A Monument To Creation

One sign sets "Human Reason" against "God's Word."

Museum exhibits suggesting that man coexisted with dinosaurs -- which fossils show became extinct millions of years before humans existed -- rely on the notion that the evidence is simply open to interpretation. The backers of the concept of intelligent design, which posits that living beings are too complex to have evolved from a primordial soup, take a similar approach, widely discredited by scientists.

The Creation Museum is located for easy access near an interstate and an airport on 49 acres of rolling hills where woolly mammoth roamed until about 10,000 years ago. Designed to inspire Christian belief, the facility was largely built with contributions of $100 or less, although three families gave at least $1 million each, said Mark Looy, an Answers in Genesis co-founder.

To put together a museum with pizzazz, the planners recruited Patrick Marsh, the designer who created the "Jaws" and "King Kong" attractions at Universal Studios in Florida. The exhibits, backed by dozens of professionally produced videos, keep the action lively, and the content coming -- "to create something of a 'Wow!' factor," said Looy, who expects 250,000 visitors the first year.

"We're going to blow people out of the water with how many people we'll get," Ham said. "A lot of non-Christians will come. You couldn't blow them into church with a stick of dynamite, but they'll come to this."

The overriding goal is to persuade visitors that the Book of Genesis is scientifically defensible, Ham said, for if Christians lose faith in the literal truth of Genesis, doubts about such matters as the virgin birth and Christ's resurrection, for example, will follow.

"You're then telling the next generation they can reinterpret the Bible. Then what we've lost is Christian morality. If there is no absolute authority and we're just animals, why not do what you want to do?" asked Ham, whose books include "Why Won't They Listen? The Powers of Creation Evangelism."

One of the museum's slogans is "Prepare to Believe." The charter members touring the building already do.

"This shows why the creationist view is so popular," marveled Bill Haney, a retired steel company worker from Ohio who values the museum as a counterpoint to public education and the certitude of mainstream scientists, of whom he said, "They don't know what happened. They might be right. They might be wrong."

Charles Leckie, a family doctor in Tupelo, Miss., wrapped a family vacation around a visit. On the way, they stopped at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, where Leckie challenged the guide's assertion that the rock formations are millions of years old. He asks why people should believe "so-called experts." After all, "they're all human."

The scientific evidence at the Creation Museum is a thin patchwork that targets a seemingly random array of research into Earth's development. The powerful eruption of the Mount St. Helens volcano, for example, is offered as an example of how nature's force could have carved the Grand Canyon in a matter of days, rather than eons.

Krauss, the physicist, recognizes that defeating such thinking is difficult. Disputing the young-Earth creationists, he said, is "like trying to explain to someone that the Earth is round if they don't believe it." He notes that historical records show buildings found in Egypt to be 8,000 years old, and that by scientific dating methods, artful human handprints in Europe go back 30 millennia.

Just south of the Creation Museum, with its animatronic dinosaurs, its planetarium and its Noah's Ark cafe, lies a humbler museum, off the beaten track. Just one room with glass cases containing rocks and old bones, it is located in Big Bone Lick State Park, advertised as the birthplace of American vertebrate paleontology. Admission is free.

The first sign inside the door begins, "Over 480 million years ago, an inland sea covered a large portion of the United States." In time, huge creatures arrived, mastodons and woolly mammoth. Tusks and teeth are in the cases, and a left tibia the size of a small child. A plaque notes that humans lived on the land perhaps 12,000 years ago.

Since 1739, more than 250 skeletons have been collected at the site, some of them by explorers Lewis and Clark, dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson.

Among the onetime visitors was Ham. Asked about it last week, he said, "There's not much there."