Creationism

With the Bible as its inspiration--the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago, this exhibit shows dinosaurs roaming the earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve.

The $25 million Creation Museum brings creationism to life and is rising fast in rural Kentucky.

“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.

While creationists can fund private museums, they are losing ground elsewhere. Last year, in Dover, Pa., voters ousted school board members who had required the biology curriculum to include mention of intelligent design. A federal judge struck down the policy, declaring intelligent design is religion in disguise.

Another place is Kansas. Conservative Republicans who approved classroom standards that called evolution into question lost control of the state Board of Education in Tuesday's primary election.

Last November, the Board of Education’s 6-to-4 conservative Republican majority rewrote testing standards for public schools to incorporate language supported by advocates of intelligent design, which holds that life is so complex it must have been created by some kind of higher power. The new standards say that some aspects of evolution are contradicted by scientific evidence. (Click here for a PDF file listing the standards.)

Connie Morris, who lost her seat said that evolution was “an age-old fairy tale” and “a nice bedtime story” unsupported by science. Right, and the rest of us missed where science supported her bed-time story of creationism. What a tool.