Following a trend set by its southern neighbor, Canada has opened its first museum dedicated to throwing monkey wrenches into evolution. The Big Valley Creation Science Museum opened its doors in June 2007. An estimated 35,000 people have visited in only four months, and owner/builder Harry Nibourg is floating as high as Noah.

"It was awesome," he said of the crowds. "It was just crazy." Did he have an idea of what his visitors thought of his Museum? "They're utterly amazed is what they are," Harry told us. "50 percent love us, 40 percent hate us, and five percent of that 40 percent want us dead."

Those who hate Creationism must find it difficult to dislike Harry, who talks like Bob and Doug McKenzie and who turns every other sentence into a question with a Canadian "eh?" or "you know?"

"We pack a lot in," Harry says of the Museum. "It's almost like a book, eh? There're lots of plaques, lots of reading." Harry told us that even though his Museum is small, it takes two to three hours to see every exhibit, "if you're a fast reader."

Some of the highlights of the Big Valley Creation Science Museum include a fossilized human foot in a boot, an iron pot in a lump of coal that's supposedly 312 million years old, and a chart that traces Prince Charles and Lady Di's genealogy back to Adam and Eve. For the technical-minded, the Museum shows the impossible-without-God complexity of DNA and debunks radiocarbon dating. "When uranium breaks down into lead or whatever it releases eight atoms of helium or whatever," Harry told us. Whatever he said after that was impossible for us to understand, but maybe we could have if we were scientists.

Harry is neither a scientist nor a museum designer. "I work in the oil field up north," he told us. "I'm just an average Joe, you know?" His inspiration to create his Creation museum was the Royal Tyrell Museum in nearby Drumheller, which Harry felt was unnecessarily pro-evolution. "I just felt this side [Creationism] should be shown," he told us.

"We're just puttin' forward the evidence," Harry explained. "You can take it or leave it. If you think it's stupid, that's okay too."

And what about those hate-fueled five-percenters that want Harry's museum dead? "We're not scared of no man, and very few women," Harry told us. "And you know how that goes, eh?"

[10/14/2007]