Ask people in America how old the world is and four in ten of them will tell you that it is less than 10,000 years old. Studies show that more than 40 per cent of Americans believe in creationism, the theory that the universe originated from acts of divine creation. You can explore the theory at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee in San Diego County, California.
on the seventh day
The museum was founded in 1976 by the Institute for Creation Research, which promotes creationism. It promotes the biblical account of science and history, which says that God created the world in six days. It has exhibits that demonstrate that the world is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old and that man and dinosaurs coexisted at one time.
noah’s ark
Visitors to the museum can explore 15 exhibits, which are: Six Days of Creation, Fall of Man, Noah’s Ark & Global Flood, Ice Age, Beginning of Nations, Ancient Civilizations, Romans Road, Human Anatomy, Dinosaur Gardens, Dinosaurs and the Bible, Dinosaur Soft Tissue, Tabernacle Theatre, Age of the Earth Cave, Life of Jesus Christ and Hall of Scholars.
They can walk through a tunnel that presents a timeline of Earth’s creation, see dinosaur fossils and scale models of Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel, and read about scientists who believed in creationism. There are also more than 50 live animals, including fish, birds and snakes. www.creationsd.org
dinosaurs and divinity
Eric Rader is a project coordinator at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, San Diego County. The conventional wisdom is that dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago, but he believes that they lived only a few thousand years ago. We asked him for the evidence:
Eric Rader: (Standard american accent): The evidence, including here at the museum, is we have a triceratops horn where we got soft tissue out of it. When you have soft tissue in any type of fossil, that is indicative of something being less than 50,000 years old, which doesn’t mean that dinosaurs existed millions and billions of years ago, as the modern theory goes that’s been created in the past 50 years.
george and the dragon
Eric Rader and his colleagues at the museum believe that dinosaurs became extinct during the Great Flood, at the time of Noah’s Ark:
Eric Rader: During the Flood, there was many animals that were killed through the flood and the rapid sediment and burial of water, and that’s how we get fossils today that show that animals existed with mankind. There are fossil footprints of dinosaurs and man together that we find. We also find folklore around the entire world, from China [about] how they loved dragons and how they existed with their culture. We find hieroglyphic writings of those that lived in caves, and again, millions of people still live in caves today around the world. But they showed dinosaurs on hieroglyphic writings with man. And so we find legends of dinosaurs, with St George and the dragon and the dinosaurs and going out to conquer animals who took over the Earth and were fruitful and multiplied, and man was supposed to have dominion over Earth, so they went out like knights in shiningarmorand went out and conquered the animals that were conquering their villages.
god loves you
Eric Rader and his colleagues also believe that God created the heaven and earth in just six days, and that dinosaurs and men were created on the sixth day. He also believes that our relationship with God is the key to our behaviour. This would also explain why people who don’t believe in God do good things:
Eric Rader: We all have a moral conscience that’s stamped on us. We all know what’s right and wrong, you know, we know it’s wrong to lie, and that’s the 10 commandments that God put onto our conscience. We have guilt We can’t go to the doctor and say, “Take out my guilt, give me a guiltectomy, you know, remove my guilt from me!” We try to do that with drugs and alcohol and with psychologists, to rethink things and blame our childhood and all these other different things that happened to us, but at the end of the day God says, “Look, the reason you have guilt is for me to tell you that I love you. You are breaking my rules, but I want to forgive you, please come and I’ll have a relationship with you, like a father to a child, and I will restore you and we’ll have a relationship, not a religion together”. Because God loves relationship, not religion. He had a relationship with Adam and Eve in the garden, and not a religion. Religion’s something that man creates.