Kentucky Creation Museum Defies Science, Common Sense
By Brantley Hargrove in Hargrove, Hicks From the Sticks
Wed., Jul. 1 2009 @ 2:55PM
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| Did you know Noah's Ark had dinosaurs? They didn't eat everyone and everything onboard 'cause of God! |
I see. This is science, according to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, just a three-hour drive northeast from Nashville. A group of paleontologists attending the North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati took a little field trip to this Kentucky museum to gawk at these ignorant hicks and their funny little fairy-tale filtering of our planet's history.
The New York Times was there to document the hilarity that ensued.
Just imagine what REAL scientists think when told things, straight-faced, like this: That different dinosaurs from different geological periods all, somehow, met their demise on the same date, which is the date of Noah's flood. Noah had dinosaurs on the ark. But they died out later. Does God hate dinosaurs? Anyway, I digress. Dinosaurs met their demise on the same date, despite the fact that their fossils are found in different layers of the earth. Well, the museum says that all the layers, for some reason, were laid down at the same time. God thought that different dinosaurs needed to be contained in different strata. Don't ask me about the inscrutable wisdom behind all of this.
When this group of venerable paleontologists entered the museum, there was an animatronic girl feeding a squirrel, with dinosaurs in the background. Nope, not separated by millions of years of evolution after all.
One scientist was hilariously quoted by the NYT reporter thusly: "I'm speechless," said Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, who walked around with crossed arms and a grimace. "It's rather scary."
When asked by the scientists how the few creatures aboard the ark were able to multiply and diversify to the multitude of organisms that exist today in such a short period of time, they received this non-answer from the Creation Museum: "God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly."
"Thus in one sentence they admit that evolution is real," said Dr. Stefan Bengston, professor of paleozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History," and that they have to invoke magic to explain how it works.
I'm sure it is all very entertaining, and I'd consider going myself, if for no other reason than to have a good laugh. But you gotta admit, the very existence of this place is disturbing. Imagine the children and the simple-minded adults who enter this museum and leave it in possession of preposterous ideas they believe are gospel. Scary, indeed, Dr. Bengston. Scary, indeed.
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