Ever since I can remember, my fascination has been with the study of the social foundations of human intellectual life: namely, in antiquity, mythology, and the classical legends.
Having completed my Master’s in Critical Comparative Scriptures at the School of Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University, and as particularly an American student of myth, I might be expected to visit the Creation Museum in Kentucky; and yet, I never have, and have no plans to do so.
The reasons for this, are simple. At the time of this writing, I live in California; and it seems to me rather spendthrift, to travel cross-country to see an exhibit, and immediately come back. I have neither friends nor relations in Kentucky, and therefore nowhere to stay or anyone to meet. Secondly, the Creation Museum is expensive; even members must pay over $50 apiece to enter. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the Creation Museum is by no reasonable measure an instructive or accurate rendition of the mythology it purports to display.
The subject purportedly on display in the Creation Museum, is the legend of the Garden of Eden: a Judeo-Christian origin-fable of human suffering, loosely based on Greek and Zoroastrian antecedents. In this legend, the first human beings live undisturbed in a peaceful garden in present-day Mesopotamia, until persuaded by a ‘Serpent’ (Prometheus) to ingest the fruit of the ‘Tree of Knowledge’, which induces a conscience, and a heightened sense of mortality. Fearful that they might then obtain the fruit of the ‘Tree of Life’ and become immortal, their Creator expels them from the garden into the wider world, and condemns them to every manner of hardship.
The representation of this myth in the Creation Museum, is far from faithful, even to the syncretic and fragmentary present form, insofar as it tries to incorporate dinosaur paleontology, hominin evolution, and geological data into the myth, which originally acknowledged none of these. On principle, there is nothing wrong with this. Numerous Early Modern scientists, including Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al-Haytham (Alhazen), Al-Petraj (Alpetragius), Omar Khayyám, and their successors Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Hubble, Herschel, Bohr, Einstein, Polodsky, Rosen, etc., saw no contradiction between an honest study of the cosmos, and reverence for its Creator. There is equally nothing wrong with alleging, as the Creation Museum does, that the discovery of marine fossils at high altitudes, inspired the legend of the global Deluge. This legend is re-created at the Creation Museum, under the name of the Ark Encounter, after the mythical vessel in which the human protagonists of the story survived the disaster.
Archaeologically speaking, the legendary Deluge may be identified as any of several inundations in and around the ancient city of Uruk, in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin (present-day Iraq): the site, supposedly, of the Eden myth, and of most associated legendry. Nonetheless, it was far from ‘global’ or ‘universal’, except from the view of the protagonists in the story itself. As well: the attempt, at the Creation Museum, to incorporate dinosaurs into either Deluge or Garden, is incorrect both mythologically and scientifically, insofar as both legends are set firmly in the anthropocene epoch, long after the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. In that respect, the Creation Museum has committed at least one serious error, and ignored its own source-material.
As a representation of Judeo-Christian creation mythology, the Creation Museum has failed spectacularly. Paleontological imagery is basically irrelevant to a myth based loosely on Syro-Palestinian, and Mesopotamian sources, and set mostly in the Iron Age. Admittedly, confusion has arisen, because the principal text, known as the Book of Genesis, relates a legend of the beginning of the cosmos; but the same book, having done so, leaps immediately to the creation-myth of the human race, without reference to the intervening geological ages. The Creation Museum does attempt to correct this omission, by displays of the Big Bang and cosmological development; but these displays do not quite compensate for the mistake of incorporating prehistoric organisms into a display of historical fiction, supra.
All these data, combined, suffice to dissuade any serious scholar, and most lay visitors, from the Creation Museum. If that museum were ever rebuilt, into some form more faithful to its true subject of mythology, and its cost of entrance significantly lowered, perhaps more intellectuals would be inclined to join its audience; and possibly, myself among them.