In the beginning, there were dinosaurs and people…
My thing is, by it’s very nature, this museum seems to be a very
narrow-minded venture. It takes the argument and breaks it up into two
constituent parts in many displays: “Human Reason” and “God’s Word”.
Yes, human reason can be flawed. But if we knew everything then we would be
gods, ourselves. As it is, we are flawed creatures trying to understand how the
universe around us works. We all then have our own beliefs on the root
cause of everything coming into being, order from chaos as atheists would
probably say, or the creation flowering into being via the Father.
Human reason is all we have, if we are to engage in this venture of
trying to discover how God did it. God didn’t put in the Bible, “Two
hydrogens will fuse to make helium with an accompanying gigantic release of energy and I
will call it ‘The Sun'”. It would have been preposterous for Him to do
that back in those ages. They wouldn’t have understood nuclear physics if
it were explained to them, or the intricacies of quantum physics, or that
matter and energy are interchangeable. Hence, most of the Bible is in metaphor,
expressing ideas and concepts in a form that people could understand through the
ages.
People miss the point, as apparently this museum does. The Bible isn’t
there to tell us the details of how everything is. It’s there to give us a
bigger picture, to tell us how to live a better life the way God wants us to
live. The Bible isn’t there to tell us the exactitude of how woman and man were
created; the entire purpose of the beginning of Genesis is to impart
to the reader that He is the one who did it. The how doesn’t matter a
fraction as much as the fact that God created it all. Christ’s word, his message
to all of us, is that we should love one another as the father as loved him.
Outside of that, this bickering about “well, God said it was 6 days,
so it must be true. So this just has to mean that dinosaurs lived with man
(oversimplified, yes, but hopefully you get my point)” is completely
useless and pointless, IMHO.
God’s word should not be lost in individual words and phrases; I think
His idea should be taken as a bigger picture. The Bible, while certainly a
complex document, is so frickin’ simple. I wish people would see that. He
created the Universe, He wants us to live a certain way, He sent a son to
teach us this and sanctify his teachings and save us from ourselves
through his death. If you can break the Bible down into a simple summary, I think
that would be at least somewhere in the ballpark. How he did it is of no
concern with The Bible. The fact that he did all of these amazing
things (e.g. created the universe and everything in it) and he wants us to live a
certain way should be what we take from it.