USA Today Columnist Promotes Falsity

On the USA Today website, and on Cathy Lynn Grossman’s religion blog, sadly—and like a number of secular reports we’ve seen lately—she promotes a falsity concerning the Creation Museum. It is hard to tell if such writers either didn’t do their homework, or if they are being deliberately misleading to undermine our integrity or just to get a "good" story (or both). She starts her blog by discussing the recent visit to the Creation Museum by 285 atheists:

The Creation Museum, where the Biblical story of the origins of life is in full display has found a creative way to stay in the headlines: Invite the “enemy.”

Had she done her homework, she would have found that AiG/Creation Museum did not “invite the enemy” (referring to the atheist group)—there was no ploy to “stay in the headlines” as she claims! This is just false. Because there was a conference for such atheists relatively close to the Creation Museum, the atheists (even according to their own press release) decided to come as a group to the Creation Museum. We did not discover that they were going to be in the region and decided to invite them here. But hey, who cares about accuracy—as long as it is a good news story!

I asked Mark Looy, our CCO who frequently deals with the media as well as PR for the museum, what he thought of the USA Today column:

It was hard to believe the opening paragraph. It’s written as if we at the museum want to pick fights and thus we invite atheists in for a confrontation. But the two groups she mentioned came on their own volition—and to pick fights themselves. The only thing we want skeptics to confront is the museum’s message that the Creator and Savior of the universe is Jesus Christ (Colossians 1).

While we certainly welcome atheists to the museum (after all, the museum has a message of hope and it’s highly evangelistic), that does not mean we relish the challenge—which Ms. Grossman of USA Today seems to believe—of having to deal with dozens of mocking and sometimes rude skeptics as we had to do on one day last week. Trying to ensure that our other (paying) guests are having an enjoyable time inside our museum is very difficult when you have dozens of rude and disrespectful atheists walking through. Indeed, the stereotype of the "new angry atheists" was certainly on display last week with several mockers.

Not only that, the columnist didn’t check things out with us and regurgitates some of the nonsense these atheists are spreading, such as:

The Museum display of the impact of the Biblical Tower of Babel, for example, is, to [the atheist leading the group] understanding, racist retelling of Noah's cursed son Ham.

What the columnist doesn’t mention is that the atheists are imposing on the Creation Museum some people’s false teaching about Noah’s son Ham on the fact that the Creation Museum shows that all people groups descended from Noah’s three sons. The atheists can’t tell the difference between what others falsely believe and what we do not teach at the Creation Museum—but hey, if you can falsely accuse us of being racist (when we teach against this), then do it anyway—and it makes a good story regardless of the truth! Well, we are used to this sort of mud slinging.

Those Floating Logs!

In my blog of August 9 I had an item about the ridiculous claim that appeared in news reports stating:

Exhibits in the Creation Museum, which cost $27 million to build and opened in May, 2007, present a history of the world based on literal interpretations of the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve share the Garden of Eden with dinosaurs; the beaks of Darwin’s finches are explained by God’s will, not evolution; and mankind spread from continent to continent by walking across the floating trunks of trees knocked down during the Biblical Flood.

Since that time, a number of atheist blogs appeared reasserting the totally false claim that the Creation Museum teaches that “mankind spread from continent to continent by walking across the floating trunks of trees knocked down during the Biblical Flood.” Some blogs linked to YouTube videos recently taken by atheists supposedly showing signage at the museum that teaches this. Even though the Creation Museum does not teach this nonsense, and even though I stated so on my blog, atheists continue to propagate this falsity. One of the things we see is that when an atheist finds out they are wrong about something, they will just respond and twist things around and move the goal posts because they just can’t admit they are wrong—particularly when it comes to anything to do with the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis. One wonders if they just lie to try to discredit—but it is mainly directed to their small group (and it is a minority) of almost cult-like followers.

This time, they have taken something from the museum’s Flood Geology room that has nothing to do with the spread of mankind and taken it and imposed it on a totally different exhibit that discusses something totally different.

The post-Flood rafting diagram appears in a room separated by a dividing wall from the Confusion/Babel exhibit. It only shows animals and plants having rafted on floating logs. No mention is made of people riding on mats and debris to travel the globe. The whole exhibit is in the context of animals and plants only, and has a world map depicting land and ocean routes for animals and plants, with a few examples. By the way, when floods occur in the Amazon, floating vegetation with animals clinging to it have been seen being washed out to sea—such a situation is not an uncommon event in the present world. However, there are other ways animals could be dispersed around the world—over land bridges (formed during the Ice Age) and by people taking them with them either over land or even on boats, etc.

After the Flood/Geology room, one then passes through a doorway marked "Confusion" into the Babel room. But even then the map of the Middle East with the dispersion of the people shown is not seen until well after there are other exhibits talking about the post-Flood people initially being together at Babel, before being judged by God with the confusion of languages. Only then does the map show the people groups spreading from the Babel area. By the way, the arrows do show the "descendants of Ham" going into Africa—but this is not racist. And there is certainly nothing about Africans or black people being supposedly the "cursed offspring" of Ham as the atheists often claim—in fact, there are many dark-skinned people groups on earth and not all are descendants of Ham. And there is no mention of floating logs, as that has nothing to do with this exhibit and nothing to do with the dispersion of people after the Tower of Babel.

Nowhere is there any connection between the completely separate exhibits on post-Flood log rafting of animals and plants, and the later exhibit in a separate room—twice removed by walls and other exhibits—of the dispersion of people from Babel. It is obvious to the biblically literate that the two are separate events, which is why they are separate exhibits on what is a time line through the whole museum. Indeed, any person should be able to see that the separate exhibits are in a time line of history.

The Grossman column can be found at: Skeptics, creationists go toe to toe—again.

Devotion

“Always looking to help them”

(Revelation 20:14–15) And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.

(Proverbs 24:11–12) If you forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; If you say, Behold, we knew it not; does not he that ponders the heart consider it? and he that keeps your soul, does not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?

We keep the simple truth before us that every lost soul will spend eternity in hell to keep us always looking to help them be saved through the Lord Jesus Christ.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken