I am curious–to all non YEC folks on forum, if you had the chance to go to the ark encounter or the Creation Museum, would you go? And if so, what would you expect to accomplish?
Not if they paid me!
I agree it would be a waste of time scientifically. However, I have a lot of well-meaning friends and family members (from my church, as well) who go there and reportedly have a great time. I’ve been encouraged to go. I am wondering if others have done so, and found it a good discussion point with family members–so they understand each other better. I am afraid, though, it be more like diving down the rabbit hole of a conspiracy theory–you never get out, and it validates the theory to a certain extent (like the Nye/Ham debate may have done), unintentionally).
1 Like
We are taking a trip to Kentucky this spring (Mammoth Cave) and I have had several ask me if we were going to see the Ark. I reply that we are not going to be in the immediate area, which is a cop-out, but I am afraid I would not be fit company on a tour through the ark barn.
2 Likes
I wouldn’t, but I’ve already been to the creation museum, so I don’t see much point in going again. I hope to help my kids see that all science museums are creation museums, and I’m afraid that would just confuse them further.
3 Likes
It would depend how much. 
1 Like
I really enjoyed Mammoth Caves! The main problem–don’t take a 2 year old girl with a lot of energy on one of those high catwalks. They do have fences (thank goodness), but about 10 times a minute, my daughter tested them and my sanity at the same time, as I thought she’d be over the edge. I wound up holding some part of her very tightly, the entire time–hand, arm–whatever spot would keep her in one place… I still tell her about that experience. We’ll go back some day when she is older.
1 Like
I’ve actually been.
At my church we do adult Sunday School classes on a college semester kind of schedule — a group of classes in the fall, a fresh set of classes in the spring, and then we take the summer off from Sunday School. So folks can pitch a class to the assistant pastor in charge of it, and teach for a semester. It’s a smaller commitment than, for example, where my parents go to church, and where my Dad taught a class for 20 years or so.
About 5-6 years ago, I taught a class on the whole science & origins thing, and I made two semesters worth of material out of it. I thought it went over quite well. One thing that was interesting was that we were way into it — maybe March of the spring (and 2nd) semester before anybody asked me where I came down on the whole origins issue. I had had my answer more or less locked & loaded for months, but I recall even today trying REALLY hard to lay my own position out in the most thoughtful and gracious way I could. I knew some folks in the room who were homeschoolers, and who used YEC-slanted materials, and there was another guy who I didn’t know well who occasionally tried to hijack the class w/ his own YEC perspective.
What’s interesting is that there were some folks who missed that Sunday, and another where I very publicly laid out my own positions, who came away from the class thinking that I was a YEC myself. I had spent 3 or 4 Sundays on the YEC perspective, so I guess I must’ve presented it fairly. That had certainly been my goal. So in a way I was kinda flattered, I suppose.
As part of my class prep I took a trip to the Creation Museum. The Ark Encounter was under construction then, but AiG was certainly advertising it enough. Stayed at the Courtyard at the Cincinnati airport. They comp’d my breakfast, IIRC, because I had a bunch of Marriott points.
I can say that I found the whole place…unimpressive, to say the least. The principal exhibit gallery is essentially a one-way walk-thru, and I walked thru it twice…it doesn’t take long, and I read every single placard at least once. It was mostly unsurprising stuff — the usual obfuscations & half-truth’s (e.g., an exhibit celebrating William Jennings Bryan as a hero of the Scopes Trial fails to mention that the man himself was not a YEC believer), mixed in w/ standard YEC folk science (e.g., this poster):
…”Yeah, see God COULD HAVE gotten all those marsupials from the Syrian mountains to Australia this way.” Lots of stuff like this. One thing that’s kinda fun: the mannequin for the prophet Isaiah (IIRC) is a dead ringer for Christopher Lee’s Saruman in the Lord of the Rings movies.
There were two things that day that made my jaw drop, though. The day I was there they had a special program of sorts at a given time, with a talk by Steve Ham (Ken’s brother). I think it was the same auditorium where they held Ken’s “debate” w/ Bill Nye a while back. Steve went on about all the usual stuff, but at one point stated without a hint of doubt nor irony that Noah has juvenile T. Rex’s on the ark, and that’s how he (and God) got around the size issue. I’d researched YEC pretty well, mostly via Ronald Numbers’ book and the John Whitcomb/Henry Morris Genesis Flood book, as well as some other sources. But I’d never come across anyone who made THAT claim. A number of folks in the audience there just nodded their heads. Again…folk science: “Yep. Makes sense to me.”
The other was this poster:
I vividly remember actually gasping when I saw this. It’s what YEC’s call “baraminology” — derived from the Hebrew words for “create” & “kind.” It’s their whole “answer” to, again, how does one get all the animals on an ark the size of what’s explicitly described in the Genesis account. It involves dramatic and very rapid hyper-speciation after The Flood. It’s become much more widely known about since the Ark Encounter opened, b/c they apparently have all these funny-looking creatures in the exhibits there, representing the speculative progenitor of each “kind” that Noah took on the ark which was preloaded w/ the genetic hardware to differentiate into multiple specific species later on. But at the time of my visit to the Creation Museum, I’d never heard any of this before. The incredible irony had been that Whitcomb & Morris had originally called upon flood geology to drive a stake thru evolutionary biology, but now YEC’s were proposing their own model whereby species of animals are not, in fact, immutable. I still can’t believe they’ve let out precisely the rope here to hang themselves with. But I did learn a couple things that helped w/ my prep for that Sunday School class.
Oh, and don’t pet the raptor…
5 Likes
Very informative post–thank you!
It sounds like it was worth it for you!
This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.