Attendance is declining at the Creation Museum, they’re having trouble raising the funds to build Ark Encounter (the Noah’s Ark Theme Park), and to top it off, they’re getting hammered on their science from actual museums in the area.

In the comment section for a Cincinnati.com article about the Creation Museum, Kurt Percy, the Assistant Manager at Cincinnati Museum Center, writes:

This is not a museum, and this is further proof of that. Please stop referring to it as such. They are not an accredited museum by any association of museums. It is a theme park that misleads the public and it is a pockmark on our region. The fact that someone profits by misrepresenting their faith as science to children and families is shameful. When we wonder why America is falling behind in science education, it is because places like this are allowed to exist. I’m glad to see that their attendance is declining despite generous handouts from the state of Kentucky at the expense of their university funding.

The Creation Museum’s Ken Ham, always overjoyed when people involved with real science mention his name, sees this as Christian intolerance:

Really, it would seem from his comments that Percy is showing his intolerance of the message of the Creation Museum. Instead of promoting freedom of speech and religion, Percy does not want a place like the Creation Museum to exist because he disagrees with the message. Sadly, this is typical of the intolerance against biblical Christianity seen in our increasingly secularized culture today.

Of course, Ham is wrong here. It’s not intolerance against Christianity. It’s intolerance against misinformation parading around as “science.”

Ham’s considering some drastic measures over this:

… I will meet with our senior staff to consider no longer recommending this attraction to Creation Museum visitors and deleting it from our website list of attractions.

I’m sure the Cincinnati Museum Center employees are shaking in their boots. Oh no! Creationists might stop coming to our museum!

I doubt Ham will do that anyway, since he sells Creationists a guide for visiting secular (i.e. “real”) museums.

Ham also goes after Percy’s comments about America “falling behind in science education”:

I had to laugh when I read this ridiculous, unfounded outburst. Think about it — the majority of kids in the culture (including 90 percent of kids from church homes) attend the public education system. This system threw out the Bible, prayer, and the teaching of creation years ago. Evolution and millions of years is taught as fact in the public schools. Public school textbooks arbitrarily define science to not allow the supernatural from having anything to do with the universe but insist the universe came about only by natural processes: naturalism is atheism.

If only that were true. Too many science teachers are afraid to teach evolution because the students (and their parents) have been brainwashed against reality by people like Ham and they want to avoid getting into a fight over religion. (That’s assuming they even know how evolution actually works in the first place.)

When school boards are still debating whether or not to put Creationism in their curriculums, you know there’s a problem. In any case, Ham doesn’t deserve all the credit; Christian pastors across the country are responsible for teaching people to doubt scientific realities.

The article that started all this is just a testament to how the Creation Museum really is a theme park and not a place of learning. It’s about how the “museum” is installing zip lines to attract more visitors:

“It should be three-to-four hours of non-stop fun for visitors,” [senior vice president of Answers in Genesis Mike] Zovath said. “We’re also going to have some information about the different trees and plant species, so there will be a little bit of educational value as well, but it’s mostly an adrenaline rush.”

“Little bit of educational value.” That’s a perfect tagline for the entire place, isn’t it?



