The Garden of Eden in Petersburg, Kentucky
Answers in Genesis (AiG) is an organization founded by Ken Ham in 1993 to promote "young-Earth creationism" as the best interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis, particularly the first eleven chapters. Young-Earth creationists read the Bible as teaching that God created the universe in 4004 BC over six twenty-four-hour days. Therefore, the universe is only a little more than 6,000 years old; and those scientists who believe it is billions of years old are mistaken. Those scientists who believe that all forms of life, including human beings, were created by a natural evolutionary process are also wrong.
AiG also teaches that the biblical stories about the global Flood and Noah's Ark are literally true. The Flood occurred in 2348 BC. All human beings today are descendants of the eight members of Noah's family who survived the Flood on the Ark. And all the land animals today are descendants of those land animals that Noah took onto the Ark.
Ken Ham began his creationist ministry in Australia. And while there, he was disturbed when he visited natural history museums that taught the evolutionary story of human origins; and he thought to himself that someday he should build a Creation Museum to teach biblical creationism as the alternative to evolution. When he moved to the United States, he located his organization in northern Kentucky, a few miles from Cincinnati, because he thought that was so centrally located in America that it would be a good spot for his Creation Museum to attract visitors.
In 2007, Ham's dream was fulfilled as AiG's Creation Museum was opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Then, in 2016, AiG opened a new theme park--the Ark Encounter--in Williamstown, Kentucky, where Noah's Ark has been reconstructed according to God's specifications. It's 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high--the largest free-standing timber-frame structure in the world, with 3.1 million board feet of lumber!
Noah's Art
Beginning in 2007, I have written a series of posts on Ham's defense of young-Earth creationism in his debates not only with evolutionists (like Bill Nye) but also with other Christian creationists who disagree with him--old-Earth creationists (like Hugh Ross), theistic evolutionists (like Deborah Haarsma), and intelligent-design theorists (like Stephen Meyer). For me, what is most remarkable here is how Revelation has failed to resolve this creation/evolution debate. These Christian creationists all agree that God has revealed his truth by sending the Holy Spirit to inspire the writing of the Bible and to guide Christians to a correct reading of the Bible. But the fact that they cannot agree on how God wants us to settle the creation/evolution debate shows that either there has been no Revelation of the truth about this issue, or there has been a Revelation, but it is too obscure to be correctly understood.
The ultimate problem here arises from the fundamental mistake in Protestant Christianity--the founding principle of the perspicuity or clarity of the Bible. According to this doctrine, every individual Christian can rely on the Holy Spirit to guide him or her to the correct interpretation of the Bible--at least what is necessary for salvation. Against this, the Catholic Church argues that the Bible is too obscure to be reliably interpreted by every Christian; and therefore, the Church must exercise its magisterium--its teaching function--by enforcing its tradition of biblical interpretation that is passed on to the lay Christians by the priests. The Holy Spirit guided the writing of the Bible, but it also guided the Church's tradition of biblical interpretation. If Christians are free to interpret the Bible as they wish, they will fall into endless disputes that will cause endless schisms within the Church, which is exactly what happens with the Protestants, who are divided into thousands of doctrinal factions. A good defense of this Catholic position is Casey Chalk's The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2023).
I am thinking more about this now because next week I will be going to both the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. I am studying some of the writing at the AiG website and five guidebooks from AiG: Journey Through the Creation Museum (2018), Creation Museum Signs (2021), Journey Through the Ark Encounter (2017), Ark Signs--That Teach a Flood of Answers (2017), and The Building of the Ark Encounter: By Faith the Ark Was Built (2016). All are published by Master Books, Green Forest, Arkansas.
I am also reading a critical study of the Creation Museum as an exercise in rhetorical persuasion--Susan and William Trollinger's Righting America at the Creation Museum (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). They see the same problem that I have seen--that the failure of Christian creationists to agree on their reading of Genesis denies their Protestant claim about the perspicuity of the Bible.
For example, as I indicated in a previous post, Georgia Purdom, a scientist at AiG, says that she sees the world through God's truth--as conveyed by the "clear biblical teachings about the past"--as opposed to seeing the world through unreliable human opinions. When Michael Shermer questioned her about this and suggested that the Bible is open to many different interpretations, Purdom responded by insisting that the young-Earth creationists don't interpret the Bible at all, because they accept the "clear biblical teachings" without imposing any human interpretation.
But then in some of her writing coauthored with Todd Wood, Purdom has said that before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, most Christian creationists believed that God had specially created every species of plants and animals, because when Genesis says that God created every "kind" of life, they interpreted this to mean "species." Once Darwin had refuted this by showing that species had emerged by natural selection rather than by special creation, creationists were forced to look for another interpretation of the word "kind" (min in Hebrew). They decided that "kind" must correspond to some level of taxonomy higher than species--perhaps "family." So, for instance, creationists can now accept the evidence that the various species of finches found only in the Galapagos Islands evolved by natural selection as adaptations to the Galapagos; but then the creationists will say that all of these species evolved out of the "kind" or family of finches that God created at the beginning and put onto Noah's ark. So the Bible's language of "kind" was obscure, and creationists like Purdom had to change their interpretation of that word in the light of Darwin's science of evolution.
The Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter don't just display the text of Genesis One declaring that God created every "kind" of plant and animal. Alongside the biblical texts, there are signs that explain that a "kind" is not a species but a higher taxonomic category. Thus does AiG try to persuade the museumgoers to accept AiG's interpretation of the biblical text, even as they deny what they are doing by claiming that they are just presenting "clear biblical teachings" without imposing any interpretation.
I will have more to say about this.
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