Monument to Delusion

Ken Ham's Creation Museum is opening this Monday near Cincinnati. The museum is run by Answers In Genesis, which promotes Biblical young-earth creationism.

This seems to be a manifestation of all that pent-up anxiety and frustration that creationists have felt for decades when visiting mainstream science museums and being exposed to the ideas of geology, astronomy, and evolution that might threaten their Bible-literalist worldview. Now they can visit a "science" museum that won't cause them to question their beliefs at all. They will have to pay for the privilege, though - the adult admission charge is a steep $19.95, more expensive than any science museum I've been to. I guess God needs a lot of money.

While I don't think this museum will convert any adults to creationism, it will indoctrinate children, which the museum is targeted at, into thinking that the earth was magically created from nothing just a few thousand years ago, and that all of Earth's millions of species were preserved on a wooden ship during a global flood, against all common sense and scientific evidence. This will add to the misinformation that these students will need to unlearn when they reach college and need to learn real science.

This museum will also strengthen, in the minds of other people in the world, an image of Americans as anti-intellectual, religious fundamentalist rubes.