We're in Chicago for a few days and the thing that has made the biggest impression upon me so far, if you don't count the way the TV in our motel room compels you to click past several cost-added options (such as "adult") in order to watch television shows, has been the "Our Evolving World" exhibit at the Field Museum. The usual way to conceive of our insignificance concerns the speck in the great blob that is our sun but what about the age of the third planet revolving around it?--about 4.5 billion years. If human civilization is thought of as being 10,000 years old--a stretch, considering that the Homeric epics were created only about 3000 years ago--then it is to the age of the earth as 1 is to 450,000. Let's say that you were modeling the age of the earth with a tape measure a mile long. The period of human civilization would take up about the last eighth of an inch. God, besides favoring out-of-the way playhouses, has a lot of patience.
The exhibit gives a straight account of such matters without any on-the-other-hand b.s. to mollify the crackpots among us, as is required of science textbooks published in the United States. At the very start of the exhibit I remember a sign explaining that "theory," as in "theory of evolution," means something very different from "hunch" before concluding, firmly, that in science not much is better attested to than evolution by natural selection.
For some adult entertainment back at the motel, I googled "creationist museum" and was soon reading, at the site of Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky:
PREPARE TO BELIEVE
The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden's rivers. . . .
It only gets worse. What's needed is more antidotes to this sort of determined stupidity.