Representing the ‘world that then was’ …
by Stacia McKeever
13 October 2003
The shell of the Creation Museum (located near Hebron, Kentucky
USA) is quickly taking shape—the walls are up, the roof is on, and the concrete
floor slabs have been poured. Thanks to the Lord’s provision through the generous
gifts of His people, everything that has been built is paid for. We still
have a long way to go, though—including designing and building the Museum’s
interior. The exhibit design team is working diligently, developing the various
areas that our guests will experience as they journey through a visual presentation
of the ‘7 C’s of history’ (Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe,
Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation). Throughout the Museum, guests will
learn how to answer the attacks that undermine the Bible’s authority in areas
such as geology, biology,
anthropology, cosmology,
etc., and will find out how science really confirms biblical history.
Although the Bible gives the ‘big picture’ of what happened and when
it happened, we’ve taken on the huge challenge of bringing that picture to
life. The Creation Walk section of the ‘walk through history’
begins with a brief overview of what happened on each of the six days of creation,
and proceeds to highlight the creation of Adam, the naming of the animals, the creation
of Eve and the brief time in Eden. The problem? We don’t know
what Adam looked like, we don’t know what the animals—the original created
kinds—looked like, we don’t know what Eve looked like, we don’t
know what Eden looked like, we don’t know … . Get the picture?
Adam and Eve in a pre-Curse world.
Recently we sat down with Dr Carl Wieland, CEO of [CMI]-Australia,
to hash out ways to portray the world as it was before the Flood. For example,
based on the study of genetics, we are relatively certain that Adam and Eve’s
skin and eyes were
middle-brown in color, but was Adam’s hair tightly curled, or wavy,
or just plain straight? Did he have a full beard? Were Eve’s eyes
almond-shaped? In order to help ‘flesh out’ the physical descriptions
of our first ancestors, Carl suggested (among other things) coming up with a ‘composite
sketch’ of the characteristics of all the various people groups combined into
two people. Now there’s a challenge!
Another example of the problems with presenting a pre-Flood world: what did the
animals look like? Obviously the various created ‘kinds’ weren’t
as speciated out as they are today, so what did the ancestor of, say, the sheep/goat
kind look like? Which structures now used as defense-attack mechanisms were
already present in the original ‘very good’ world, and which came about
as a result of the Fall? It’s hard to tell, but recent
hybridization observations are giving us hints of how the original kinds
may have appeared. Our artists anticipate some challenging—but fun—work
as they attempt to literally piece together some of those original animals.
And what about Eden? Since it was destroyed in
the Flood, along with the rest of the world, we really have no idea where it was
originally, or what it looked like. Was Eden on top of a mesa or a mountain?
Was it a dense forest, or a sprawling garden with lots of open space? Or portions
of both? What did the original ‘plant kind’ ancestors look like?
Although the Bible isn’t specific about a lot of these things, we’ll
take what we do know from observation of today’s world and the history
in Genesis, and combine it with lots of ‘sanctified imagination’ (based
on biblical principles). Our prayer is that the result will be glorifying
to the Lord, true to the Bible and a blessing to our guests, as we encourage them
to stretch their own thinking, while teaching them that the Word of God can be trusted
from the very first verse.
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