Americans flock to Ken Ham’s hi-tech Creation Museum where man and dinosaurs frolic happily together reports UK newspaper 19 August 2007 which wrote: “But wait at least one second before dismissing Ham as a crackpot. For starters, his is about the slickest museum you are ever likely to visit. It has an interactive cinema that tells the creation story according to Genesis, with wind gusts in the auditorium, vibrating seats and squirts of water, as well as a state-of-the-art planetarium. Its animatronics are worthy of a world-class theme park. In fact, the principle designer also helped build exhibits for Universal Studios in Florida.
Something else impressive: the construction of the museum was funded entirely by private donations; it doesn’t carry one dollar of debt. In other words, in a country where the evolution-versus-creation debate is alive and raging, there are plenty of Americans ready to embrace Ham and support his museum. A recent Gallup poll in this country showed nearly 50 per cent of people accepting the notion that, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”
Ham says that the target for the museum was 250,000 visitors by the end of its first year. That was conservative. They are now on track to clock 150,000 people by the end of August, just three months after opening. On a recent Tuesday, a long queue had formed at its front entrance one hour before the posted opening time of 10am. Parents with children were there, coach trips and excited church groups. And judging by the variety of licence plates in the car park, they were driving here from all across the country.”
Editorial Comment: The key feature in this report is a statement by University of Wisconsin Professor Ronald Numbers, that “The creationists have been very successful in persuading conservative Christians to abandon their non-literal interpretation of the Bible.” This is an open admission that acceptance of evolution or the inability to refute it, has been the main reason why US church goers originally abandoned a literal reading of their bibles. How sad that many Conservative Bible colleges still won’t touch this subject or have speakers from Creation Research, as they still labor under the convenient excuse – Genesis is not crucial to the Gospel.
29th August 2007