Paleontologists visit Creation Museum

from New York Times online

Paleontology and Creationism Meet but Don’t Mesh

Mark Lyons for The New York Times

A DIFFERENT VIEWPOINT Peter Dodson, left, of the University of Pennsylvania, Michael Foote of the University of Chicago and Jon Todd of the Museum of Natural History in London watching a video at the Creation Museum.

By KENNETH CHANG
Published: June 29, 2009

PETERSBURG, Ky. — Tamaki Sato was confused by the dinosaur exhibit. The placards described the various dinosaurs as originating from different geological periods — the stegosaurus from the Upper Jurassic, the heterodontosaurus from the Lower Jurassic, the velociraptor from the Upper Cretaceous — yet in each case, the date of demise was the same: around 2348 B.C.

“I was just curious why,” said Dr. Sato, a professor of geology from Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan.

For paleontologists like Dr. Sato, layers of bedrock represent an accumulation over hundreds of millions of years, and the Lower Jurassic is much older than the Upper Cretaceous.

But here in the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, Earth and the universe are just over 6,000 years old, created in six days by God. The museum preaches, “Same facts, different conclusions” and is unequivocal in viewing paleontological and geological data in light of a literal reading of the Bible.

In the creationist interpretation, the layers were laid down in one event — the worldwide flood when God wiped the land clean except for the creatures on Noah’s ark — and these dinosaurs died in 2348 B.C., the year of the flood.

read more

This is an interesting approach by the Creation Museum in Kentucky in explaining the existence and extinction of dinosaurs biblically. I am sure many of the paleontologists are mystified and it has nothing to do with mysticism.

More about the Creation Museum here