Creation Museum

We wanted to go here, but initially, we had a bit of sticker shock over it.  It cost over $70 for our family for the day.  We planned well though and arrived at opening and stayed till close; we're good at making sure we get the most bang for our buck, you know! The kids did an extra session, Monkey Business, which cost extra and lasted an hour.  If you plan on doing more than one of the "extras" and also plan to see the whole museum (and read all the displays and watch all the videos), you'd need more than a day to do it. We missed the Petting Zoo portion, unfortunately.  The botanical gardens are beautiful though, and you are welcome to bring your own picnic lunch to eat there.  It was so nice to not have to eat in the parking lot!

The 7 C's are the core teaching of the museum

You can click on the pictures to expand and read the words

It might be expensive, but this is a great museum!  Every other museum we've been to always explains things with the foregone conclusion that evolution is fact.  It is refreshing to see the flip side of that coin, for sure!  I also learned things I didn't know.  For example, radio isotope dating on rocks formed during Mt. St. Helen's explosion just 32 years ago showed that these rocks are millions of years old...therefore showing that dates that "prove" the Earth's age are rather suspect.  I also didn't realize that dinosaur bones have been found with soft tissue still inside!  If you are a believer and aren't sure how to handle the evolution question, this is a great place to start!  It gave us lots to think about, discuss, and research further!

The Snopes Trial.   Steve is related to William Jennings Byran who was the defense lawyer .

Lots of scoffers these days

 I liked the way they discussed that your findings on a particular fossil can vary because your starting points are different.   If you assume that the earth is billions of years old, and if you assume there is no divine Creator, then you will interpret a dinosaur fossil using that filter.   Another scientist who believes that God created the earth and everything in it will look at the same exact fossil and come to a different conclusion.

They also made it clear that natural selection does not equal evolution.   Basically most scientists interpret the results like this: natural selection + gazillion years = species evolution.   The gazillion years is supposed to explain everything; you are supposed to throw all logic out the window and just accept that a gazillion years is the answer.  The fact that most modern families in the animal kingdom are represented in the fossil record does not support species evolution.  There is an answer, however, and it is not evolution; there is a God who spoke it all into existence.  That same God loves us and does intervene in our lives.  For us, the most vivid recent example was when He prompted Steve to change his plans and stop early in New Mexico. When we stopped, we discovered the wheel had come off the front axle on the rig, and we were riding on one wheel on the right side, with our rear axle supporting all the weight. The wheel-less axle was hovering mere inches above the ground.  God didn't speak out loud; he spoke by giving Steve an inexplicable uneasy feeling.  It took a while for him to listen, but once he did he immediately felt more peace.  Had we kept going, the tire supporting the whole rig on the right side would have blown, and we could have totaled it!  (We had another 90 miles to get where we were going.)

We stayed until the museum closed, and when we left, we were all tired and hungry; imagine that!  Steve was itching to try Skyline Chili, a Cincinnati thing, so we stopped for dinner.  It was a fluke that we happened to stop on "Kids Eat Free" night, definitely a big bonus!  There were slightly mixed reviews--Steve, Genna, and Alyssa all loved it, and Shanan & I thought it was okay but not great.  Jake was uninterested in food altogether; he was focused on trying to give Steve's keys to the guy sitting at the booth next to us.  Such a socialite!

Skyline Chili was a thumbs up!  The girls loved sitting at the "bar" all by themselves!