The backstory: During the summer of 2014, I decided to visit the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, while on my way to Arizona and a raft trip through the Grand Canyon. While looking at the Creation Museum's website, I stumbled on the Flat Ken photo contest, in which kids could print out a caricature of Flat Ken (Ham), founder of the Creation Museum, to photograph during their summer travels. Submit the right photo and the contestant would win all sorts of wonderful prizes. . . Although I was way too far gone to qualify as a kid (alas), I thought that Flat Ken might enjoy a raft trip down the Colorado River - and that he would appreciate a two-dimensional companion. And so I asked Flat Charles (Darwin) to join the "expedition," with the idea that he might channel modern scientific understanding and engage Flat Ken in discussions on various natural phenomena, such as fossils and rock strata. And that he did. Since the Grand Canyon trip, Flat Ken and Flat Charles also have traveled to Great Basin National Park and the High Sierra. Details follow, but needless to say, they remain a quarrelsome couple and have rarely agreed on anything (except that July in the Grand Canyon was HOT, and the rapids were exciting).
So, the Creation Museum: no details from me (I'll let Flat Ken and Flat Charles discuss the visit), except to say that my son and I felt like Lawrence Welk fans at a Sex Pistols concert. It did not go well.
Flat Ken (FK): Welcome to my ‘hood! It’s a long way from Australia, but I’ve found my spiritual and financial home. For just $29.95 you can visit the Creation Museum and understand the Truth about evolution and the age of the Earth, which is 6,300 years old.
Flat Charles (FC): I am confused. Everywhere I look at the Creation Museum, there are dinosaurs, and you depict the evidence of Dinosauria as arguing against evolution. Yet the existence of these “terrible lizards” offers strong proof for my theory. We know that the Dinosauria lasted 165 million years and evolved into “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful.” And here I’ll defer to Dr. Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago: “We don’t find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of the evolutionary sequence. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally derived from the fossil record.” (As an aside I might point out that admission to my home in England, Down House, costs only $US 14.00, less than half of what you charge.)
FK: No way, Flat Charles! Come see the Creation Museum’s displays of dinosaurs grazing in the Garden of Eden and sheltering on the Ark, next to the cattle. Or ask Dr. Tommy Mitchell, who lectures on “Jurassic Prank” at the Creation Museum. He’ll tell you that there were about fifty different kinds of dinosaurs on the Ark and that T. rex was a herbivore until after the Fall – no worries about those fierce teeth! (And Flat Charles, that $29.95 admission fee that you question goes to support our ministry!)
FC: And what did your spokesman, Dr. Mitchell, mean when he said that “The world uses dinosaurs to convince kids that they are no more than reorganized pond scum”?
FK: Dr. Mitchell meant that the evolutionists use dinosaurs to turn children away from God and toward the purposeless, random, directionless world of secular humanists. We use dinosaurs to turn people toward God and the Bible, which tells us that birds came before dinosaurs and that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
Grand Canyon, day 3, Nautiloid Canyon: the first "debate". . . FK: Just look at these nautiloid fossils in the Redwall Limestone! Many of them are aligned in the same direction, which shows that they were killed rapidly during the Noachian Flood 4500 years ago! As my friend Tom Vail writes in Grand Canyon: A Different View, “…the Grand Canyon is . . . a chilling museum of death, with its trillions of fossilized creatures who were terrorized as walls of mud and water froze them in time.”
FC: Sir. The Redwall Limestone and its nautiloid fossils are of Mississippian age, which occurred 340 million years ago. And there was no noticeable orientation to the dozen or so wonderful fossils that I saw in Nautiloid Canyon – they were arranged more or less randomly. By the way, what’s with this “chilling museum of death” quotation? Death, as we know, is a necessary part of life. And the fossils of the Grand Canyon, from trilobites to nautiloids to crinoids and brachiopods, are beautiful and fascinating, not “chilling.” Flat Ken, you seem to have a pathological fear of death that blinds you to the wonders of the natural world.
Grand Canyn, Day 8, Bass Sill. FC: The black layer of rock behind Liza and Zach (not to mention us, Flat Ken) is a diabase sill – once molten rock intruded between other layers of rock – in this case, sedimentary rocks of the Grand Canyon Super Group, which are of Precambrian age. Radiometric dating indicates that this sill is about 1 billion years old.
FK: Nonsense! My friends at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) have used four different radiometric dating methods on rock from the Bass Sill, which have yielded dates ranging from 840 million years to 1,375 million years. This shows radiometric dating does not work! Besides, our studies will show that rates of radioisotopic decay were very high during the creation and Flood and have slowed since then.
FC: Your ICR people have not paid attention to the assumptions of each radiometric method and so your conclusion does not hold – even though your own “data” show that the earth is very old! And there is absolutely no evidence that rates of radioisotopic decay ever change; heat isotopes, subject them to tremendous pressure, and the radiometric clocks just keeps on ticking. Besides, IF rates of isotopic decay were substantially higher in the past, the heat generated in the process would have melted everything on Earth!
Day 16, Diamond Creek. . . FK: Well, Flat Charles – we have arrived at the take-out point. Has this river trip made you see the error of your ways?
FC: I must admit that it has – but not how you think. Back in the day, say 1870, I suspected that the Earth was tens or a few hundred million years old. Of course, nobody knew about isotopes and geologists did not have the means to accurately date the age of rocks. But this river trip has helped me see that the Earth is inconceivably old! As we floated through the Grand Canyon we traveled through the deepest layers of time. We touched rocks that were formed 1.7 billion years ago – just imagine! How stunning the Canyon was, and is! In the language of your time, it “blew me away”!
FK: You never will admit to the error of your ways, will you, Flat Charles? Don’t you see what the Grand Canyon really is? According to my friend Tom Vail, “The Grand Canyon is a symbol of sin and what it once caused.”
FC: Do you mean to tell me that one of the most beautiful and wonderful places in the world is “a monument to sin?”
FK: Yup.
FC: Sigh. I will never understand you, Flat Ken. One other thing, though. In reading through Grand Canyon: A Different View and visiting the Creation Museum, I did not see one word about the importance of protecting what you affirm is God’s creation. Why is that?
FK: Don’t know, really, except it might not sit well with our conservative "base." And there’s no way that we are going to make common cause with those environmentalists, many of whom are philosophical naturalists.
FC: I give up. It’s time for an ice-cold IPA. By the way, do you know that we Brits invented IPA during the heady days of our Empire? We did it to preserve beer better in the bitter heat of India, our “Jewel in the Crown.”
Great Basin National Park. . . FC: These trees are amazing! They are among the oldest non- clonal organisms known; scientists have used tree rings to date some bristlecone pines to 4,900 years of age. And dendrochronologists have used overlapping tree rings from living and dead bristlecones to construct a record that goes back about 10,000 years! I might point out that is quite a bit older than the date you give for your "Noachian flood". How can that be?
FK: No worries! I suspect that patterns of tree ring deposition have changed since Noah. Just as my Answers in Genesis RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth) team is trying to show that rates of radioisotope decay have changed since the Creation, my newly formed TRITE (Tree Rings in the Age of the Earth) team will get to work on the bristlecone pine problem. We can deal with this, much as we have with other nettlesome issues.
FC: You mean by willful ignorance, falsehoods, and outright malfeasance? No amount of data will ever change your mind, will it?
FK: FC, those are fighting words! And as I said many weeks ago, we all start with the same facts; we just interpret them differently.
FC: Flat Ken, we DO NOT start with the same facts; you ignore whatever ones do not fit your world view, and create new “facts” to support yours!