LOUISVILLE -- My family attended the grand opening of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum and I saw what I expected to see: closed minded propagandists who don't want any challenge to their narrow view of origins. But they weren't in the museum.

So we drove past the protesters and into a museum whose exhibits constantly reference both sides of the creation/evolution debate.

My three older boys were, quite literally, jumping up and down at the prospect of dinosaurs, and the animated creatures did not disappoint. The moving, roaring facsimile reptiles were big and (at least in the post-Fall exhibits) fierce. The $27 million budget was obvious here, since the dinosaurs were more "Jurassic Park" quality than "Land of the Lost." While my boys ran around on a replica of Noah's Ark and pretended to sword-fight a T-Rex, their mother and I read the displays on ice ages, species development, and differing understandings of radiometric dating.
The planetarium inspired awe at the vastness of the universe, bringing to mind the Psalmist's question -- "What is man that you are mindful of him?" -- while answering it as the New Testament does: with the Incarnation and atonement of the Redeemer-Ruler of the cosmos. I was pleasantly surprised that the planetarium exhibit acknowledges problems caused for any biblical historical timeline concerning the time it takes starlight to reach our field of vision. I was furthermore surprised that the exhibit didn't take a dogmatic stance on any one of the possible creationist answers to the problem: whether the concept of starlight created already in transit or Russell Humphreys' theory of the question resolved by relativity of space and time or any of the others.

In fact, this scientific humility marked the museum, in a way not typical of some other attempts at creation science. The museum exhibits make clear a conviction that, hermeneutically and theologically, a relatively "young" universe makes the best sense of the biblical data. The museum exhibits provide possible scientific explanations of how this biblical authority can be scientifically explained but they do not confuse the authority of Scripture with the derivative and revisable authority of any scientific theory, whether that is specifics of fossilization and flood geology or a "vapor canopy" over the pre-flood biosphere.

Now, I am a six-day creationist of the oldest sort. But I haven't always been. There was a time when Hugh Ross' day/age theory of origins seemed somewhat plausible and when the restoration model, the old "gap" theory, seemed even more possible. I came to a more traditional creationist approach through my studies in biblical eschatology, ironically enough, dealing with texts such as Romans 8:18-23 and Isaiah 11:1-10. Many of my close friends are "old-earth creationists," Bible-believing Christians who think reconciliation between the biblical text of Genesis and the reigning scientific dating paradigm is more workable than I do. Even if I agreed with my old-earth creationist friends, I would be happy to walk with my children through this museum, if for no other reason than to show them how some Christians understand Genesis.

Frankly, even if I were a Darwinist, I would think I would have no more reason to be angered by this exhibit than by a New Age museum arguing for the Gaia hypothesis of earth as a living organism or by an Eastern religion's museum arguing for a universe with no beginning and no end.

Speaking of Darwinism, it was everywhere, and fairly presented. In virtually every exhibit, on the "Lucy" fossil or on carbon-14 dating or on the fossil record or on the Big Bang, the information included both the Darwinist-materialist explanation for the scientific data along with how the same data are interpreted by the museum's biblical creationist grid.