Eric Hovind and I were in Arizona for the summer’s great adventure- a tour of the Grand Canyon! While there, we stayed a few more days to meet up with friends and work on upcoming projects, and with an hour to kill between chimichangas and Sunday night church, we dropped in on a museum and filmed our adventure. On July 6, Creation Today published the video on our YouTube channel and titled the video “The Museum of Not-Real History?”. In short, it’s Eric and I goofing around at a museum in Arizona. About halfway through the video, we take notice of the CONSTANT assertion of billions of years, which is presented with no indication as to why those dates should be accepted. Then we leave, praise the museum for being well designed, but complain that lies should not be told to children. 

You can watch it here: 

It’s not going to win an Oscar but in only three days over 6,000 people decided it was worth watching. Part of its popularity is due to the critique by the internet famous internet atheist who calls himself “The Friendly Atheist.” (1) His article was called, “Watch These Creationists Pathetically Try to Debunk a Museum of Natural History,” and he describes our video this way: 

“They recently went to the Arizona Museum of Natural History to debunk what’s inside… and the entire substantive part of the video is just them staring at placards that say various rock formations are hundreds of millions of years old and saying “Not true.””

If you’ve watched our video and also understand what the word “debunk” means, his critique ought to leave you confused. It had me perplexed because we didn’t DO any “debunking.” The museum offered no defense of its assertion of those ages, therefore we had nothing to debunk. But then it dawned on me: 

MOCKING is what Atheists confuse for DEBUNKING!

Aside from the very real possibility that the “Friendly Atheist” has no concept of how humor works*, he is so immersed in the sewage of internet atheism that he has completely lost the ability to understand what it means to dismantle an argument or opposing position. When we are acting like goofballs and having a laugh at something, THIS is the language he thinks he recognizes as “explaining in great detail why the exhibits are absolute lies”!

Speaking of absolute lies, he says this:

“At one point, Melugin points to a sign saying Mount Rushmore is 1.6 billion years old and acts like that’s a glaring mistake. He never mentions how that refers to the age of the mountains, not the presidential carvings themselves.”

Here is a screenshot so you can see what the museum offered.

“Mount Rushmore, SD, 1.6 billion years ago.” THAT is the signage in its entirety. As you can see, the photo shows the modern image carvings Mount Rushmore is known for and not a photo of what the mountain looked like before it was carved. There is not a sign below or above explaining that we are intended to assign that age to the rock and not the carving. However (and feel free to explain this to your friendly neighborhood atheist) I already KNEW they were referring to the rock and not the carvings. 

THAT IS WHY THIS KIND OF RESPONSE IS FUNNY

Of course I know what the museum meant by this sign, but where is the humor in properly filling in the gaps left by the museum with what we know they intended? I’m embarrassed for the atheists on the internet when I have to explain to them how humor works, but here we go: 

At 35 seconds into this video, Eric looks up into the rib cage of a dinosaur skeleton and says, “So THAT’s what’s inside a brachiosaurus!” I don’t want to ruin the magic, but just between you and me, Eric knows that dinosaurs, as a general rule, weren’t hollow when they were still alive.  That’s not a lie nor evidence of his ignorance—it’s an obvious attempt at humor.  Well, obvious to anyone who can tell mockery from logical dismantling of faulty premises defending a faulty conclusion. Also, when I am doing my impersonation of a T-Rex, I don’t really believe anyone watching will be fooled into thinking I am a real dinosaur. 

So… maybe we need Atheist subtitles on our video? Perhaps it would have helped the Friendly Atheist if the bottom of the screen read, “Eric is making a joke based on the skeleton, but he knows that when still alive, there would have been intestines and other soft dinosaur parts inside this brachiosaurus. He is not lying to the audience, but making a funny joke. Ha ha!”

The video we made was not intended to be a serious critique of the museum as a whole. As we say several times, the museum is generally well laid out, has wonderful displays and was very enjoyable. So the assertion that we were trying to “Debunk a Museum of Natural History” is asinine on its face. But if a point was to be made, it was where we made it. 

