Far more controversial is the Creation Museum, the brainchild of an Australian evangelist named Ken Ham. Opening this week in northern Kentucky not far from the Cincinnati airport, the museum is devoted to the idea that the creation story in Genesis is literally true and that the Earth is just 6,000 years old. (Scientists put the age of the Earth at 4.5 billion years.) With the look of a natural-history museum and the feel of a theme park, the Creation Museum has robotic dinosaurs in its lobby and a special-effects theater in which the audience viewing, say, Noah’s flood gets wet. It’s Bible-based “edutainment,” but it’s posing as science, with an astronomer on staff and fossils in the display cases—and that is making the scientific community angry enough to stage vociferous protests, including flying a plane overhead pulling a banner that reads THOU SHALT NOT LIE. “They have a right to build a museum,” says Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western who is among the protesters. “What they don’t have a right to do is be openly fraudulent about science.”
For Christians interested in the creation story, a far safer bet is the 30-year-old Sight & Sound Theater, based in Lancaster, Pa. Now playing, through October: “In the Beginning,” a dramatic re-enactment of Genesis, with special effects, pyrotechnics, live animals—dogs, cats, horses, alpacas and a flock of real birds—and actors playing Adam and Eve. Does Sight & Sound have any take on the evolution debate? “We’re not preachy,” says spokeswoman Pamela Evans. “We’re professional theater. We don’t get into that.” Eight hundred thousand visitors journey to Lancaster each year to watch the miracles onstage at Sight & Sound—just another reminder that a story doesn’t have to be demonstrably true to be a good, and inspiring, story.
