ICR Discovery Center Vlog
Added 2024-10-02 20:17:32 +0000 UTCOkay, so
I'm (not-so anymore) freshly back from a trip down to Glen Rose, Tx to film a big chunk of the upcoming video. It was an exhausting week, the heat absolutely took a lot out of us, but we were very lucky with our timing and (heat aside) the weather was great and we were able to get some excellent footage of the tracks at Dinosaur Valley State Park.
We also stopped in at two Young Earth creationist museums while we were in the area, and these are my reflections on those.
Comments
Went to a private Christian school K-12, and I also thought the “dinosaurs lived alongside humans” stuff was crazy. Unfortunately, this was because I did not believe in dinosaurs. 😔
Emily Coleman
2024-10-21 17:00:29 +0000 UTCHating catholics is tempting. But we should remember that they don't listen to the pope when he is being too crazy. One time -one of the good popes- said 'No condomes' and 97% of catholics used them anyway, because it's a good way to have sex. I say give catholics a chance.
Zebedee Weetaluktuk
2024-10-19 02:09:21 +0000 UTCOh wow
Cadaverish
2024-10-08 21:43:46 +0000 UTCI paused on the First Law of Thermodynamics and just had to digest the surface-level understanding of conservation of energy that turned instantly into complete self contradiction in the space of a single paragraph. And then I read the moon series, which starts from arguing that the moon protects life on earth by keeping its rotation stable, to saying it must have been created because it is at exactly the right distance to be the same size in our sky as the sun, to pointing out that the moon is moving away from us –the third point therefore contradicting their use of the first two. It really is a pastiche of "science" and "reasoning", with the requirement that when one "argument" has been made, you immediately forget it and use the same anecdotes to prove the opposite.
polywogy
2024-10-08 13:54:07 +0000 UTCThere should be an achievement for finding the off-brand Argonian
Tom
2024-10-07 21:49:21 +0000 UTCWhoops, I don’t think I belonged here.
Konan Palmer
2024-10-07 17:46:55 +0000 UTC"I didn't know that, and I still don't." Is still a bit too cheeky.
Rankin Fithian
2024-10-06 15:17:04 +0000 UTCI have honestly met people who are fervently anti-feather dinosaur for the sole purpose that it's less "cool" and I wish I were making that up.
T. Delligatti
2024-10-05 20:17:39 +0000 UTCThe "oh wow" is a better response than I could have managed. Reasons why I'm kept away from business clients.
James Rule
2024-10-04 13:00:07 +0000 UTCAlways nice to see a fellow escapee! And yeah. The intention is definitely to keep people from ever being brave enough to leave the cult in the first place--I remember hearing several times, as a scary warning, that most people Leave The Faith (or whatever specific term they used for it) when they go off to college. I was thinking about the bit about the snake venom becoming "serum" in this video earlier, and it so perfectly encapsulates the whole bit of intellectual dishonesty going on. All you had to do is ask one followup question and that anecdote goes from "oh wow, snake bites were good actually in Eden" to "huh, I guess that whatever you did to that snake caused its venom to break down", and they had to know this because there's zero chance whatever scientist they asked (if, indeed, there was one) didn't explain this remark afterwards, but it's compelling enough if you never learn how to question it.
rs mason
2024-10-03 22:09:16 +0000 UTCI had near enough the exact same experience as you. (Home schooled, but for religious reasons and using all the same kind of textbooks.) I remember being taught an incredible strawman version of evolutionary science and why it didn't make sense. The obvious question was "Then why do all these smart people believe it?" and the answer on tap was "Because their hearts are hardened against God due to the pride of the flesh." I accepted it at the time, but it didn't sit right, answering a physical question with a metaphysical response. Several years later when I looked up the full story of the theory of evolution on my own, and it made total sense and fit with principles I had learned and proven in my college courses, it was instantly all over. A house of cards nearly two decades in the making, fallen flat with an abruptness that's almost funny looking back. My parents almost did me a service by teaching me a worldview so defiantly ignorant that I couldn't help but dismantle it once I escaped the filter bubble.
Josh B
2024-10-03 21:32:16 +0000 UTCOkay but the segment about the first museum you went to is honestly a great tourism ad. I would absolutely stop by there on a roadside attractions road trip
Kathy Clysm
2024-10-03 16:48:27 +0000 UTCI think you might be underrating the extent to which the anti-feathered dinosaurs thing is just them taking the opportunity to be anti-something that feels intuitively wrong and pro-something that feels intuitively right to their audience of people who just don’t think too hard about these things.
