Forbid Them Not

Budget Travel is taking a poll for “15 Places Every Kid Should See Before 15.” Several atheist groups are very upset the Creation Museum recently made it to the top.

Screenshot from BudgetTravel.com.

One atheist website—which dubs itself “The Friendly Atheist”—begs people to “Keep the children out of here” and to “go vote for anything so that the museum gets kicked off the list,” adding, “Then tell your friends to vote too.” Another atheist website, well known not only for its vehement attacks on Christians but its blasphemous attacks on God, noted “The Creation ‘Museum’ was at #1 earlier, but it has begun to slide downward. How about pushing it farther?” and then recommended a strategy. Others have nominated mock names to the travel website—“Creatard Museum,” “Creeashun Muzm,” and “Crustacean Museum”—though, to the travel web monitors’ credit, these have been removed. More deliberately, variations of the name Creation Museum, slightly misspelled, kept popping up on the travel site, probably placed there by anti-Creation Museum nominators hoping that museum supporters will not vote for the correct listing and spread their votes out over a few wrong names (and thus dilute the total museum vote).

The atheists’ campaign has not only produced some rather curious fluctuations in the tallies but also captured the attention of many who wish to express their opinions by more than a simple “click” on the “thumbs up.”

How very unfair these atheists are to deprive the public of a fun and helpful poll in order to advance their own agenda! In any event, the atheists’ campaign has not only produced some rather curious fluctuations in the tallies but also captured the attention of many who wish to express their opinions by more than a simple “click” on the “thumbs up.” While most listings have few if any comments, and only a few—as of our press time—had between 5 and 20 comments, the Creation Museum KY listing contained 959 comments. Opinions vary, as we would expect, but many are positive and thoughtfully written. But love it or hate it, a lot of people are speaking up!

Despite the fact atheists such as Richard Dawkins favor teaching children the evolutionary tale from age five,1 the “Friendly Atheist” asserts, “Of all the places kids ought to visit at a young age, the Creation Museum should be faaaaaaar down on the list. It’s much more entertaining when you’re older and know enough about how the world works to realize the whole thing’s a sham.” In fact, Dawkins asserts creation accounts such as what he calls “the Adam and Eve creation myth”2 leave a “child's questions unanswered, or they raise more questions than they appear to answer.”3

Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum exist to equip people—including children—with God’s answers to their questions about our origins. In fact, we point people to God’s answers for life’s most important questions—“Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?”4 The many displays and videos in the Creation Museum help people of all ages see the answers God provides in the Bible are consistent with the evidence we see in the physical world. Hearing what the Bible says from the very first verse, even young children can understand where we came from, why there is suffering in the world, and why Jesus chose to come into this world “to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).

God, after all, was the only eyewitness to our origins. And God does not lie—neither about our origins nor about our sinful natures. And no scientist, no matter how well meaning, can overcome the limitations of time and space to go back and make testable, repeatable observations of the origin of life. Dawkins writes, “Evolution is a truly satisfying and complete explanation of existence, and I suspect that this is something a child can appreciate from an early age.”5 Yet what can be more satisfying for a child than to learn Jesus Christ loves children enough to give them answers and to say “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:16).