A trip to the Creation Museum seems like harmless fun until you see the eager schoolchildren streaming through its doors

I've talked to a number of theoretical physicists during my tour of America, and often the subject of parallel universes has come up. This week I actually got to visit one, when I spent a disorientating afternoon in Petersburg, Kentucky, at the Creation Museum.

The Creation Museum bills itself as a natural history museum, but it's one from a world in which we are certain that God created the Earth and everything in it, roughly 6,000 years ago, and all in six days. Anything that looks older – fossilised dinosaur bones, multiple strata of sedimentary rock, signs of ancient water erosion and the moving of the continents – were all caused by one catastrophic event, the flood that Noah and his family so adroitly survived by building a massive floating menagerie.

This is nothing you wouldn't see or hear in your average fundamentalist church, but what makes the Creation Museum different, and controversial, is that it promotes the idea that not only is everything stated in Genesis chapters 1-11 true, but it can be proved … with science. And the museum has teams of qualified palaeontologists, geologists, biologists and historians working on this. Oh, and baraminologists too. You haven't heard of them? Neither had I.

For anyone not familiar with the early parts of the Bible, these be the facts: God created everything in six 24-hour days; Adam and Eve were the first humans; all the bad stuff in the world, from murder to animals eating other animals, is a result of Eve's choice of afternoon snack; Noah built an ark to house two of every kind of land-dwelling animal (including dinosaurs) and his extended family, while God wiped everything clean with a worldwide flood; then God linguistically confused Noah's descendants and dispersed them around the world with the Tower of Babel incident.

The Creation Museum was founded by the organisation Answers in Genesis, led by the Australian fundamentalist Ken Ham. It first opened in May 2007, and on the day I was visiting it was celebrating its 5th anniversary. In those five years over a million people have been through its doors, many, if my visit was anything to go by, on school trips. The site is huge, housing both the museum and the headquarters of Answers in Genesis, and provides employment for over 300 people. The museum is entirely privately funded.

Despite the erroneous claim to be a natural history museum, the displays of fossils, including casts of many famous examples such as an archaeopteryx and Lucy the Australopithecine soon give way to expensively mounted dioramas telling the biblical story of creation. There's also a section where a world that has abandoned God is depicted – picture a Disneyfied crack den where vulnerable teenagers watch porn and consider abortions.

Any actual attempts to present "science" inevitably have a creationist slant. A display on evolution suggests that "Although often viewed as an icon of evolution, Darwin's finches serve as a perfect model of variation within a created kind [because in] Genesis 1:21 we learn that God created 'every winged bird according to its kind'." Those baraminologists interpret "kind" to mean "species".

While at the museum I spent some time talking to geologist Andrew Snelling. Another Australian, Snelling has a PhD in geology from the University of Sydney and worked in various capacities for the Australian mining industry before getting into "creation science" full time, first for the Texas-based Institute for Creation Research, and then since 2007 for Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum.

I mention to Andrew that I'm surprised to see animatronic models and fossils of dinosaurs around the museum. "They were real, we have their bones … in fact the Bible even potentially describes creatures that were dinosaurs. We don't have to be afraid of the real evidence," he says. "We're looking at the fossil record – instead of being the order of creatures living and dying and evolving over millions of years – as the burial order during the flood. In other words, dinosaurs were alive during the pre-flood Earth. So were trilobites, so were people."

When I ask him how his background in geology is being used here, he tells me of his fieldwork at the Grand Canyon. "In my research I've been involved in sampling rocks, sending them to laboratories, where analysis is done on radio isotopes," he says. "What we always emphasise is this: we all have the same rocks, the same fossils, the same evidence … We all have the same geological maps … As we emphasise in the museum it's your starting point."

This is a point that's made over and over, to the extent that it begins to sound reasonable. Their mantra is, "Hey, we're all doing science here, there's just a disagreement about the age."

Creation science has a big problem with orthodox radiometric dating and carbon dating. They also use the example of the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption and subsequent pyroclastic flow to show how both the formation of the Grand Canyon and the tectonic shift of the continents could have happened in seconds during the flood, rather than over millions of years.

As I head for the exit I have mixed feelings about the place. Sure, I think, it's wacky, but each to their own delusion, and at least the government isn't funding this. Then another party of wide-eyed, eager-to-learn schoolchildren is ushered past.

Listen to the full interview with Andrew Snelling, in which we talk about where dinosaur fossils came from, how the Grand Canyon and continents formed, and how there came to be kangaroos on Noah's Ark.

Next week: The people who fight the creationists

Neil Denny is the producer and presenter of the Little Atoms radio show and podcast, which is broadcast every Friday evening at 7pm BST on Resonance 104.4fm

You can find the feed for his US road trip here or search for Little Atoms Road Trip on iTunes, and follow his progress on Twitter @littleatoms. The trip was made possible by a 2012 travelling fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust