So a Geologist Walks Into a Creationist Museum …
Alberta is a land of opposites: Wide-open prairies set against foreboding mountains, liberal city centres and conservative countryside. Hell, even our winters and summers are like Jason Kenney and Rachel Notley.
For me, as a geologist who’s worked for 10 years in Canada, the Middle East and the UK, the biggest contrast this province has to offer is the proximity of the Big Valley Creation Science Museum to Drumheller’s Royal Tyrrell Museum – located in one of the world’s premier dinosaur fossil sites, the Alberta Badlands.
The village of Big Valley is 45 minutes away from Drumheller, and given its name, isn’t very large. Finding the Creation Science Museum didn’t take much work; it’s nestled between the Big Valley Historical Society and the Big Valley Inn. I knew I’d arrived at the right place when I caught sight of a full-sized Deinonychus adorning the entranceway.
Here you will meet Harry Nibourg, the charismatic owner. He used to be an oil field worker operating a gas well out of Sylvan Lake, and is now retired to run his museum full time. In 2017, he was elected to sit on the Big Valley village council. He’s an engaging person, extremely approachable and very keen to share his knowledge on all topics related to Creation Science. After dropping the bombshell that I was a geologist, he was even more interested in showing me around, and gave me a personal tour.
“This is my chance to convert a uniformitarian geologist,” as he calls me, “to the truth of Earth’s history.”
Harry was a nervous ball of energy, bouncing from display to display, and back again, with the manic intensity of a kid with new toys. Ideas poured out in a Flood as he led me around. There has clearly been some serious money spent on this place, a theme that seems to run hand in hand with Creation Science museums around the world – invariably located near important geological sites. There’s one in Ireland, too, near the Giant’s Causeway, a UN Heritage Site.
Harry took me first to the Bacterial Flagella exhibit – which he says is prime evidence that God designed the universe. This “bacterial motor” is so complex that there’s no way that it could have come together randomly to form the building blocks of life. As if to prove it, the museum’s Bacterial Flagella interactive display was running a little slow that day – caused by kids holding down the button too long, burning out the motor.
Central to the core of Creation Science belief is that the Earth is young, 6,000 years old or less. Harry informed me that members of the Creationist circle had sent various fossils and rock samples off for carbon dating – with all of them returning ages of less than 4,500 years.
Meanwhile, the entire scientific community agrees that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
Harry talked about the importance of carbon dating as evidence of a young Earth. However, he didn’t mention that while carbon dating is very accurate for young objects that are less than 20,000 years old, it doesn’t work very well past 50,000 years – because the amount of the Carbon-14 isotopes left in the sample doesn’t exceed the margin for error in testing. In other words, you eventually hit an upper limit – which according to the Creationists is 4,500 years. Modern scientists date older fossils with other isotopes, such as potassium-argon, or zircon. I didn’t ask Harry about those.
Probably my outright favorite section of the museum was the dinosaur exhibit. Dinosaurs have long been considered by scientists to be the major Achilles’ Heel of Creationism: How could fossils millions of years old exist on a 6,000-year-old Earth? And here they have some impressive replicas of Utahraptor skulls and even a T-Rex footprint.
What I learned delighted and saddened me at the same time. Harry explained that dinosaurs – formerly known as “dragons” – co-existed with humans up until the 16th Century.
“We hunted them to extinction,” Harry says, talking about how dinosaurs were killed off by marauding knights seeking glory. As “evidence,” he gave me a lovely hardback book called Dire Dragons. Gathered from cultures across the globe are various pieces of art including Mayan engravings, European tapestries and stonework, and Chinese carvings, showing very dinosaur-like beasts. It seems if you can draw a dinosaur in the same pose as a dragon you’re onto a winner.
The Biblical “Flood” is the main event for Creation Science. It’s a good story – God gets mad, hits reset and cleanses the Earth. They’ve made a lot of films about it. Tony Danza starred in the 1998 TV movie Noah – which was filmed near Drumheller.
Harry shows off a nifty scale replica of the Ark, and photographs from the various expeditions to find the exact location of its final resting place.
Some questions come up.
If the Earth was completely flooded, where did all the water come from?
“From both above and below us,” Harry explains. The standing theory is that Earth was once surrounded by a layer of water, 7 km thick, suspended high above the atmosphere. When God decided we’d gone far enough with our sinning, the water was released, and also forced up out of the Earth’s core, causing the Biblical Flood.
Where did the water go after the Flood?
“It’s in the oceans,” answers Harry. He explains that the downward pressure from the water on the Earth’s mantle led to a rapid upwelling of superheated rock in the region of what is now Eastern Turkey and the rapid rise of Mt. Ararat – the point of landfall for the Ark. (Incidentally, he claims, the Turkish coup attempt in 2016 was part of a cover-up to hide from the rest of the world that the true Ark had been discovered.)
So, about all of those animals – how did they fit? The Ark was box-shaped, not the stylized boat version that started showing up in religious art from the 17th Century. It had been ordered by God Himself to be exactly 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. With one cubit being about 20 inches, the Ark was approximately 1/8th the size of the Titanic.
There were two of each animal, as mentioned in the Bible, and they were all juveniles. How did they avoid eating each other? Harry claims “carnivorous behavior” is the result of stress. When the animals were on the Ark, “God kept them calm” so they didn’t feel the need to break out of their wooden cages to chow down on each other. Never mind lions, tigers and bears – there were T-Rex along for the ride!
The Flood is also used as a way for Creation Scientists to explain the fossil record. As the waters rose, Harry explains, the least complex life forms were caught in the rush, with the more advanced creatures making it further up the hill – before they, too, were swallowed by the Flood, to eventually turn into fossils. This of course doesn’t explain why we see the same chronological complexity in the fossils of marine creatures.
Another bummer about living in our modern world is our ever-shortening human lifespans. Noah, possibly the greatest survivor, lived for 950 years. The reason that humans lived longer in pre-Flood times, according to Creationists, is that the Earth’s water canopy shielded us from harmful cosmic radiation. In the 12 generations following Noah to Jacob, human lifespan decreased to an average of 147 years.
“Genetic entropy” – the theory that life has never actually evolved since God created it; it has only mutated – is also used as a mechanism to refute the theory of evolution. Mutations are caused by an absence of sections of genetic code, which are caused by the harmful radiation from space, taking things further away from the original Intelligent Design of each species – according to the Creationists.
Far from being offended by this material, as a scientist, I’d found my time in the Big Valley Creation Science Museum fascinating – two and a half hours being approximately 2:15 more than I thought I would last. I think it’s important to have your own ideas challenged sometimes – and what better way for Harry to challenge the mainstream scientific community than to set up shop just up the road from the mighty Royal Tyrrell. He proudly told me how that when he’d first opened up the museum, the University of Calgary used to send their undergraduate students for tours. After too many of them came back to school with their beliefs in “uniformitarian” geology shaken, he says, the university began to send their professors. (The U of C does not currently have a Creation Science program.)
While I was there, a retired English couple had been making their way around the exhibits. As they reached the end, Harry asked them what their professions were. Turns out they’re retired biology teachers.
Harry asked,” Did you understand what you were looking at, and did it change your minds?
In the polite manner that only the English can achieve, the husband replied, “Well, you see, I think your museum is a crock of shit.”
Harry offered that they should “agree to disagree.”
In addition to being a rock scientist, Stuart Bobbin is a rock musician who plays guitar and sings with the Edmonton band Hewson Grey.
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