A Student’s Anti-Museum Blog Gets Noticed on the Internet—Our Response

Yesterday afternoon I was “winging my way” back to my homeland of Australia. I will be arriving in Queensland right after this blog gets posted and will be “down under” for more than two weeks. Because of the last hectic 24 hours, I thought my blog today could point you to an excellent item by Dr. Georgia Purdom of our staff that has just been posted to her blog.

Below are excerpts of Dr. Purdom’s blog—then visit the link under the excerpts to read her full blog post. It involves a student at a well-known seminary who wrote negatively about our Creation Museum. Now, this seminary has many professors we admire, and the president stands with us regarding the historicity of Genesis. But that's not to say that all the students there believe that Genesis is straightforward history.

First, Dr. Purdom discusses why a young student even merits some attention from us. Here is why:

A few weeks ago I came across a blog post written by “Ben,” a seminary student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, Kentucky. I greatly respect the president of SBTS, Dr. Albert Mohler, who has spoken at one of our conferences and written several articles for Answers magazine. (His wife Mary has also spoken several times at our Answers for Women conferences, and we have many friends on the SBTS faculty.) It is sad to see the claims this student makes against our Creation Museum which are clearly contrary to the teachings of Dr. Mohler. But as the saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.” Every educator strives to teach his or her students the truth, but it is ultimately the decision of the student as to whether or not to accept that truth.

I wanted to respond to just a few things that really stood out to me as I read Ben’s post. AiG typically does not comment on a post by a student. However, bloggers and websites are linking to his anti-museum commentary, and people are now asking us to comment because of the claims made against our apologetics ministry.

Presuppositions About Dragon Legends

Ben has a lengthy rebuttal as to how the museum presents dinosaurs and dragons. In the new Dragon Legends exhibit, we share how many of the so-called dragon legends from multiple cultures around the world are likely based on real-life experiences that people had with dinosaurs and other reptiles thought by old-earthers to have perished millions of years ago (i.e., those extinct reptiles of the sea and of the air). The Bible states that land animals (which would include dinosaurs) were created on Day Six, the same day as Adam (Genesis 1:24–27, 31). Therefore, man and dinosaurs co-existed since almost the beginning of time. Evidence from petroglyphs and other places that we describe in our exhibit indicate people had knowledge of dinosaurs throughout history, with dinosaurs possibly only becoming extinct in the recent past. But Ben offers an alternate view . . .

I encourage you to read the full blog post by Dr. Purdom. More about our fantastic new Dragon Legends exhibit will be the theme of my blog post tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken