The Creation Museum

Adam and Eve photo by rauchdickson

We took a happy little side trip to the Creation Museum (Petersburg, Kentucky) as an addendum to our Washington, D.C. vacation. The museum's founder, Ken Ham, was a speaker at the pastor's briefing my husband attended and sparked his interest in the museum.

My oldest three children were already acquainted with Ken Ham via his DVD series entitled "Answers Academy," a class they had attended in our co-operative school this past year. It is amazing how strands of knowledge and events coincide by serendipity when you are homeschooling!

The Creation Museum is only 2 years old, and is very classy. It captured the element of awe and grandeur that I felt was missing from the D.C. Museum of Natural History. Ancient history came alive as we viewed life-sized scenes from Genesis 1-11: the lush garden of Eden, all manner of natural wonders including dinosaurs, the serpent, and the tree of life. When we reached the very vivid scene marking sin's entrance into the world, the change is so real that it made my heart feel literally sick. (I remember feeling that same sense of loss when I read Milton's Paradise Lost).

The section on Noah's ark I thought was exceptional. On our trip, I had been reading the novel Chesapeake, which had an extensive description of ship building by trial and error. Because of my reading, I could look at the model of the inside of the ark with a little more appreciation and understanding. Noah did not have to learn by trial and error, he only had to follow the blueprint that God provided him. Noted: "The scale of the ark is dramatic and comes close to the limits of wooden technology. With no need for masts or a streamlined hull, and without the economic restrictions of shipwrights, the ark could be made incredibly strong using ordinary wood and tools." The museum's ark exhibit is built to scale and represents 1% of the volume of Noah's ark.

Also included in the tour is a star-gazer's planetarium which introduced us to the outer regions of the cosmos and helps us measure the incredible expanse of the Creator's hand, a hand that spans the universe.

Outside the museum is a real garden so breathtakingly lovely that I just wanted to linger and linger. Gorgeous plantings, little walking bridges, fountains and statuary made this look like the real garden of Eden.

All the other museums we visited left me feeling jostled and worn, but I left the Creation Museum feeling refreshed and built up. In the future, I'd consider this as a destination and not just a side trip.