The Creation Museum in Kentucky

On my recent road trip around the USA I visited the Creation Musuem and here are my thoughts.

Firstly it is technically impressive. The animatronic exhibits are excellent and the feel of the entire place is one of quality; they’ve clearly spent a lot of money on the place. They also have many audio visual exhibits which cuts down on the amount of reading required; I really dislike museums that have walls and walls of text to read. The videos they play are normally rather short so you are constantly moving rather than stuck watching a video for half an hour. As an aside the more explicitly sciencey short videos were the most interesting item there. They also had some lovely gardens and a zoo but we didn’t see much of them due to time constraints.

The aim, as I understood it, was to show that everyone looks at the world with a particular lense which is non-neutral- the examples used were atheism and Christian theism- but with a greater emphasis on the Biblical narrative making sense of the universe particularly 6 Day Creation, Fall, the Flood, Babel and finally Christ. Consequently the amount of science content was proportional low; most of it was focused around geology which was quite informative.

It did not though succeed even on its own terms: the worldview analysis was rather shallow and misleading at times- it was hardly assumption quaking; the Biblical narrative exposition was good although it felt as it was focused towards Christians rather convincing others of it i.e. far too little of actual creation evolution debate (and anthropology). It took me a while to figure out the purpose of the museum.

If you are a Creationist or an Evolutionist of any stripe it doesn’t provide enough science to get your teeth into. If you are a non-Christian it won’t convince you of the Biblical narrative since it doesn’t adequately engage with non-Christian narratives.

All in all, a missed opportunity and an expensive one at that- not cheap especially if you took a family (it’s deliberately kid friendly but there are clearly adult exhibits). So if you are a Creationist or an Evolutionist I’d say go to some botanic gardens and read some books on the subjects.