I can only wish the same sense of epistemic humility were found in the protesters standing with placards outside the museum's gates or in a plane flying overhead with a banner reading "Thou shalt not lie." Inside the museum, I was asked by a reporter to respond to the Darwinist protesters' charge that I was "confusing" my children by bringing them into a museum that presents a markedly different view of cosmic history than that found in secular science textbooks. I am dumbfounded that groups with names such as "Free Inquiry" could believe that seeing viewpoints at variance with approved orthodoxy, whether religious or materialist, is "confusing." After all, weren't the Big Bang and natural selection "confusing" to a previous generation of schoolchildren?

It is remarkable that no Christian has ever asked me if I am "confusing" my children by taking them, as I did later that weekend, to the Cincinnati-area aquarium with exhibits everywhere assuming only a Darwinist/naturalist understanding of the origins of aquatic life. Most conservative Christians I know want their children to understand Darwin's account of human evolution, and a fair representation of it, precisely so they will not be mystified by it later.

One would think the secularist free-thinkers would want everyone to see the creationist account of origins, for the very sake of the contrast with what they would see as a more viable model. I can even understand Darwinist ridicule of a narrative that is so strikingly at odds with the current scientific consensus. What I cannot understand is the attempt to suppress the debate itself, whether through attempted zoning regulation mischief or through noisy planes overhead on opening day. Whatever happened to postmodernism?

I suspect, in the end, that the humility of the Creation Museum's presentation is precisely what worries some Darwinists. Some previous generations of creationists have spoken in ways that made it seem that the scientific data is on our side, that the debate can be won using the very same playing field as naturalism itself with an appeal to raw general revelation. The Creation Museum exhibits offer very little triumphalism of this sort. The exhibits quite often ask the questions "what if" and "could it be." The exhibits honestly acknowledge that every viewpoint rests on some authority, with this viewpoint interpreting the data through the authority of divine revelation. The museum designers also seem to understand that the debate with Darwinism will not be won ultimately with brute facts, but with an alternative narrative, a narrative that rings truer than the Darwinist story of a nature accidentally but perpetually red in tooth and claw.

As we drove out of the museum gates, my boys asked me about the protesters outside: "What are they yelling about?" My wife and I gave a thumbnail explanation of Darwinism, and it dawned on me that the problem for the protesters is not that they are scientifically wrong. They are certainly not our enemies. The problem is that they hold a view of the world that is sad and hopelessly violent.

I don't pray, first of all, that they will be convinced by scientific arguments, whether those of young-earth creationists or Intelligent Design theorists. I pray that the Darwinist protesters become like the little children they see before them, with their snow cones and dinosaur balloons.

I pray the protesters see not just the truth but the beauty of a world in which scientifically impossible things happen: lions eat straw like an ox, the world is saved in an ark, people come back from the dead, camels pass through needles' eyes, old men are born again.

Russell D. Moore is dean of the school of theology and senior vice president for academic administration at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. Adapted from a column first posted at www.henryinstitute.org

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