Museum Exhibits A Creationist Viewpoint
Written by Bryan Los on August 9th, 2005 @ 11:49 AM
I don’t know if I should file this article under Religion or Stupidity, but certainly not Science. The previous sentence will give you a good idea where I’m going with this one, so please, bare with me.
Before I continue, I would just like to say that I am an atheist, but I respect a person’s right to worship and believe in any god they see fit. Religion, the bible, and faith can help one lead a very happy and productive life. Having said that, religion has no place in science. You will read why in the next few moments.
The Eureka Springs, Arkansas Museum of Earth History is attracting some attention. The museum opened in April and is quite different from most museums you may visit. This museum utilizes the bible, rather than science for fact, essentially burning and throwing out all data and information we have gathered over the last several hundred years.
The museum’s exhibits are aligned with the bible’s six days of creation, so you get some really wacky revelations presented to you. As wacky as they are, the owners of this museum hold all these proclamations true and part of science.
Charles Darwin, if you are reading this, please stop and go to Yahoo! Games and play some pool. I’ll be there in a few minutes. This is not for your eyes.
The dinosaur exhibit is something to see. Life-like recreations of popular dinosaurs fill the museum. However, if you visit the Museum of Earth History, you’ll find out some interesting facts you didn’t know.
Flintstone Science
The museum teaches that dinosaurs are not tens of millions of years old. In fact, dinosaurs are relatively new to this planet, less than 10,000 or so years old. Sounds crazy? Well, dinosaurs can’t be older than the Earth, can they? The bible confirms this era, so we’ll go with that for now.
This is a nice factoid– vegetarian dinosaurs shared Eden with Adam and Eve, whose vaguely Polynesian appearance represents all races, according to a guide. Another exhibit confirms that dinosaurs, like all land creatures created on day six, were on Noah’s Ark. The exhibit maintains that the ark could accommodate them because it was huge–450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high, and only smaller, adolescent dinosaurs were put on board.
One display is a replica of a Pteranodon, a pointy-headed flying reptile with a 33-foot wingspan, hollow bones and a bony ruffle on its skull. Visitors are told: “Each of these unique design features indicate that Pteranodons were created to fly, not that they slowly evolved into flying creatures.” This gives new meaning to the phrase “blueprints” for life.
It is important to many creationists that man and dinosaur lived simultaneously because they believe there was no death in the world until Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. If the Genesis story is false, they say, then there would be no need for Jesus Christ to redeem the sins of the world.
Piecing Together the Madness
I don’t know where to start, but I think I’ll start at the end and work my way back.
So the SS Ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high? It held all land animals, including dinosaurs? Well, forget about the current species of animals living today. There have been approximately 700 species of dinosaurs named. Now, if this exhibit is correct and Noah did manage to find them all and pick them up, the dinosaurs on their own couldn’t even fit on the ark, not to mention all the other cute and fuzzy animals.
I would like to know how many species of animals that T. Rex chomped on for lunch? Was Noah feeding Rex some of the inferior species, the ones that god really screwed up on? Why did the platypus survive? Or did Noah simply feed them some appetite suppressant for the long trip to their new home?
By the way, did Noah drop each animal off into their natural habitats, or did he just drop them all off at once, and call it a day?
And dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden? Plenty of fruit to go around I guess. Why didn’t god punish the dinosaurs for eating that damn apple! Eve got a raw deal. I can tell you this, if man lived side by side with dinosaurs, man would have become extinct. We can hunt a saber-tooth tiger, not a T. Rex.
The people who run this museum are blind to the fact that their god created the dinosaur, not man, in his image. They cannot accept this, and must try to show that man was here first, and that dinosaurs were like some exotic pet for Eve.
Sci-Fi-ence
This is nothing more than a step by some conservatives to adopt creationism, or as it’’s now called, intelligent design, as truth and fact. But it’s not. There is nothing intelligent about anything presented at this museum. Science can date once living creatures pretty well these days. You will never, never, ever, ever get any reputable scientist to tell you that T. Rex is only 10,000 years old. Never. Not in a million years.
This renewed move to push these teachings in schools is frightening. And to avoid legal issues, like separation of church and state, intelligent design doesn’t explicitly use words like god, religion, or bible. Instead is uses a mix of word-play and nonsense to craft a story on the origins of life here on Earth.
Never trust anyone who has an answer for everything. This is what religion does. It has an answer for everything, like that know-it-all kid you used to sit next to in grade school. He knew everything, and was never wrong– at least he thought he was never wrong. This is why science is so fascinating. We don’t have answers for everything, hardly. And while striving to find answers, we learn more about us and the universe around us.
Sadly, faith and the bible can never learn from new information or findings. Faith is locked in. The bible has been written, by mere mortals no less, and can never be changed. What’s in the bible is the de facto standard on everything from dinosaurs to planets.
This is why you must never mix science with religion. You can’t change a person’s faith. If they believe dinosaurs are 10,000 years old, then that is so. A scientist could date the fossils, but the faithful wouldn’t change their opinion. On the other hand, science is always finding better answers to problems they once thought solved. When a new solution presents itself, or science learns something was wrong, they fix it, and update their viewpoints. Religion will never update anything, and will simply stick to what some screen writers in the first century AD had to say.
If this museum weren’t for real, you’d probably think I made this up. Just remember, man rose from the steamy oceans as a swab of slime, and eventually took control of this world we live in. Man created god.
Remember that old “the Earth is the center of everything” nonsense? Well, they made another mistake. Don’t forget to visit the MOEH museum, but please bring your sense of humor.
Other Resources
If you want real facts on dinosaurs, check out these sites:
