More on the Trip to the Creation Museum

This story in the News and Observer by Jeffrey McMurray about the trip to the Creation Museum by a group of palaeontologists is a bit longer than the last one. It also focuses more on what the scientists think about the place:

"The real purpose of the museum visit is to give some of my colleagues an opportunity to sense how they're being portrayed," said Arnold Miller, a professor of paleontology at the University of Cincinnati, which is hosting the conference. "They're being demonized, I feel, in this museum as people who are responsible for all the ills of society."

Miller and other paleontologists object to numerous other aspects of the museum they say imply science is doing more harm than good.

The story also interviews cell biologist David Menton who works for AIG:

David Menton, a cell biology professor and researcher with Answers In Genesis, which founded the museum, made no apologies for the fact that the museum's teachings are rooted in the Old Testament. He insists they rely on largely the same facts scientists use, just with a starting point millions of years later. Anything before that can't really be proven by science anyway, he says.

"I've spent enough of my professional life in science that I know science being compatible with religion is not the sort of thing that keeps scientists up at night," Menton said. "There's a lot of scientists out there that rather applaud that idea."

He defended the displays that argue people and dinosaurs are contemporaries, including one at the museum entrance that show two young girls playing in a field near a dinosaur.

"I'm not saying dinosaurs and man frequently hobnobbed," Menton said. "I live on Earth at the same time as grizzly bears, but if I could stay as far away from grizzly bears, that suits me fine."

This man is a cell biologist and he makes statements about the lack of science proving things? Of course it can't be proven, but when you have a mountain of evidence that points one direction, just saying that it cannot be proven is a weak excuse. The inanity of that last comment is amazing. It ignores two hundred years of geological discovery that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that dinosaurs and humans are separated in time by at least 50 million years. What does he make of all of the dinosaur fossils of animals that were sixty to seventy feet long? Or the fact that there were thousands of them on the landscape? The last line of the article pretty much sums it up:

"Faith is one thing," said Mark Terry, a high school science teacher from Seattle, "but when it comes to their science statements, they're completely off the wall."

Yup.


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