The Creation ‘Museum’ makes it to the peer-reviewed literature
PZ Myers:
The other striking thing about it is that it is an empty shell, a hollow façade. Go to any other respectable museum in the country, such as the Science Museum of Minnesota (which does have a bit of a pop-science, entertainment quality to it), and you can find extensive collections and research facilities behind it. The part that most people visit is the public relations side, with nicely laid out exhibits and explanatory material and hands-on elements. Behind the scenes, you’ll find large rooms with shelves everywhere and buckets and barrels and crates full of specimens, the smell of formaldehyde and alcohol, and spaces full of beetle larvae gnawing away at carcasses. Not at the Creation “Museum”, though!
It’s not quite accurate to call this evangelical center a “museum.” It contains almost no “information,” unless you count as information speculations on how Noah kept dinosaurs on the ark. It offers no new observations about nature, unless you think that inferring a Designer can be called observational. Unlike most other nature museums, it has no “research” component whatsoever. When I asked Mark Looy, vice president for AiG ministry relations, where the research labs and archive collections were located, he confessed that he didn’t understand the question. “This is a museum,” he finally said, chuckling.
That’s revealing. These people don’t even know what a real museum is.
Website and blog for Curator, The Museum Journal, here:
curatorjournal.org
