Friday, November 23, 2007

Museum with a message

A tour of the Creation Museum, a place where dinosaurs and children play side by side, where poison is harmless, and where every animal from tiger to Tyrannosaurus eats only plants, is more than a lot to swallow. But ever since its opening outside Cincinnati in northern Kentucky in late May, the Creation Museum (open seven days a week) has been drawing thousands of visitors with its assertion that such a world existed—if only briefly—and in the recent past.

That proposition is yours to consider as you walk through an exhibition of the first chapters of Genesis, where detailed dioramas bring to life stories long confined to flannel graph: God creates a perfect world in six days—Adam and Eve disobey—creation is cursed—life has been hard ever since. Within an ornate setting of the Garden of Eden, where a life-size Adam is naming the animals and fingering Eve's hair not far from a 28,800-leaf tree of life, what may have been two-dimensional history for even Bible believers becomes 3-D.