a do-over, remaking His world, “cast[ing] out death and the disobedient.”

I’m still struggling with the idea that God will have to cast out death and the disobedient at the Consummation. Wouldn’t He have figured out how to avoid all that hassle and pain the next time round? I mean, if he is starting over from the beginning, why not just do it all perfectly? Oh, wait a second, God did do it perfectly the first time and it was Evil in collusion with God’s effigy that sent things down the wrong path. So God also made Evil? Yes? No? Oh dear. Religion is so incompatible with logic.

But then, it’s not about logic and it certainly isn’t about science. It’s all about faith and human claims to knowing what God really has in mind.

We returned to our car and headed back to our Hampton Inn in Covington along the Ohio River. Route 8 (aka River Road) winds through woods past the occasional farmhouse or village center. The foliage was scarlet and yellow, and a field of orange pumpkins caught my eye and showed me the trees behind and through a break a glimpse of the Ohio. I drove slowly, luxuriating in the bends and curves, pulling over every so often to let pass locals in more of a hurry.

pumpkins and the Ohio River

pumpkins and the Ohio River

I can’t however erase from my mind images of young people intently studying those displays, attentively reading the texts, looking at length at the dioramas. If they had entered the museum with doubts, with a certain readiness to accept the premises of evolution, to see the world as the product of the processes of Nature rather than the deliberate and “intelligent” design of a divinity, then they seemed to be leaving cocooned in the impenetrable fog of religious dogma.

children , education and truth

children , education and truth

What disturbs me most is that these are the young people who will shape the future, determine my medical care as I lie in the Old Folks Home, make decisions about war, about the health of the environment, about the possibilities of art, of scientific discovery, of the very existence of imagination as an essential route to Truth.

So I thought the Creation Museum would simply be an Amusement Park. But it wasn’t fun and I’m not laughing.