Media rushing in as museum grand opening nears

It’s been one of the most surprising and exciting aspects about the Creation Museum project: even before the museum has opened its doors (the week of May 28), there has been a continual parade of media—both international and national—touring the museum construction site.

What has been equally gratifying is that the press coverage has been generally fair and balanced. With a few exceptions, often manifested by a mocking tone or the insertion of editorial comments, the coverage by and large has been surprisingly positive.

AiG believes there are two reasons why the media have generally represented this Bible-proclaiming museum in a rather balanced way: 1) the impressive building and its quality exhibits and 2) the professionalism of the museum staff, from the artists the reporters interview to the several Ph.D. scientists who have helped ensure that all the exhibits, videos, and other museum displays are accurate.

Here is a sampling of the media who have already done stories on the Creation Museum (almost all of them have flown or driven to the museum to take a construction tour):

Major U.S. media covering AiG and the Creation Museum (a sampling)

American press

• NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams
• ABC Nightline
• CBS News Sunday Morning
• CNN (Anderson Cooper 360° and Paula Zahn Now)
• PBS (News Hour with Jim Lehrer)
• Fox News Channel
• HBO (2007 documentary Friends of God)
• New York Times
• Washington Post
• Chicago Tribune
• Los Angeles Times
• Discover magazine
• Newsweek
  

European press (a sampling)

• Times of London
• The Economist (UK)
• Independent (UK)
• Guardian (UK)
• Telegraph (UK)
• Channel 4/ITN (UK)
• BBC World Service
• BBC Radio—domestic (UK)
• BBC TV (UK)
• Der Spiegel (Germany)
• Der Tagesspiegel (Germany)
• Berliner Verlag (Germany)
• El Mundo (Spain)
• El Pais (Spain)
• Finnish Broadcasting Co. (Finland)
• ll Sole (Italy)
• Special Envoy (French TV)
• Der Bund (Switzerland)
• The Tribune (Switzerland)
• L’Actualite (Switzerland)
• Zurnal (Slovak Republic)

Other foreign press (a sampling)

• 60 Minutes (Channel 9—Australia)
• Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
• Bulletin (Australia)
• Haaretz (Israel)
• La Presse (Montreal)
• Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

The negative with the positive

While this is a very positive, high-profile time in the history of the AiG ministry with the museum opening soon, we have to deal with some negative reporters and columnists. While columnists are expected to inject their opinion when they cover a controversial topic like evolution vs. creation, when their opinions about the Creation Museum are based on wrong information or poor reasoning, we write the publication in question to set the record straight.

Here is just such an example of AiG's CCO, Mark Looy writing a response to The Cincinnati Post (and its sister paper The Kentucky Post), to rebut an error-filled column1 written by a regular contributor to the newspaper:

Editor,

The April 27 column about our Creation Museum and the evolution/creation controversy was surprising not just for its many inaccuracies and misrepresentations, but also for the fact that the historian who wrote the piece broke his own profession's cardinal rule: historians should use primary sources to make their case, not rely on secondary (usually less-reliable) sources of information. If the author, for example, would have simply called and asked us (a primary source) for background on a piece he was writing about us and our museum, he probably would not have made the following glaring errors and misrepresentations:

– The author regurgitated the myth that the Creation Museum has received $7 million of its $27 million in corporate donations. His source was not us, but an inaccurate British article written in 2005. The columnist was attempting to show that corporations will give to our Creation Museum but won’t support secular evolution-promoting museums, for fear that potential visitors would object to the evolutionary content and not come.

The only corporate donation we could uncover in the past year was merely $800 (not including matching gifts, where a corporate employee would send the museum a donation and the company would match it—these donations are typically in the hundreds of dollars, certainly not millions!).

A Google check of several major science museums would reveal that those hosting evolution exhibits have corporate sponsors.

– There was the author's concern that “nearly 45 percent [of Americans] believe that the world was created in six days as described in the Bible.” Apparently, he did not read the Gallup poll for himself, for if he had, he would have read that the question was actually about when the first humans appeared on earth. Almost 45% said they believed it could have been within the past 10,000 years. That still leaves open the possibility that respondents believed in a very old universe and that evolution occurred for millions of years before the first people appeared. The poll had nothing to do with the six days of creation.

– The columnist/historian grossly misrepresented the Galileo vs. the Catholic Church affair. The Church back then believed that the earth was the center of the universe, but it was not a belief held because of what the Bible teaches (Scripture is silent on the topic, not withstanding the columnist's claim that it teaches a geocentric universe). The Church leaders accepted an earth-centered universe because that’s what the ancients believed (e.g., the astronomer Ptolemy). The Galileo controversy occurred because Catholic Church leaders greatly respected the ancient scientists and philosophers, and incorporated their fallible conclusions in their Church’s beliefs.

– The mutating “bird flu” has absolutely nothing to do with molecules-to-man evolution, contrary to the columnist’s contention. The author used this as an example of evolution occurring before our very eyes. However, the mutation that causes the virus to change is definitely not the type of change (in quality or direction) that would cause it to eventually become a totally new, more complex type of organism. This sort of change by mutation produces no new genetic information to provide even the smallest step in molecules-to-man evolution (e.g., for a reptile's scale to gain the genetic information to evolve into the feather of a bird, as evolutionists believe happened). Much more about this, by the way, can be found at www.AnswersInGenesis.org.

– Contrary to the writer’s straw-man assertion, I don’t know of any creationist group (and there are dozens in America) who advocate that evolution should be thrown out of schools. Outside of a rare lone voice outside the creationist mainstream who would advocate such a thing, we have often told the press (and have written in our publications) that because evolution is a dominant worldview in society, it needs to be studied. In fact, my three sons probably know more about evolution than the typical public school student (but they know it warts and all). And yet, the columnist makes the bizarre, unfounded charge that creationists “don't want their children exposed to science [i.e., evolution].” The columnist's false claim here is yet another example of not knowing what we at AiG really believe.

I find it surprising and heavily ironic that a historian will write so knowingly about a topic without checking primary sources (in this case: us, history texts, and scientific research). I hope the author will take the time to visit the Creation Museum when it opens on Memorial Day and see for himself what we are all about, including seeing the scientific evidence from astronomy, genetics, anthropology, geology, etc. that the museum uses to support biblical history.

Sincerely,

Mark Looy
CCO

Answers in Genesis