Northwest Science Museum is a creationist museum in Idaho. It opened on June 14, 2014.[2][3] The museum's directors plan to create a 350,000 square foot facility including a full-scale model of Noah's Ark near Boise, Idaho, replacing the museum's current "Vision Center" near the state capitol in Boise.[4] The museum's founders say that their collection of Ica stones offer proof that humans and dinosaurs coexisted,[5] that out-of-place artifacts constitute "damaging evidences [sic] against evolution",[6] and they can show with other evidence the Earth is 6,000 years old and it was physically possible for Noah to bring dinosaurs on board the Ark.[3][7]
Inspiration
Fundraising documents published by the founders cite the Creation Museum in Kentucky as establishing the viability of a similar concern in Idaho.[8]
Collection
The museum's collection includes petrified wood, fossil dinosaur eggs, the Ica stones mentioned above and a replica of the "Lone Star" mastodon skull.[9] They present the fossils as having been formed about 4,500 years ago in the Biblical Flood.[9]
Criticism
Almost three years before the museum opened, Hemant Mehta said "this place is going to be ripe for mockery...misnamed twice over — it's not science and it's hardly a museum".[10]The Raw Story called Northwest Science Museum's Ica stones "fraudulent" and "a favorite artifact of many conspiracy theorists".[11] London's The Independent newspaper filed the museum's opening under "weird news".[2] A Salon.com editorial called it "beyond frustrating [n]ot just because of the pseudo-science dribbling out, but the fact that young children are being fed nonsense under the guise of 'true science'".[7]Salon also found "much to take issue with — right down to the organization’s misleading use of the terms 'science' and 'museum.'"[7]
References
^Prospectus(PDF), Northwest Science Museum, c. 2010, pp. 9–13, archived from the original(PDF) on 2013-03-19, retrieved 2015-03-30
