Our visit to the Creation “Museum” is being reported on ABC News now — not a bad report by a reporter who was actually there. You can also read Ken Ham’s account, which basically backs up everything we’ve said about it. Ham tries hard to highlight our ‘bad behavior’ and their forbearance, since they only threw out one person and say they only warned a second.

One other amusing fact: Ham/Looy make disparaging remarks about a so-called reporter who only “stated that he was with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune” — that’s the same reporter who authored the ABC News story.

Sean Carroll has a very interesting post on appropriate arguments — he illustrates it with this grid of disputation.

The context is the recent bloggingheads between Paul Nelson and Ron Numbers. It was a painful display, and the problem was that Nelson is an irredeemable kook, a young earth creationist well into the Red Zone of Crackpots in the diagram, yet none of his lunacy was engaged — he was treated as if he were a sensible person, with meritable ideas deserving serious consideration, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Sean makes a somewhat different point: that it is a bad idea for critics to engage the very worst of the opposition, and to then congratulate themselves on their success in fighting off the enemy. We should be wrestling with the Green Zone of Worthy Opponents, not wasting our time with crackpots!

There is definitely considerable truth in that. Non-crackpot arguments are more challenging and require more thought, and are ultimately more satisfying. However, there is a problem when the focus is on an issue rather than an individual. Some issues, and I would put evolution in this category, don’t match this model well. While the issue is real and red-hot in the culture, the Green Zone of Worthy Opponents is unfortunately rather underpopulated. There is no one in the green box. So what should we do? Simply ignore the mobs of people populating the red box?

As an example of a Worthy Opponent, Sean mentions Ken Miller, and I’d agree…except that he’s only a worthy opponent on the issue of tactics in science education, but on the topic of evolution, he’s solidly in the Blue Zone of Friends. An argument with Miller on evolution would be really, really boring, because we’d just sit around agreeing with each other. While Sean has offered a useful model for thinking about strategy, it leaves out a significant situation in the real world.

I just don’t feel like sitting back and twiddling my thumbs for a few years because Ken Ham is way too inane to deserve my attention. He’s too successful as a con artist.

There is lots of video on the web from our visit to Ken Ham’s Palace of Lies, but here’s one of one of the rare incidents to mar the trip. This is the student who was kicked out; I was with him when he was pulled aside, and can verify that he was doing nothing but engaging in quiet conversation with a small group of us godless atheists when Mark Looy arbitrarily singled him out and took him aside to tell him stories about how unruly he had been. It was genuinely bizarre. As you can see in the clip made as we were standing outside, there was no shouting, no disruption, no rudeness at all going on — they simply plucked Derek out of the group and told him he was a bad boy.

Not shown is the other stuff that went on at the same time. While Looy had Derek off to the side, their head of security hovered about and tried to interpose himself between Looy and all the cameras aimed at him…an impossibility, since there was a whole arc of watchful atheists around them. At one point he gestured to one of the uniformed guards and sent him to escort one attendee with a large, high-quality video camera off the premises — this happened to be a fellow who was there making a documentary about atheists, who had been careful to not directly participate and who was certainly not wearing any godless apparel. The creationists are certainly brilliant at PR, aren’t they?

I can say that all of the atheists were well behaved and civil, that the only behavior the museum staff could possibly have complained about is that we engaged in quiet criticism, and that the only bad behavior was by people like Looy and the noticeably edgy security guards, who we could tell were looking for an excuse to throw all the people laughing at their joke of a “museum” out. I think Derek was simply their chosen sacrificial lamb, used as an excuse to vent their failed expectations for a ferocious confrontation.

One last irony: after expelling a few of our people for imaginary infractions, Looy came up to me with their photographer to ask to take my picture, presumably to put on Ken Ham’s blog. I let him, of course, but I expect they’ll also use it to let their security know who I am, in case I should make future invasions. (Which is not likely, by the way. I think I got enough.)

It’s a small thing, but it’s representative of the bizarre pseudoscience in the world of the Creation “Museum”. There was a room with a small collection of dinosaur models and skeleton casts, and they each had little panels describing the specimen…just like a real museum! Then you read them, and the weirdness sinks in.

Notice that “Diet” specifies “after the Fall” — that’s because everything was a vegetarian before Adam and Eve ate the apple, since there was no death anywhere in the universe (which implies, apparently, that in their version of Christian theology, plants are dead). That’s not the weirdest thing, though.

No, the part that I found most amusing is the date. This is a Jurassic ceratosaur, so it says that this is from the Jurassic (~2348 BC). There were other specimens from other geological eras, and they would say “Upper Cretaceous (~2348 BC)” and “Lower Cretaceous (~2348 BC)”. I’m sure that if they had some Cambrian specimens there, they would have also said “(~2348 BC)”.

Why does the geology even matter to them if they’re just going to ignore it all and compress everything into one year, a year given with such remarkable specificity?

Even if you don’t care about the geology, what about the history? All but 7 people are exterminated in 2348 BC, by their accounting, yet we know that in that century, we have the establishment of the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia, the sixth dynasty in Egypt, the founding of major cities in the Indus valley and Korea…we have archaeological and historical records that show business as usual, with no one noting a massive annihilation of the human race.

The whole “museum” is like that — it’s a succession of assertions that flout the evidence, but does so in a style that is simply parroted from legitimate museums. Substance is completely lacking.

Details to follow later.

I’m currently at Edwin and Helen Kagin’s house, 15 minutes from the Creation “Museum” — we’ll be heading off to the event around 9am, but first we have to be fed, and the Kagins are infamous for stuffing their guests. I may have to waddle through the theme park.

We have 285 people signed up so far. There is some concern that we’ll strain their parking, especially if mobs of creationists try to tie up spots early. If there is a problem, people can legally park along the county road leading to Ham’s Folly, as long as you don’t block access. We also have an agreement with a local farm 2 miles away to let people park there; if worst comes to worst, we’ll let people know where to go and will shuttle them back and forth.

For a little crowd control, the Creation Theme Park has also told us they are setting up a table and tent — it’s nice of them, but I suspect they are more concerned about making sure chaotic milling crowds of atheists don’t choke up parking or the entrance. Congregate there, please. If Kool-Aid is served, however, I recommend that you don’t drink it.

I have heard from a lot of people that they want to get a photo of the dinosaur with a saddle. I should mention that last I heard, it was no longer there — it was out for maintenance. However, in an amusing coincidence, a van full of godless atheists on its way to Kentucky last night passed a trailer carrying…you guessed it.

It’s an omen. My correspondent tells me the entire van erupted in laughter, which is precisely the response we’re looking for. If you’re coming, remember: don’t get angry, laugh instead. We are going to be a merry, cheerful band of atheists.

I won’t be hauling my laptop through the museum, so I won’t be live-blogging it, unfortunately. I will be using my iPhone to twitter now and then, so feel free to follow along on my account, or better yet, I’ve suggested that everyone twittering this should use the hashtag #CreoZerg. That link should give you a growing kaleidoscope of short reactions to our visit.

I will be posting photos on Twitter. They won’t be the greatest — just stuff shot with my iPhone camera — but it’ll give you all a taste.

I’ll also be putting together a summary post this wekend.