Some of you may recall our lengthy discussion about dinosaurs, evolution and Adam and Eve. A museum is being built that takes this question and answers in a most creative way: dinosaurs and Adam and Eve co-existed. Oh, and don’t you dare suggest we evolved from fish or monkeys.

“If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that’s our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there,” museum founder Ken Ham said during recent tour of the sleek and modern facility, which is due to open next year.

Ham, an Australian native who started the Christian publishing company Answers in Genesis in the late 1970s, said the goal of his privately funded museum is to change minds and rebut the scientific point of view.

“We’re going to show you that we can make sense of the different people groups, we can make sense of fossils, we can make sense of what you see in the world,” he said.

It’s called Creation Museum. The location is the outskirts of Cincinnati. One version of the story is here They have a blog up and as of January, 2007 are reporting having raised $24.5 million of their needed $27 million.

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  • I just went to the Creation Museum. WOW, I was impressed. The one things that stood out to me was that impressed me was that fact they did not censor out evolutionary interpretations. They posted both ideas or origins side-by-side. They were fair and balanced as they presented the data. The conclusions were up to the visitors to make. Not up to the curator’s to impose on the guests of the museum. I have been to many museums as a science teacher and I have never seen such open and honest comparisons of ideas before. The Creation Museum is a great place to understand Creation and Evolution as two opposed world-views of our origins. I would invite people to visit with an open mind and make up their own minds. Which reminds me of a great quote, “A mind is like a parachute: it works better when it’s open!”

  • I am not up to speed on every detail of the Orthodox Jewish take on Evolution, or science in general.

    But even I know that there is much more to that, than non-Orthodox people realize, Tom Morrissey.

    People open the “Old Testament”, read the noble King James English, or a modern English translation of the Hebrew original, and figure, well, they know what it says. They’ve read it, haven’t they?

    No.

    There is twenty-five hundred years of discussion of the Hebrew original. Every word of the Hebrew original is densely packed with implication, partly, partly, because of the way the Hebrew language works.

    English is magnificent in its fullness and resulting precision, and Hebrew is magnificent in its compactness and resulting potential for mulitple meanings, all of them true in different ways.

    I never get mad at Science, good science. I invite it to Shabbat dinner, and it sings right along with me, just as loud.

    Facts on the six days, Truth on the seventh day. No problem. I don’t expect G-d to read me a science text on Friday night. Dinner would be too late.

    I know plenty of science, but I have no trouble with the Friday night prayer, when we read aloud the passage from “Genesis” about G-d having finished material creation on the sixth day, then injecting the supra-material on the seventh day, so we wouldn’t all die of boredom from just being matter.

    “Genesis” recaps and parallels scientific views quite nicely, actually. But excessive literalism makes me want to hide under the bed.

  • C’mon, Muffti, everybody knows that the dinosaurs were the result of animal miscegenation in the generations before the Flood. The animals saw the sexual immorality of the humans and copied it.

    So a yak and a gorilla get it on and the result is a T. Rx.

    I thought everybody knew that.

  • Don’t date fossils, Muffti– stick with younger chicks.

  • …and hopefully nearby a real museum where you can learn facts about the commonality of DNA between species and how they evolve, dating methods that show fossils to be millions of years old…(c’mon someone, pick up the beat!)

  • Middle’s attempting to set that up, Ben-David. He’s contacted me about getting Catholic backing for an ecumenical interpretation of the creation story.

  • A worthy enterprise which will bring Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians closer together. After all, they’re the only folks who believe the Genesis creation account(s) are literally true.

  • I think that it is rather amusing that he’s named Ham, the same as one of Noah’s sons, especially since the flood is one of the biggest points of contention between creationists and those who believe that evolution happened.