It was time to finally enter the exhibit. I had already been tweeting away, but my friend Josh said he couldn’t get any service on his iPhone. Turns out I was one of the few people who actually had cell phone reception during the main part of the exhibit (I know both Hemant and PZ were having trouble with their iPhones too, and all of Mark‘s tweets tragically came in days later). This shocked me, since I have US Cellular. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of it – it’s a service provider located in Chicago, and if you get out of the suburbs, you have shitty service. I’m usually roaming and down to a bar or two. Inside the Creation Museum? Full bars. While no one else had service. That’s when I knew I had entered Bizarro World. Up was down, black was white, evolution was a lie, and US Cellular wasn’t crappy.

The entrance was remade to look like Antelope Canyon and was pretty cool looking. Actually, now that I think of it, many parts of the museum involved you walking through somewhat narrow corridors with seemingly no escape, since you had to walk through the entire linear exhibit before you could get out. A claustrophobic person would not enjoy themselves there. Anyway, once you make it through, you’re greeted with this sign:This sums up a major theme of the museum: Scientists and creationists are using the same data, but since they have different starting points, they come to different conclusions. Which honestly, is true. Scientists have the starting point of logic, reason, and background knowledge based off of many previous experiments. When they see data, they use those things to come to an appropriate conclusion. Creationists, on the other hand, have the starting point of the Bible, which is also their conclusion. When they see data, they try to figure out how to explain the data so it fits their already established conclusion. Oh, and let’s not forget that the creationist is a wise old white man, but the evil scientist is a young Asian man. Woo, let’s use xenophobia to further our argument. Anyway, so yes, this sign is true:But why? Because Creationists are delusional and full of crap. Just because Creationists can come a different conclusion doesn’t mean that conclusion is valid – especially when their starting point is a ridiculous book full of impossibilities and contradictions. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but this was a very annoying trend in the exhibit: taking scientific facts and twisting them in order to fit their preconceived ideas. And just for an example on how stupid some of these questions got:
Are you shitting me? You use the creation of artificial sapphires to support your claim that sapphire formation goes much quicker than we think? Again, they need to come up with crazy ways to distort facts (sapphires take a long long time to form) so they fit into their worldview (world has only been around for 6000 years). I don’t need to tell you this, but laboratory sapphires undergo much more extreme conditions that would be found on earth, so they can form faster. Of course, the Creation Museum would probably just tell you these extreme conditions were causes by the flood or fire that rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah or Xenu hurtling atom bombs into volcanoes – er, whoops, wrong fiction story.

And yes, there was much face-palming that day. Especially when I found out that God is a Caps Lock troll (who possibly inspired Popeye the Sailor):
This room started a related trend: Hating on human reason. We’d see these sorts of signs throughout the rest of the museum:
Human Reason on one side, God’s Word on the other. This drove me crazy for many reasons. One, it obviously implied that human reason is bad. The whole purpose of this museum is to promote God and the Bible as the literal truth and to expose the “lies” of science. Putting up Human Reason against what they see as the truth clearly paints it as wrong, the bad guy, evil. It pains me to see reason, one of the greatest virtues I think a human can have, be treated as a sin. It doesn’t surprise me, though – there have been plenty of Christians throughout history who have been against intellectual curiosity. I guess we should be thankful – they could have just as easily put “Satan’s Word” with scientific thoughts under it, which would probably make people hate us scientists even more.

The second reason this drove me nuts was just because the scientific truth was actually there! From the Reason vs God signs I read, they did a very good job at simply explaining scientific processes. To think of all the people who are actually standing there and reading the truth and not recognizing it drives me mad. It’s like watching someone play Marco Polo or Hot and Cold and just barely missing their target. They’re agonizingly close to the truth, but then they miss it. Sigh.

And yet another theme of the museum was that Science is Hard, God is Easy:

Again, I think I’ll agree with that! For most people, science is harder to understand than just waving your hands and saying “God did it.” Zeus hurtling thunderbolts was easier than understanding lightning. I say most people, though, because I find it nearly impossible to comprehend how insane God logic makes sense to people, since I was never raised religious. But I loved how they graphically represented this. See, science is winding and confusing and always changing, but God’s word is constant and perfect and immutable. Therefore, God’s word is correct.

Wait, what? If anything, the fact that science changes is what makes it so beautiful. It admits when it’s wrong and strives for a better truth. Yes, this makes it more complicated, and yes, means that some minor things we accept today may be false (key word: minor. We’re not going to discover the Earth goes around Jupiter or that evolution is false). But it is light years ahead of how much of God’s Word is true. All you have to do is crack open a Bible to see all that’s wrong within it. Just to make your blood boil even more, here’s a detailed view:I’m really not quite sure what the heck is going on in the evolution sign. Galaxies and solar systems are still developing (I don’t think I’d say evolving, but let’s not play the semantics game with fundies), they didn’t just stop once Earth was formed. I’m not too sure why the formation of coal is so important. Actually, it was at this point that I just stopped trying to figure out how any of this supposedly made sense. Facepalming rates increased greatly.

