Before You Go to the Museum

The Smithsonian claims duckbill dinosaurs are supposedly 50–65 million years old. What does the Bible say about this?

Museums are found the world over—from one-room exhibits filled with local fossils to grandiose halls loaded with specimens from every part of the globe. For most people, natural history museums conjure up images of stuffy rooms filled with evidence of life from ages past: fossils of dinosaurs, chunks of rock, chips of meteorites, tools of ancient man. Although each is unique in presentation, every museum (with few exceptions) is united around a common goal: to tell the history of the universe from a naturalistic point of view. This view, by definition, excludes any type of supernatural intervention or revelation, and attempts to explain how things made themselves. “Evolution” and “millions of years” stories abound throughout their presentations.

Is it possible for a Bible-believing Christian to visit such a place and yet leave with his faith intact? As we’ll see, the answer is a resounding “yes!” Yes, we can learn about the natural world, and we can do it from a biblical perspective.

Before you go, you’ll want to learn how to tell what is true from what is fiction by learning to be discerning, as the Bible exhorts us to be (Proverbs 2:1–5, Philippians 1:9, Hebrews 5:14). We need to become like the Christians in Berea, who examined the Scriptures to see if what they were being taught was true (Acts 17:10–12).

We can do this by understanding the nature of science and biblical history.

The Creation Museum, located in Northern Kentucky, brings the pages of the Bible to life with 160 exhibits! Ask your parents about planning a visit soon.