Where Was the Garden of Eden?

I was interested to read a Wall Street Journal review (Saturday’s edition, page C-6) of a book that deals with the topic of the Garden of Eden. One of the reasons I was interested in this review was because it began by mentioning the Creation Museum:

In the United States, the gulf between biological empiricism and biblical literalism has barely narrowed since the 1925 Scopes Trial, and there seems to be little hope of ever closing it. One of the largest of our many creationist museums, in which Adam and Eve can be found frolicking near dinosaurs on a planet 6,000 years young, opened only four years ago in Petersburg, Ky. Against such a backdrop, it is hard to imagine a person searching for the actual location of the Garden of Eden as anything other than a player in a tired, politicized game.

The review discusses various ideas regarding the location of the Garden of Eden, and then ends with this:

As Ms. Wilensky-Lanford's story moves into the present, she notices today's young-earth creationists reluctant to identify a geographic Eden, despite their stridency about the rest of the physical world. Ms. Wilensky-Lanford finds the nonspecific Edens in the creation museums disappointing compared with her subjects' idiosyncratic ones, which, though far-fetched, "represented possibility," she writes, and a hope for a better world. It's easy to share her sense that a vague, generic Eden is no Eden at all.

Now it is true that nowhere in the Creation Museum do we suggest a location for the Garden of Eden. And why? Well, as we have written for years (and as this author should have researched, if we are to believe what the WSJ reviewer says about the author’s apparent omission), we would have absolutely no idea where the Garden of Eden was located because the whole earth was totally destroyed by the devastating worldwide flood of Noah’s day.

We have a number of articles on our website for both children and adults dealing with this topic and explaining a number of reasons as to why we could not locate the geographical position of the Garden of Eden in today’s post-Flood world.

For instance, you can read articles such as Was the Garden of Eden located in Iraq? and Where is the Garden of Eden?—or listen to this short audio clip.

Children who have read the Kids Answers section of our Answers magazine know that we cannot locate the Garden of Eden today. It’s a shame this author didn’t do her homework and explain why one cannot locate this Garden today. I suspect, though, that this author wouldn’t accept such an obvious explanation based on taking Genesis as literal history—to do so would be to admit that the Bible’s account of history in Genesis is true!

You can read the entire review.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying

Ken