"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
Ken Ham has spent 11 years working on a museum that poses the big question when and how did life begin? Ham hopes to soon offer an answer to that question in his still-unfinished Creation Museum in northern Kentucky.
The $25 million monument to creationism offers Ham's view that God created the world in six, 24-hour days on a planet just 6,000 years old. The largest museum of its kind in the world, it hopes to draw 600,000 people from the Midwest and beyond in its first year.
Ham, 53, isn't bothered that his literal interpretation of the Bible runs counter to accepted scientific theory, which says Earth and its life forms evolved over billions of years.
Ham said the museum is a way of reaching more people along with the Answers in Genesis Web site, which claims to get 10 million page views per month and his "Answers ... with Ken Ham" radio show, carried by more than 725 stations worldwide.
"People will get saved here," Ham said of the museum. "It's going to fire people up. If nothing else, it's going to get them to question their own position of what they believe."
Ham is ready for a fight over his beliefs based on a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.
"It's a foundational battle," said Ham, a native of Australia who still speaks with an accent. "You've got to get people believing the right history - and believing that you can trust the Bible."
Among Ham's beliefs are that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, a figure arrived at by tracing the biblical genealogies, and not 4.5 billion years, as mainstream scientists say; the Grand Canyon was formed not by erosion over millions of years, but by floodwaters in a matter of days or weeks and that dinosaurs and man once coexisted, and dozens of the creatures including Tyrannosaurus Rex were passengers on the ark built by Noah, who was a real man, not a myth.