Jake Hightower
2024-10-03 07:03:35 +0000 UTCI had the misfortune of attending a fundamendalist Christian school K-12 growing up and one of the things that struck me even when I was still in the cult is their rhetoric about the evils of evolution and how to destroy the evil evolutionists with facts and logic always felt very clearly meant to preach to the choir. No attempt was ever made to convince non-creationists; rather, it was propaganda aimed at keeping creationists from straying from the fold, by giving them some thought-terminating cliches they can engage anytime they might accidentally be exposed to the truth. That it felt so fundamentally deceptive was I think a big part of why I was able to break free from all that; surely if you were confident in your ideas you wouldn't be dedicating an entire chapter in every science textbook on cool arguments you can use to argue the evolutionists into submission, or putting in random lines in history textbooks about how Homer "invented" the Greek religion?
rs mason
2024-10-03 05:29:26 +0000 UTCI had to go down the rabbit hole on YEC stuff a few years back due to a tiff with a student, and it is absolutely fascinating the levels to which they go to come across as respectable. There are entire creationist journals that look and read exactly like regular scientific literature and can even correctly recite many scientific processes and facts, like a discussion about the carbon cycle and how carbon dating works. It all seems above board until the narrative suddenly breaks off into discussions about the flood. It's almost like a cargo cult in a sense; they're convinced that if they look and act like scientists then they can somehow reap the rewards from a fickle group they don't fully understand. I think another reason the museum comes across as depressing is that creationism fundamentally lacks the joy that comes from scientific discoveries. Real science is frequently boring and frustrating, but what makes it worthwhile is the rare times when your pushes at the boundary of human knowledge bears fruit and you find something new and exciting, and when it happens you can't wait to share it with every single person you come across. Every day for a scientist comes with the potential for that excitement. Meanwhile, for a creationist every day comes with the existential dread of a new discovery. Rather than providing an interesting idea for study or a chance to open up whole new avenues of discussion, each inconvenient fact has to be retroactively worked into existing dogma. There's no joy of learning, only the rote mechanism of grinding fact into fiction and hoping you ground finely enough not to choke any of your flock. Small wonder they all pray for the rapture.
Erik Larsen
2024-10-03 03:17:06 +0000 UTCAm I the only person who paused on those touch-screen panels to read the text? And am I the only person who read them in Rick DeLano's smarmy voice?
Tom
2024-10-03 01:16:53 +0000 UTCOh wow. The first couple shots from the ICR struck me as interesting places to start a discussion. There are a lot of uncomfortable truths in how fine-tuned the universe is, and arguments like the various anthropic principles leave a lot of room for discussion. Especially if presented slightly askew. There is a fine line between "the universe necessarily formed this way so that humans observe" and "the universe was necessarily created this way so that humans exist". And that sort of discussion could easily lead into a much harder to refute space -- scientific cosmology can't prove that a creator god doesn't exist; at best, science can show that a creator god is not necessary. And, my understanding is that there is still a big question around cosmogony -- scientists have coherent things to say once the Big Bang happens, but why it happens is interesting. Of course, if you are the sort of museum creator who believes that a creator god was active on a particular Monday at the (northern) autumnal equinox some 6027 years ago, it isn't helpful to point out that science arguably says that a supernatural creator god could have created everything a moment ago but also that such a creator god might not have been necessary in the last 14ish billion years. It's impressive that over the course of a couple exhibits my view of ICR managed to tip from "laughably interesting" to "laughable hacks" to "utter hacks". As an agnostic particularly focused on cosmogony and epistemology, there are a lot of interesting questions out there. ICR doesn't seem to have anything to say, and even their vague gesturing lacks conviction (at least, in what exhibits were shown).
KevinR
2024-10-03 00:21:02 +0000 UTCKara seems cool.
Ross Vincent
2024-10-02 23:48:41 +0000 UTCI love that they apparently could read the baby dinosaur's face to know exactly what it was feeling and also the apparent global context for that feeling. Like, how exactly do they imagine the Flood happened? The Bible says it just rained a lot. It wasn't a tsunami or something.
Michael Chui
2024-10-02 23:17:59 +0000 UTCDisplaying a random coprolite and saying that it's evidence of the Biblical flood and is also a hatching dinosaur egg is funny on so many levels
Ted Koutz
2024-10-02 22:12:59 +0000 UTCCould those “framed” (cardboard-mounted) “paintings” (screens) of “scientists” (actors) be accurately called… Pseudoscientists? 😎
Chaz
2024-10-02 21:46:31 +0000 UTCwhen i saw the snake man I said "Oh wow!" out loud to myself
Robby Blum
2024-10-02 21:26:47 +0000 UTCSo what i'm taking away is Tom Landry is a fundamental part of divine creation.
Brain
2024-10-02 21:10:47 +0000 UTCI'm laughing picturing that grumpy man in the purple shirt following you around like a Disney Imagineer controlling those animatronic dinosaurs
Brett Phillips
2024-10-02 21:00:32 +0000 UTCoh wow
Sean Boerger
2024-10-02 20:50:37 +0000 UTC
