Saturday, October 24, 2009

Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum

Donna Healy of the AP writes about a museum out in Montana that is giving the Creation Museum in Kentucky a run for its money. From the story:
The head and monstrous jaws of a tyrannosaurus rex sculpture poke through the outer wall of the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum.

Inside, life-size castings of dinosaur skeletons offer the polished look of a big-city science museum. But a quote from Genesis clues in visitors that the 20,000-square-foot building, which opened in Glendive this summer, is not your standard natural-history museum.

Instead, the museum, located in an area of Montana known for world-class dinosaur fossils, offers a literal, biblical account of creation.

What follows is a lengthy description of the museum and how it came about. The focus is clear:
"We approach evolution on the basis that it's basically not possible," Kline said. "There is no scientific proof whatsoever that evolution has ever taken place. There's also no scientific proof that creation has taken place because they both are faith-based."

Nearby is a replica of a protostega gigas, a giant sea turtle measuring 16 feet from flipper to flipper. Similar fossils have been found in Kansas.

"There's two ways these fossils could get to Kansas, and one is the evolutionary way; the other is the biblical creation way," Kline said.

"The evolutionary way says there was an inland sea that came from the Gulf of Mexico. But the biblical creation way says it was the flood of Noah's day."
As I and so many before me have mentioned, the evidence that Noah's flood was never a world-wide event is so overwhelming as to be almost certain. And, if everything did die in the flood except the pair on the ark, how did the sea turtle get to Kansas, especially if, as it says in Genesis 8:13: "the water had dried up from the earth?" So much misinformation, spread to so many people.

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8 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:35 PM

    Another monument to ignorance and dogma, showing total disregard for everything that we as a species have discovered about the natural world.

    A line needs to be drawn in the sand here; people who appreciate science and reason and want to live in a society which embraces them need to head off in one direction, and those that wish to forsake them in favour or a return to the Dark Ages need to be sent somewhere where they can wallow in their own ignorance.

    Let's face the facts; scientists are never going to convince the presuppositionalists at AIG and their followers that what science says is accurate, and scientists are not going to ever come round to the idea that Noah's Ark had dinosaurs on it.
    There is no reconciliation to be had between the two sides.

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  2. Anonymous7:37 PM

    Then why do all scientist believe in an ice age that killed all the trees? The oldest tree that we have a core sample for is 5000 years old.

    It seems that an ice age that killed all the trees would have to cover the face of the earth.

    It seems more believable to accept a worldwide flood than a worldwide ice age.

    In fact, I am not sure how you can admit an ice age and then deny the worldwide flood.

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  3. Anonymous (the second one, anyway), okay, first, you are talking about a living tree that is almost 5 000 years old. That is absurdly old for a still-living thing (By the way, if you track back from the building of the second temple to get a flood date, the bristle cone pine tree predates it).

    The most recent ice age, the Würm, dates to from c. 110 000 years B.P. to around 15-16 000 B.P. with an interstadial period between 34 and 37 000 B.P. It covered from Northern Germany over to the Urals and up in Europe and from the Great Lakes up in North America. Everything below that suffered some impact but was not covered in ice. If, on the other hand, you are speaking of the Marinoan or the Sturtian glaciations of the Cryogenian period, those were both in the Archaen age, some 300 million years before there were any trees.

    It makes no sense to accept a worldwide flood when there is no evidence to support it and mounds of contra-evidence suggesting that the geological column is the result of millions of years of deposition and evolution. If God decided to destroy all life in a world-wide flood, He has gone to a lot of trouble to cover His tracks. The models that the ICR uses to explain the sediments in this way are fatally flawed and do not withstand even the most cursory scrutiny. There is plenty of evidence for ice ages. In fact, that is what made Louis Agassiz, the great 19th century geologist to wonder about the flood explanation. He found evidence for expansion of ice, but no evidence for a deluge. Please read Davis Young's account of how geologists came to grips with the evidence in his essay History of the Collapse of Flood Geology and a Young Earth. It is an eye-opener.

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  4. Anonymous number 2.

    All scientists believe the latest ice age killed all the trees?

    ROTFLOL!!

    And you heard that where? It sure as heck wasn't from a scientists. In fact, I can say with far more evidence that NO scientist believes the latest ice age killed all the trees.

    As to the proposed question of how the sea turtle got to Kansas if the Flood dried up -

    First, Creationists don't claim everything except what was on the Ark died in the Flood. They claim everything ON LAND that didn't go onto the Ark died. This doesn't include things like turtles, fish and whales.

    Theoretically, even if they did believe that everything outside the Ark died, including the water-born creatures, then I can imagine they could claim the corpse was laid there during the Flood.

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  5. J, I went back and reread Henry Morris a bit more carefully and concede that he states that there may have been sea creature that survived and were not part of the group on the ark. I don't think that Genesis specifies this in any way, but that wouldn't be the first "extrapolation." John Morris extends this by saying that there would have been pockets of sea water and pockets of fresh water (how???) during the flood, allowing for some of these animals to survive. That violates the "economy of miracles" that creationists claim, however. Nonetheless, my comment about the sea turtle was incorrect.

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  6. Pockets of seawater and freshwater?

    Wow. I'd be interested how someone could make that work in a realistic fashion.

    If the Flood's waters were salty, that would quickly wipe out the freshwater fish, since there wouldn't be a river or stream anywhere that wouldn't be totally subsumed by the saltiness. Possibly the largest of lakes would hold out for a little while, but that would only work if the Flood waters were essentially still and they were quickly gone; instead they are rushing torrents scouring the continents, carrying kilometers deep piles of sediment, and last for a year.

    The only thing I can think of would be a miraculous protection.

    There's a bit less problem if the Flood waters were not salty. Does anyone know if the current Flood ideas state the Flood was salty or pure?

    Also, Gen 7 specifically talks of the destruction of the land animals, but not the water creatures, so the standard YEC view is that plenty of water creatures survived. I don't think they have any problems with sea turtles surviving.

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  7. Anonymous #2, 5,000 years is only the age of the oldest *living* tree. There are dendrochronologies that go back more than 10,000 years. (A dendrochronology is a set of overlapping tree ring records)

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  8. AMW's point is well-taken. The chronologies are pretty secure back quite a bit longer than any creationist would posit the occurrence of the flood. My point was that, given the chronologies that are adhered to, even one living bristlecone pine presents a problem for the flood having occurred between 2 and 3 000 B.C. I have seen creationists counter the bristlecone pine data with the argument that the table of nations genealogies and those in early Genesis might not be complete and that the flood may have occurred much earlier. My response to that is "okay, so the Bible is to be taken literally where you want it to be and not where you don't?"

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