How Evolved are You?

A few days ago at the gym I saw a television advertisement for something called The Creation Museum in Kentucky.  From what I can tell, a Christian organization called AnswersInGenesis funds and runs the museum.  Apparently the building is devoted to the Earth's creation as described in the Bible. 

Frankly, I'm very confused.  The museum claims God created the Earth and everything in it in six days.  Adam, Eve and all the animals (including dinosaurs) lived together in the Garden of Eden and ate only plants.  It contains a number of fossils, the result of the Great Flood which only Noah and his family survived.

I don't know a lot about fundamental Christianity, since I wasn't raised that way (Lutheran Catholic mother who is more concerned with personal spirituality than church canon and a holiday Roman Catholic father) but I do know they take the Bible literally and consider it the actual words of God.  I know they reject the principles of evolution because A) human beings are made in God's image and therefore could never have looked like monkeys and B) if evolution was true, all monkeys would have evolved into people as evolution always ends in a creature's "perfect" form.

The following is completely editorial and I in no way intend to offend anyone.

My first issue with the Creation Museum is the Earth's age: 6,000 years.  According to most accepted scientific theories, modern homo sapiens (the classification of all human beings) began to appear about 200,000 years ago.  Anthropologists base this on fossilized bones...their shape and size matches our own almost exactly.

That's 194,000 years of struggle and hunger and childbirth and sex and love that apparently never happened.  If each of those people had a soul (as I personally believe almost all living things do) that's hundreds of thousands if not millions of souls God is "ignoring."  And considering "His eye is on the sparrow," I sincerely doubt that.

I suppose there is an argument that these bones are those of the people who died in the Great Flood, along with the bones of dinosaurs.

So let's move on to those dinosaurs.  The Creation Museum claims dinosaurs lived side by side in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and ate only plants.  If God creates perfection and makes no mistakes, how could a Tyrannosaurus Rex eat plants without the necessary flat teeth for grinding them?  Meat-eating dinosaurs could not have possibly survived on plants...they couldn't have broken them down properly for digestion.

My last bit is about human beings being created in God's image.  As a person who spends a lot of time with animals, I can tell you they are far more Christian than any person I've ever met.  They love with abandon, forgive even the most grievous offenses, suffer willingly and require only basic necessities and love to survive.  Animals are made in God's image, and humans are devolved from their perfection. 

I came across this interesting article about how Chimpanzees give birth.  The baby emerges from the birth canal headfirst facing upward so the mother has an easier time lifting the baby toward her and clearing the airway.  This is almost exactly how human beings have babies.

I'll write more in the future about the correlation between science and religion and my own opinions about it, but for now I think I've given you enough to chew on.