John M. Cropper

“Prepare to believe”.

Those were the words that greeted my friends and me some weeks ago when we decided to abandon our day’s plans and make the trek to rural Petersburg, Ky. The Boone County town is just minutes over the river from Cincinnati and home of the newly opened, coolly controversial Creation Museum – where conventional science is left at the door and history is presented through a literal reading of the Bible’s first book, the book of Genesis.

While most Christians interpret the book of Genesis as an allegory, a smaller sect, known as Young Earth creationists, maintains that God did indeed create the earth in six, 24-hour days. It was with this belief that the creators of the museum, a group called Answers in Genesis, built and organized their $27 million, 60,000 square foot structure.

So I went, thinking I wouldn’t see much “out of the ordinary.”

I was wrong.

For starters, I underestimated the extent to which the creators of the museum would go to address each shortcoming that modern science has found with Young Earth creationism. The biggest of these questions, and seemingly the most difficult for creationist apologists to answer, is: What about the dinosaurs?

Whether they are sitting atop the ominous brass gates at the museum’s entrance, munching fake grass in a life-sized garden of Eden, or swimming in a pre-historic pond with Adam and Eve, dinosaurs are everywhere in the Creation Museum, without much explaining as to how, or even why they are there. Except, it seemed, to quell the dinosaur debate with flashy exhibit scenes and million dollar animatronics.

Patrons of the museum are able to walk through a life-sized cross section of Noah’s ark, which, creationism posits, Noah used to survive the flood that caused millions of years of rock formations in just days. On a tiny plaque outside the door, an explanation reads: “The Book of Genesis says that two of every one of God’s creatures survived the flood aboard Noah’s ark. Thus, dinosaurs must have been on the ark, too.”

Go figure.

I was raised to understand the Bible as a tool through which to teach positive Christian values, which the museum is right to memorialize. But history lessons never seemed to come up in my Sunday school classes.

Leading up to the opening of the now-historic museum, the National Center for Science Education collected more than 800 signatures from tri-state scientists and professors in protest of its opening.

Michael Leahy, editor of the Christian publication Christian Faith and Reason said in a statement: “(B)y replacing the scientific method with biblical literalism, the museum undermines the credibility of all Christians and makes it easy to represent Christians as irrational.”

Andrea Wolfe, an evolutionary biologist and associate professor at Ohio State, teaches a class called “Creation and Evolution: Differing World Views,” in which students are presented with literature and arguments from both perspectives. The class remains one of the most popular in the department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, she said, and has been on the books since 1997.

Though she tries to remain objective while teaching, she opened up a bit about her beliefs when we sat down last week.

“I find it disturbing that so many people disregard what science tells them about their world,” she said, adding that she is offended that many people believe all scientists are atheists.

“It’s just a matter of the natural explanation of the world versus the supernatural,” she said.

Barring some flashy museum making me feel otherwise, I think I’ll stay rooted in the natural world for now.

At least, that’s what I’m prepared to believe.