Hyperbaric biosphere.
Second floor of Creation Evidence Museum.Follow OffCite's State of Museums series in advance of the forthcoming issue of Cite. Use the hashtag #StateOfMuseums to view related content on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
The road to the Creation Evidence Museum of Texas was blocked. Just outside of Glen Rose, the two-lane 1001 is crossed by the Paluxy River, which splits off from the Brazos a few miles away. I passed small ranches until the pavement ended and the road funneled down to a rocky ford. That morning, the water was running so high I had to put my Honda into reverse and take the long way around.
Just upstream from there you can see in the riverbed hundreds of fossilized tracks of the Paluxysaurus and Acrocanthosaurus, dating back, most paleontologists agree, to the Cretaceous Period, the last era before dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years ago. Dr. Carl Baugh, who founded the Creation Evidence Museum in 1984, claims that you can also see fossilized "man tracks." For Dr. Baugh, these tracks show that Man and Dinosaur co-existed, refuting theories of evolution and proving that Earth was created by God about 6,000 years ago.
His Creation Evidence Museum houses a variety of objects thus appointed: fossils, Bibles, bones. The building, a two-story rock cabin with a peaked roof and walls of sun-stained Plexiglas, is long and narrow with an open plan on the inside. Perched on a short hill and shaded by a few trees, it's flanked by portables and a prefabricated shed and backs up to the Paluxy. Dr. Baugh, a trained Baptist minister now in his late 70s, has said that the museum receives about 15,000 visitors a year, many of them making a kind of pilgrimage to see what he alone can show them.
Inside, a volunteer collected my admission fee and directed me to have a seat in front of a television at the rear of the main building. I watched a 30-minute video --- produced in the '90s, judging by the graphics and the reference to Shaquille O’Neal --- of Dr. Baugh taking me through his arguments. Until 2013 the host of Creation in the 21st Century on the Trinity Broadcast Network, Dr. Baugh speaks with a televangelist's polished drawl, mixing Biblical exegesis with scientific terminology in a stupefying performance. Presented in the video as further evidence for said co-existence is an Anasazi cave painting, which depicts both a warrior and a dinosaur-shaped creature.
Display cases along the wall hold some of the other fossils, bones, primitive tools, pottery. The other side of the first floor is taken up by a long golden tube with portholes that Dr. Baugh calls a “hyperbaric biosphere.” The biosphere, one of the main attractions at the museum, is designed to reproduce the unique atmospheric conditions of the pre-flood world in which humans were Shaq-sized and lived peaceably among the Paluxysauruses. When I peeked inside I saw that it was being used presently as storage space for extra chairs and office supplies. Mostly, it was empty.
Upstairs, the exhibits are arranged along a U-shaped loft. The rear of the space is devoted to offices.
One side of the loft is taken up by a replica ark, maybe 25 feet long, sparsely populated with heavy plastic figurines. Shown in cross-section, the cabins of the ark present a version of things as they might have been during those long 40 days and nights: cats roughhouse with snakes; women prepare dinner; pterodactyls swoop around and annoy the polar bears, etc.
The Ark.
Detail of Ark.Next to the ark is a special section of the museum titled “Creativity of Man.” It features an antique car and a penny-farthing. Next to that are statues of a woman wearing Native American garb and of former Dallas Cowboys Coach Tom Landry.
And that's pretty much it, as far as the museum goes.
In 2012, a writer from the Texas Observer was told by Alice Lane, a Glen Rose resident, that "most everyone in Glen Rose that I know believes man and dinosaurs coexisted. The only conflict we have is when people move from metropolitan areas and have different value systems. I think some don’t have a strong [religious] belief system, and they’re more likely to go with science than faith.”
Most of the claims on which the Creation Evidence Museum were founded have been debunked by scientists. It turns out that the tracks thought by Dr. Baugh and others to be a man's really belonged to a dinosaur that pressed the full weight, and shape, of its sole into the ground. Nevertheless, faith can rule, especially in Texas, where many, including some of our elected public figures, want creationism --- or creation science, intelligent design, etc. --- taught in public schools. For that matter, many want our textbooks revised for the sake of "critical thinking" so that evolution is represented less as a principle akin to gravity and more as an unproven theory, even though that was ruled unconstitutional in 1987.
I was tempted, at first, to group the museum with other curiosities like the Orange Show or Cathedral of Junk and call it one man's temple to the thing he loves most. But John Milkovisch didn't build the Beer Can House so you would convert to drinking Texas Pride. Dr. Baugh wants your soul. I left thinking that it had been mislabeled as a museum. It looks and feels like a church or organizational headquarters, committed more to instruction than education. The exhibits belie a dogma that's deadly serious. For me, education isn't about the process of eliminating from your worldview those things you don't like or can't believe, but enlarging your worldview so it can fit them, if uncomfortably, inside it.