In a developing story from Kentucky, the Creation Museum is running out of money due to declining attendance, bringing their “Ark Encounter” project to a stand-still because of a lack of funding.
Interestingly, the reason for the slowing traffic seems to be creationism itself, since the main exhibit has literally not changed in 5 years. Most museums’ exhibits change as new discoveries are made, as artifacts travel from other museums to visit, or as adjustments in scientific thinking are made.
Another reason could be the demographic that creationism’s proponents target.
Mark Joseph Stern from Slate.com writes:
A spectacle like the Creation Museum has a pretty limited audience. Sure, 46 percent of Americans profess to believe in creationism, but how many are enthusiastic enough to venture to Kentucky to spend nearly $30 to see a diorama of a little boy palling around with a vegetarian dinosaur? The museum’s target demographic may not be eager to lay down that much money: Belief in creationism correlates to less education, and less education correlates to lower income.
In hopes to draw repeat customers, the museum has added zip-lining and sky bridge courses to their attractions this summer. But when confronted by critics who wonder what the zip-lining and sky bridge attractions have to do with the museum’s message, Mike Zovath, the museums co-founder and vice president, says that the extra activities are irrelevant.
“No matter what exhibit we add, the message stays the same,” Zovath said. “It’s all about God’s word and the authority of God’s word and showing that all of these things, whether it’s bugs, dinosaurs or dragons — it all fits with God’s word.”
In their opening year, the Creation Museum garnered around 400,000 visitors, but that number steadily decreased in the following two years, with just over 254,000 visitors showing up this last year.
Watch WCPO’s Channel 9 report on the Creation Museum in the video below.
The Creation Museum has twice the annual attendance of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center located on some of the most prime real estate in Cincinnati. You make it sound like attendance is poor at the Kentucky Creation Museum, yet articles defending the money-losing, taxpayer funded, downtown Cincinnati-based Freedom Center cite that it is well above the median national museum annual attendance of 80,000. Why would you waste your time ranting about the attendance and finances of the privately funded Creation Museum when just a few miles away you have a taxpayer-dollar sucking museum?
Exactly, David. My friend just visited the Creation Museum, and she couldn’t even get into the Planetarium because it was sold out all day long. No, the museum is doing quite well, I’m happy to say. I plan to go there again myself next month. They keep adding new and wonderful attractions.
Most museums do not sustain themselves with attendance income, or taxpayer funds. Their primary source of income is usually private donations from individuals & foundations, or very rich sponsors. ( like the Freedom Center has )
… Your tax dollars are safe !
… Don’t blame the IRS for your bigotry.
George, here I am asking people to back off their attacks on the Creation Museum, a privately funded organization, and you call this bigotry??? George, your tax dollars are safe w/r/t the Creation Museum. On the other hand, over $910,000 of tax-payer dollars went to the Freedom Center last year, not to mention it shares services with the even more heavily tax-payer subsidized Cincinnati Museum.
Well the Underground Railroad actually exist and is marked in history. The theory of creationism comes from a book written by man, with no evidence to back it up. Why can’t you people believe a higher power developed the universe, but not under what the church teaches you. Remember the dark ages. Do you see the trouble going on in the Middle East. All fighting over religious non sense. We need to start believing in humanity not religion.
Just shows that stupidity knows no bounds.
And what do you suppose the advertising budgets of these two museums are? Me, I’m willing to bet the Creation Museum spends a *heck* of a lot more on advertising than the Freedom Center. Furthermore, it sounds to me like the Freedom Center is busy preserving a part of our national heritage, which sounds like a perfectly acceptable use of tax dollars to me.
Don’t kid yourself. The creation museum is a fucking joke.
Does anyone know why God created the Ebola virus?
The notion of “irreducible complexity” keeps coming up in creationist arguments, but it’s based primarily on a very dubious interpretation of “knock-out” studies. A “knock-out” study is one in which a chunk of DNA is removed from a cell (usually a single-cell organism) and the resulting–usually non-viable–offspring are examined to determine what that chunk of DNA was responsible for building. Creationists will tell you that this is evidence of irreducible complexity which is evidence of a designer.
Bull. Suppose I hand you a blueprint for a dresser, and you decide for whatever reason to leave the screws out when you build it. Does the resulting failure of the dresser to hold together prove that screws are utterly vital to the design? No. You could have used nails, you could have used glue, you could have used mortise and tenon or dovetail joints… Just because screws are arguably the most efficient fastener doesn’t mean they’re the only possible fastener.
In like fashion, we look at the proteins that allow the flagellum to rotate. With only a little imagination, we can contemplate them starting out much like cilia, only allowing motion in one plane. A chance mutation allows some out-of-plane motion and suddenly you have a primitive flagellum. Over millions of generations, mutations that make that primitive flagellum more efficient accumulate until you have a modern flagellum. So why do some bacteria still use cilia, you may ask? Because their ancestors didn’t get that chance mutation that allowed the cilia to bend out of plane. Or because *in their environment* flagella are more of a hindrance than a help. Or for any number of other reasons.
Someone should make a museum of the creation beliefs of various religions.
That building would have to be the size of The Pentagon to fit all those fantasies in !
Scientology should come out with a creation museum of their own, so the people who visit this joke can take their kids to learn all about the nonsense of Xenu and the space aliens too.
I want to know why people are so eager to believe this new belief system/interpretation of Earth science when it was never questioned before..? The ignorance isn’t the issue here, so much as the arrogance of this new movement is at hand. These people are basically saying they are smarter and better not only than every scientist before them, but that they are also smarter and better than every interpreter of the Bible before them…you know…including apparently all of the folks that actually wrote the book. I thought that book allowed for enough confusion based on interpretation already. I was sorely mistaken.
Keep on slugging down that Kentucky Bourbon and you’ll believe anything!