Creation trailer

Thanks to Aliie for letting us know The Telegraph has this “exclusive” trailer for Creation. I’m glad to see they confront the coming storm of controversy head-on, with a couple of the most potentially inflammatory hot-button lines we’re likely to see in any movie this year.

Creation opens September 25, in the UK, just two months shy of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. So how far have we come in a century and a half? Into what intellectual climate will Creation be released?

June 10, 2009 — PETERSBURG, Ky. — A school bus hissed to a stop near a giant concrete dinosaur perched outside the Creation Museum, a $27 million, 70,000-square-foot natural history museum-meets-Biblical theme park. Three dozen middle school students tumbled out the doors, stretching after the 113-mile drive from Westside Christian School in Indianapolis for a field trip to augment their science lessons.

Inside, the students learned from displays that, contrary to mainstream textbooks, science supports the Bible’s accounts of the Earth’s creation in six days; that the Grand Canyon was created suddenly in Noah’s flood; that dinosaurs and humans lived together; and that animal poison did not exist before Adam’s original sin.

“Creation makes more sense — what’s here just confirms it,” said seventh-grader Nick Johnson of Westside Christian…

Two years after its controversial opening, the Creation Museum has drawn 720,000 visitors, far more than the 250,000 annually organizers predicted.

“Children should be exposed to alternative views,” said Mark Looy, a museum co-creator. “Where do you go to get an opposing view? To the Creation Museum.”

How about the Museum of Alchemy? Or The Museum of Spontaneous Generation?

Scientists and secular educators fear those students are being led astray by pseudo-science that they say distorts accepted scientific findings, including a fossil record that shows life becoming progressively complex over billions of years. They also argue it fosters a distrust of science.

“The poor students who go there thinking they will learn some science are done a great disservice,” said museum critic Lawrence Krauss, a physicist who directs the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University.

The National Center for Science Education asserts that “students who accept this material as scientifically valid are unlikely to succeed in science courses at the college level.” Yet religious schools are flocking to the museum, including schools from Louisville that view it as a valuable educational resource.

“It really helped supplement our curriculum” and “shed a lot of light” on earth sciences, said Dan Delaney, principal of Louisville’s Northside Christian School, who objects to evolution “propaganda” in museums and textbooks…

“Science tries to discredit God,” said Della Davidson, a parent accompanying Westside’s field trip with her 12-year-old daughter, Kyla. The museum “shows how God can discredit science.”