Day 1 - Earth, universe created. Museum of Creation and Earth History.

Creation and Earth History Museum

Santee, California

We visit plenty of colorful attractions espousing the Biblical (or Creationist) view. But the Museum of Creation and Earth History is somewhat special in its presentation -- located, not in some dusty, sun-beat trailer west of East Jesus; but in a professional, well-designed facility on the suburban fringe of secular San Diego.

Walk through its galleries, blur your vision, and you would swear you were in a slick, big city science museum. But please don't swear -- it's a sin -- and for that matter, don't blur your vision. These exhibits will already scramble your preconceived, faulty world view (for this report, if you're not a secular humanist or pantheistic evolutionist, just pretend...).

The museum fills 4,000 square feet of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) main floor, in a modern industrial-park building adjacent to the freeway (and easier to spot since they added a fiberglass T-Rex statue next to the building entrance. The ICR, since 1972, teaches classes and pursues academic activities related to "origin science."

Acts of God - Day One

The Museum of Creation and Earth History is a series of rooms and hallways, chronicling events and science from the dawn of Creation up to present day.

It starts with the birth of the Earth, and, oh yeah... the universe... which happened at the same time ("Day 1"). Large, backlit panels in the next room show stellar photography and artists' conceptions of planetary development. Signs explain comets, galaxies, and that dopey Big Bang Theory, and juxtapose relevant passages from the Bible. Each section is numbered by the day it occurred -- according to Genesis.

Day 6 is a jungle-like room, with live animal terrariums set into the walls. A tall chamber containing a snake hints at who is about to enter the picture.

Day 7 and onward, the museum smoothly segues into the history of Humanity. Not with Adam and Eve, but with a peek at Entropy. "Death & Decay," an exhibit of animal and human skulls, shows the inevitable order of things in the physical world; "Universal Disorder" illustrates how messy it could get without a guiding Hand. A serpent curls around the branches decorating this room. Sound effects piped in add to the atmosphere -- babies crying, animals, and forest noises (though maybe those were bleeding over from Day 6).

The next chamber presents a model of Noah's Ark, and information on the Great Flood that covered the Earth. It explains in detail how the ark was able to save the animals and people to repopulate the planet. There's a bit of a photo op, where you can stand as if you are on the inside of the ark.

What about those Petrified Logs?

A room decorated to appear as a cutaway of geologic strata presents more evidence of the worldwide flood. A section on volcanic activity uses catastrophic changes wrought by Mt. St. Helens' 1980 eruption as proof of how geologic epochs happen more rapidly than we've been taught. And what about the mystery of the upright floating logs? A helpful woman in the gift shop filled us in. Where petrified forests used to prove the Earth is at least many thousands of years old, one-day landscape riots like Mt. St. Helens indicate otherwise.

A case is even made that the Grand Canyon didn't take millions of years to carve. It might have been less than a day.

The Ice Age Room is decorated with blue icicles. Free brochures along the way explain the problem with the current scientific theories, and the case for the Creationist view. We grab No. 226 - Ice Cores and the Age of the Earth.

The Tower of Babel Room includes artifacts and a model of the accursed structure. According to a sign, Nimrod built the Tower, as we all know, "to unify the culture and religion of the people in a system of evolutionary pantheism, which also involved polytheistic idolatry, astrology, and occult spiritism." A replica Rosetta Stone illustrates the fracturing of languages after the Tower fell.

Fair and Balanced Face-Off

The Dueling Viewpoints Walls face each other: framed portraits of prominent figures from 18th and 19th centuries who believed in the Biblical explanation of things (Faraday, Babbage, Morse), and those that sunk their rotting teeth into the apple of Evolutionary Theory (Carnegie, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin).

Oddly, in the photos, all the Creationists are clean shaven, while the Evolutionists sport hairy beards and moustaches like unkempt primates. Were those Creationists more evolved?

By the 20th Century, the ICR really piles it on. Near a portrait of Adolf Hitler, signs are titled" "Nazism and Communism - Fruits of Evolution," and "Racism: the Fruit of Evolution." Just before you hit the gift shop, you come upon "The Two Trees - Good Fruit and Bad Fruit." The healthy "Creationist Tree" bears ripe and many-colored fruit, and it's where one will find True Americanism, True Government, True History and True Science, to name a few.

"The Evolutionary Tree," a gnarled and twisted trunk with no leaves, bears the fruit of "Harmful Philosophies" and "Evil Practices" (promiscuity, genocide, homosexuality, bestiality, drug culture....).

We recommend a visit, if for no other reason than to explore what a substantial portion of America believes is science. And for further mind expansion, combine with a trip to the nearby Unarius Academy of Science, El Cajon, where the Unarians await the arrival of their Space Brothers in the 33 City Ships of the Galactic Federation.