Merely Assaulted with BILLIONS OF YEARS

As you enter the museum, you are faced with a bright yellow hallway titled “ORIGINS” covered in printed images with almost no information about them save a brief title, and either ages or distances. Stars and galaxies are listed with their name and distance from earth. For example, just before I reach Mount Rushmore, I pass a picture labeled, “Comet Galaxy, 3.2 billion light years distant.” No other information is given about these galaxies, or why the distance of galaxies is relevant in a hallway dedicated to the age of the universe. Naturally I understood the point which was being made, but if you’re not sure, the reply from our friendly neighborhood atheist clears it up for us. He says, 

“And somehow, despite thinking the Earth is just a few thousand years old, they’re both fine with galaxies being billions of “light-years” away. That may be because Creationists genuinely think that term has nothing to do with light actually taking that long to travel.”

Neither the Friendly Atheist nor the museum felt it necessary to connect the dots, but the general argument is this:

“Since light travels a light year each year, and we know those galaxies are BILLIONS of light years away, we know the universe is billions of years old.”

The Friendly Atheist (because it seems he doesn’t know the difference between mocking and debunking) says “Creationists genuinely think that term has nothing to do with light actually taking that long to travel” and indeed it does not. A Light Year is not a measurement of TIME, but of distance. How he managed to forget this fact of science I don’t know, but it’s probably because he got so caught up in his anti-Creationist conclusion that he didn’t think before he spoke. 

Our Atheist friend and the museum are both making the same error. They are assuming their conclusion into the facts, such that they aren’t presenting the case they think they are. In fact, they aren’t presenting a case at all, but rather presenting unsubstantiated blanket assertions. Neither makes any attempt at explaining why a great distance MUST mean a great time. Despite it being almost certain that he’s been told over and over for years, the “Friendly Atheist” pretends he’s never heard any of the Creation replies to this attack on our position from people such as Berry Setterfield, Russel Humphreys, Danny Faulkner, or Jason Lisle, just to name a few. Creation science has presented valid replies to this skeptical attack for decades, but apparently we still have work to do getting the word out to our friendly neighborhood atheists. 

Just like the listing of distances, the listing of ages was given no defense. If the museum offered any reasons to accept those ages, it’s somewhere in another room. In the “Origins” room we are merely assaulted with BILLIONS OF YEARS over and over and over as a FACT, with no explanation as to why anyone accepts those assertions as real. So while we didn’t intend to do a deep and lengthy discussion at the museum as to why we don’t accept those dates, the museum merely said BILLIONS OF YEARS! So all we said in reply was “NOPE!” 

Creation Scientists have been debunking the false claims of atheism for decades, and their work is available very easily, especially now that there is the internet. For a collection of free works you can enjoy right now, visit https://searchcreation.org and type in “distance to galaxies.” 

Our critique of the museum still stands. It was a well laid out museum of wonderful displays. What little information they had on the signage was a combination of accurate scientific facts and blind evolutionary assertions that have been legitimately debunked by observational science. Their Origins hallway serves as nothing but a meaningless piece of anti-Creation propaganda which offered no reasons for the faith they desire you to adopt, and we make light of it because we know that real science has debunked their atheistic faith, and real science shows that the Bible can be trusted from the very first page. For every skeptical question offered by atheists and evolutionists, there are answers. The mission of Creation Today is to share those answers with Christians and Atheists alike, so that everyone will come to know and trust in Jesus. 

Having read the criticism from our Atheist friend, I can only say this; If anything we did in that video actually “failed pathetically,” it was probably my impression of a T- Rex. I’d take criticism for that. 

Our thanks to the Friendly Atheist for letting people know about our video. We appreciate the publicity. And remember- Jesus Loves You. 

 

1- https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/07/07/watch-these-creationists-pathetically-try-to-debunk-a-museum-of-natural-history/
*This isn’t a personal attack, just a hypothesis. We all have something we’re tone-deaf to. Some people don’t understand humor. I don’t understand most professional sports, or why people are SERIOUS about golf, when to me it seems like an expensive excuse to wear ugly pants and take a series of short walks.