Creation Flood Evidence Museum displays counter evolution claims
GOODWOOD, ON—To curator Martin Legemaate, the hundreds of rocks and fossils on display at the Southern Ontario Creation Flood Evidence Museum are more than just beautiful examples of God's creation—they are proof that the theory of evolution is wrong.
Evidence of both Noah's flood and the biblical creation account can be found right here, "in our own backyard," Legemaate says. He collected almost all of the samples himself, most of them from Ontario.
The museum is housed in the basement of Goodwood Baptist Church, about 20 minutes north of Markham. It may be small, but it has deep roots in an international creationist movement. Legemaate says he had tried to "blend evolution and God together," before hearing a talk by John MacKay, international director of Creation Research, a ministry that stands against the philosophy of evolution.
"He really challenged me to look [at the evidence] for myself," Legemaate says. "My jaw dropped."
Legamaate, a home painter, began going on fossil trips with MacKay and helping him at speaking engagements. He collected his own specimens for years, before finding a home for them at Goodwood Baptist.
Evidence in the rocks
Legamaate points to rock samples with deep groove marks made by "quick-moving water." He invites visitors to rub together two sedimentary rocks and smell the pungent evidence of crude oil. Both are proof, he says, of a major flood as described in Genesis. He adds that while evolutionists would claim both phenomena would have been caused "by a succession of small, local floods…they wouldn't have a satisfactory answer."
"Something big must have happened in the past," he says. "Not a tiny piddley flood. Rock like this covers most of northeastern North America, from Sudbury all the way down to Pennsylvania. Evolutionists have no explanation for the amount of coal and crude oil buried."
Two other cases display "evidence for creation," including comparing an ancient snail fossil to a modern shell. "Snails, no matter how many millions of years ago, produced after their own kind," Legemaate says.
Visitors can pick up a hammer and chisel and break open rocks to find trilobites fossils inside. The extinct marine creatures are further proof of intelligent design, Legemaate says, pointing out how their intricately designed eyes enabled them to see underwater. "Their eyes are Fresnel lenses!" he says. "These creatures, which evolutionists would consider primitive, have space-age technology eyes!
"There's tons of creation information out there," he adds. "But when you get the information and the rocks together it creates a much more powerful presentation. Here you actually can break open a rock and see a trilobite. Here you smell the rock that is chock full of oil."
Understanding of God
For Legamaate, belief in a literal interpretation of the Genesis stories lead to a right understanding of God Himself.
"I think if I had heard the creation evidence as a child," he says, "I would have seen God in a better light sooner, rather than a God who used millions of years of death, struggle and disease in His creative process, and then turned around and called it 'good.'
"God and evolution aren't compatible," he adds. "If a Christian believes in evolution, then he must believe the rock record is millions of years old…and that God used evolution in His creative process. And we know the rock record contains…deformities and fossils with two heads. There are actually two-headed freaks in the fossil record! And God said that was good?
"So I like to tell as many people as possible, especially kids, the creation message—that there really is evidence out there for Noah's flood and creation. That God is a loving God, but something happened in the Garden of Eden, and that's the reason why there are dead things in rocks."
Is it true?
Cell biologist and author Kenneth Miller couldn't disagree more.
"I think that the first duty of any Christian is to the truth," he says." So that the first question that any Christian should have about evolution is, "Is it true?" Not, "Is it consistent with my reading of the book of Genesis?"
Miller is a biology professor at Brown University in Rhodes Island and author of Finding Darwin's God and Only a Theory. He has also been debating creationists for almost 30 years.
Miller's first such debate was against Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research in 1981. He says, "It bothered me greatly, as a Christian myself, that so many falsehoods and [mis]representations were being made in the name of faith."
He says the essence of the arguments put forth by places like the Creation Flood Evidence Museum "is that astronomers, cosmologists, geologists and biologists are all completely wrong about the age of the universe, the age of the solar system, the age of the earth and the age of fossils throughout time.
"Creation museums, like the one in Ontario, are founded upon a series of falsehoods," he says. "The falsehoods include the notion of instantaneous creation of living organisms. The notion that the geologists' ages are incorrect, and that the [rock record] actually represents the work of a single 40 day, 40 night flood, and that the physical sciences are engaged in a vast conspiracy against the Christian faith. None of these things are true. And it is outrageous to embark on an enterprise to teach the school children of Ontario such misrepresentations."
Miller is concerned that in trying to subjugate scientific research to a literal understanding of Genesis, creationists not only contradict scientific evidence, but omit research which doesn't support their claims.
"That kind of argument strikes me as profoundly dishonest," Miller says.
"I think what the narrative in Genesis teaches us is that the evil, the sin, the perversion that is in the world is a result of man's rejection of God's law or God's plan for human existence, and I think that's something which certainly all Christians can agree on.
"Here is what evolution teaches us. Evolution tells us that we live on a planet that is simply bursting with evolutionary possibilities, and that we are part of a fabric of life that covers this planet and that gave rise to every living thing we see. I think it is remarkably easy to see the process of evolution as fulfilling God's providential plan for His creation."
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