Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Believing Their Own Lies

Over this past weekend, we took our kids to the Cranbrook Natural Science Museum. In most regards, it is great museum...but I'm bugged by the blatant attempt to not merely show the world as it is and was, but push an evolutionary worldview. There is an entire section, for example, that tries to "prove" that evolution is true.

And, while that annoys me, it isn't unexpected. But what I came across on this weekend made me downright angry.

Cranbrook is hosting an exhibit that is all about dinosaur eggs and baby dinosaur fossils, etc. But there is a hidden secondary purpose to this display: to make impressionable minds believe that dinosaurs evolved into birds.

This is, of course, a more recent development in evolutionary theory based on virtually no real fossil evidence. Still, scattered around this room were dozens of "artist impression" paintings of what these dinosaurs looked like. At first I didn't take much notice. But then I started to see that almost every single one of them had dinosaurs with feathers. And so I glanced around the room, and sure enough, with a few exceptions, the paintings featured feathered dinos.

And that's when I started to get angry. These paintings were made based on a belief, not science, and the museum, by displaying them, is hoping to convince those who were there that dinosaurs developed feathers and eventually became birds.

Trouble is, it is a lie. All of it.

Then, the most significant point came when I first read the caption next to "picture" of an "oviraraptor" dinosaur. While the picture clearly showed the dinosaur with features, the caption said, quite clearly, that paleontologists have found NO fossil evidence that the oviraraptor had feathers, but they painted them that way because they believe they might have. Hmm. Notice that bit about there being "no fossil evidence"? I sure did.

Except that about thirty feet away, there was another little display that said asked a question. It asked what two things make scientists today believe that dinosaurs evolved into birds. The answer? Number: That the oviraraptor had feathers, and that the dinosaurs carefully tended their nest of eggs.

The second bit, of course, doesn't really offer any evidence at all, since is a behavior. But the first? A blatant lie that contradicts the very statement made elsewhere in the very same museum. There is no fossil evidence that the oviraraptor had feathers, yet this display stated that they do!

Of course, I took this opportunity to point all the flaws with all of this to my own kids. But the thing is, this kind of tendency to believe in their own lie is found throughout evolutionary science. There is so very little evidence that supports even the possibility of macroevolution, yet scientists defend it as fact to the point of having to actually lie to the general public to keep people from balking at it.

Do your research, folks. Ironically, there is so much MORE scientific evidence that supports the creation model than there is the evolution model. Don't believe me? Well, go look for yourself.