"The Bible doesn't talk about fossils, but it gives you a basis for understanding why there are fossils around the world," Ham says, alluding to a favorite bit of anti-evolutionary apologetics, whereby the water pressure from a worldwide flood created what appears to be layers of rock and fossils and so on laid down over millions of years, but really it happened in forty days and forty nights.

The Bible doesn't talk about dinosaurs either, so what's with the dinosaurs in the exhibits? "People are are just fascinated by dinosaurs, but they've sort of become synonymous with millions of years and evolution," Ham says, explaining why the Creation Museum shows humans and dinosaurs frolicking happily together even though, according to the article, "Scientists say there's a gulf of millions of years between man and the giant lizards."

Okay, lizards? I thought we'd moved beyond well beyond thinking of dinosaurs as "giant lizards" -- you know, some of them were warm blooded, closer to modern birds, etc? And, also, while humans and the biggest dinosaurs probably did not co-exist, humans and smaller dinosaurs probably co-exist to this day if you consider things like alligators and maybe ostriches to be dinosaurs.

Lazy reporting doesn't help the cause of science.

Speaking of Noah, and dinosaurs, this Reuters article mentions that the museum actually shows dinosaurs hitching a ride on Noah's Ark which opens up a whole other can of mind-blowing. Because, okay, wouldn't a single Tyrannosaurus Rex have pretty much used up all the cubits on Noah's very precisely dimensioned ship? ("The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits," according to Genesis 6:15) And, hello, it would have eaten all the other animals including Noah and his family. But maybe the museum shows only small herbivorous dinosaurs being given a ride on the Ark.

And, why show dinosaurs on the Ark anyway? When I heard that little "fossil record equals flood" business as a kid, it was always suggested that the flood killed all the dinosaurs. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, but makes slightly more sense than the version with dinosaurs.

Furthermore, if you want to suggest that all modern animals are actually descended from the pairs Noah brought on his Ark, then you've kind of argued yourself into a corner, where the Ark had to be either a lot bigger than described (which negates the whole "literal" interpretation thing, but leads to interesting science fictional ideas about ark ships and DNA), or the animals that got off the Ark immediately dispersed wildly and started evolving like gangbusters.

Which leads to another dead end, where one of the big creationist arguments against the theory of evolution is the holes in the fossil record, the missing links between different species. So, in the Noah's Ark version, those missing links aren't part of a spotty and somewhat random fossil record going back millions, even billions of years -- those missing links date back less than six thousand years, to what amounts to recorded human history.

Just contemplate that for a moment. Six thousand years ago there were no polar bears*. And then at some point suddenly there were. You'd think somebody would have noticed something unusual going on.

Ham says, "When you're talking about origins, you're not talking about science. You're talking about belief." No, Mr. Ham, you're not talking about science. Scientists are. I suppose that little misconception could cause a lot of problems. And when you're already living in a fantasy world, the next conclusion seems reasonable:

"We're going to blow people out of the water with how many people we'll get. A lot of non-Christians will come. You couldn't blow them into church with a stick of dynamite, but they'll come to this."

Admission to the Creationist Museum is $19.95 for adults, $9.95 for children. Which seems a little high, frankly. So, you know, I could be wrong -- and I have no money riding on this -- but I'm going to make a guess that in a year or so we'll read about some changes made at the struggling museum. Maybe they're going to lower the admission, add new attractions, hire a new director. And then in five years we'll read about them declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy and how they're going to come out of it stronger than ever. And then, very quietly, it will go out of business and become a shopping mall, but by then everyone will have forgotten about it.

But, like I said, I have no money riding on it.

Ham believes very strongly that Christians need to consider Genesis to be factually correct (including, one supposes, the two contradictory creation accounts). Because if you allow for things in the Bible to be allegory or metaphor, according to Ham, "You're then telling the next generation they can reinterpret the Bible. Then what we've lost is Christian morality."

Wait -- I think I see where this is coming from. It's all about homosexuality.

Because, if you allow the next generation to interpret the Bible differently than the currently favored interpretation -- never mind that the current interpretation is already different from interpretations of the past -- well, there's all sorts of things that might change, but homosexuality seems to be the one people really get worked into a lather about.