The “Science is Hard” and “God is Easy” didn’t end there, though. They also applied it to their version of human evolution. Well, not evolution, since they don’t believe in that. “Kind” variation generation or whatever the hell they were trying to suggest that was basically the same as evolution:
See, apes are confusing! They have lots of complicated branches and extinction events. But humans are perfect. They’re special. They’re just a straight line, going on unchanged throughout time. Unfortunately, I think this is a view I’ve heard from more liberal Christians that accept evolution: that other animals evolved, but man didn’t. Not entirely sure how that works: did man just poof into existence one day, after the animals had been chilling and evolving for all those years? My…brain…explode blaahhh!Yes, and we hope to keep it that way. This fairy tale nonsense deserves no place in schools. Just look how sad it made Vanessa!

(Thanks to Vanessa and Josh for extra photos)

Part1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

After the mastodon is what I think is supposed to be a brief “introduction” to the museum. Aka, getting right to calling scientist delusional liars and preparing you to witness dinosaurs and humans mingling together:
This museum is overflowing with dinosaurs. I initially found it strange; I mean, this is supposed to be about all creation, right? There are other animals in the exhibits, but no where near the number of dinosaurs. I can think of millions of interesting things you could say about amphibians or birds or mammals or insects or whatever, and I’m sure they have millions of ways they can twist those facts to fit their own agenda.

But once you look at the usual demographics of the museum, you know why there’s all the dinosaur hype: kids. Nearly all of the theists there (recognizable by their lack of a name tag and their looks of shock) were with families. When I saw a large group of 7-ish year olds walk in on what seemed to be some kind of field trip, my heart sank. The Creation Museum isn’t for the believing adults whose faith is strong, or the atheists who come to giggle and likely won’t be converted: it’s for the impressionable youth. These kids are getting brainwashed, and who knows if they’ll ever be taken to a real natural history museum. And what better way to brainwash children than to have exciting dinosaurs? I know I loved dinos as a kid, and I would also believe whatever an adult would tell me. This sort of million-dollar-budget indoctrination is hard to undo.

The other thing the museum beats over your head is that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. It’s preposterous, but necessary for them. Creationists already have their “conclusion” as told to them by the Bible, and they have to take reality and warp it to fit their preconceptions. They know the Earth is 6000 years old, so how do they explain dinosaur fossils? Apparently it’s less crazy to say humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time than to claim God buried fake dinosaur fossils to test people’s faith. I mean, that would just be silly.
And to be honest, the fake humans really freaked me out. They fell right smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley. This little girl was especially freaky because she was animatronic, and her eyes would shift back and forth. I think I died a little inside when her eyes stared right at me. Made me wonder if they’re really some sort of video camera, like in one of those old haunted houses. I can just imagine Ken Ham sitting behind a bunch of surveillance cameras, watching as the atheists file through his museum.

The pre-main exhibit display cases were attempts to make people doubt evolution and raise questions that would later be answered (Spoilers: The answer is always “God did it.”). Since I’m studying both genetics and evolution, parts like this in the museum really made me want to cry. For example:Standard creationist argument, right? There’s not enough time for evolution even in a billions of years (which is an outright lie), and we all know the Earth is only 6,000 years old because all “facts” are provided by the Bible. Therefore, evolution is a lie. The weird thing about the museum is that they actually try to use genetics and natural selection in their later exhibits, but they’re just setting themselves up to fail. Their stance isn’t even consistent through the museum (not surprising). For example:
Here, there’s no way all this diversity could have evolved, right? God made all the finches unique (they even had about 7 beautifully colored live finches in a display to make their point). Sounds like the standard creationist argument: Except the Creation Museum believes in natural selection. They have whole exhibits explaining how a single “Kind” of animal that was brought on the Ark had enough variation that through natural selection it produces lots of different species. For example, two proto-horses brought on the Ark would later produce modern horses, donkeys, and zebras.
I honestly don’t understand how they say the appearance of new species over time from a common ancestor is not evolution – it’s like staring at an apple and asserting it’s an orange, or more appropriately, sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling “LA LA LA!” But regardless of that inanity, why didn’t they use that explanation for the finches? Why not say Noah brought a “Kind” on the Ark that was a basic finch, and after the flood it turned into different finches? You would think if they’re just making stuff up, they would at least be consistent about it – of course, look at the Bible. I’ll talk about what’s actually wrong with the “Kind” hypothesis once I actually get to that part of the museum.

(Thanks to Vanessa and Josh for extra photos)

Part1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9