Did T-Rex Cuddle With Adam & Eve?

What do you think of when I say the word "museum"? School groups of bored kids shuffling from one exhibit to another? Fossils? Rocks? Your grandma's house?

How about dinosaurs living in the Garden of Eden?

No? Neither do I. A museum is a place of learning, where geeky scientists attempt to cause a little bit of scientific learning to absorb into the brains of a typically uninformed public by making what they think will be compelling displays of scientific data or artifacts.

I was amused the other day when a friend of mine (Thanks, PeaceFrogs!) sent me the following link that interviews the founders of the Creation Museum in Kentucky while it was being built back in '06:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzjjxi7f0Oc

If you believe what the Creation "Museum" is telling us, you would believe that the world is only 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs coexisted with Adam and Eve in the Garden, and that dinosaurs climbed onto Noah's Ark two-by-two along with lambs and crickets and lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) and they all lived happily and non-carnivorously for 40 days and 40 nights with Noah's soon-to-be incestuous family. Funny, I don't remember reading about dinosaurs in Genesis!

Oh, sweet T-Rex, if only you could cuddle with me at night and keep me warm like you did Adam and Eve in their innocent, Platonic beds!

To teach these "lessons", they use animatronic dinosaurs playing alongside happy little animatronic children dressed in caveman garb and a giant T-Rex tromping through the Garden of Eden.

Yes, and though the Creation "Museum" hides in a shroud of scientific inquiry, like the Intelligent Design mumbo-jumbo they espouse, nary there will you find reference to any peer-reviewed papers in any journals of geology, biology, or ecology. But for the low low price of $19.95 per adult ticket, you, too, can enter the "museum" and partake of such scientific activities as a tour that highlights "God's judgment of the Tower of Babel" or a seminar entitled "Security for faith-based organizations".

Here's a rather amusing interview conducted with the director of the museum and a bona fide scientist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HajP5pE4BE0.

Wow. Just goes to show that no amount of evidence from tens of thousands of published scientific articles each year will change the irrational mind of zealots. So I have to ask what's really on display at the Creation "Museum" – the supposed "evidence" that dinos laid down with the lions and the lambs, or the white-bread, wide-eyed fundamentalists who cheerfully enter the "special-effects theater complete with misty sea breezes and rumbling seats" and swallow the Bible as literal fact, then file off to the gift store to buy more propaganda illustrating how us evil, godless scientists are lying to them with devil-inspired scientific inquiry.

I wonder how they would react to "museums" inspired by other creation myths, such as that of Hindu or Greek mythology. Would T-Rex be shown hatching out of the creation egg with Brahma? Would velociraptors be depicted strutting around on Olympus with Zeus and Epimetheus? How preposterous would that be? It is no less preposterous to me than the Creation Museum's version.

But, hey, who am I to rain on their holy theme park? Praise Jesus and pass the tickets!


Image ruthlessly adapted from HERE and HERE.