Roll Over, Charles Darwin!(a visit to Kentucky's Creation Museum)

Byline: BY A. A. GILL PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL BETTANY

ROLL OVER, CHARLES DARWIN!

On the 150th anniversary of Darwin's masterwork, the author visits Kentucky's Creation Museum, which has been battling science and reason since 2007. Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark: it's a breathtakingly literal march through Genesis, without any hint of soul

It's not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about. They could, though, if they were the bragging sort, brag about a quaint old optician's shop that will make you a new pair of spectacles in an hourby chance I am both shortsighted and had an hour to spare. As the nice lady gave my new lenses a polish, I asked her if she thought the eye was such a complicated and mysterious structure that it could have been created only in one inspired, farsighted moment by God and not by the blind trial and error of natural selection. "That kind of makes sense," she smiled. But then, Galileo invented a refracting telescope and the church locked him up for pointing out that, as he learned by observing the rest of the solar system, the earth isn't the center of the universe. Do you think that glasses might be the work of the Devil? She smiled again. "Would you like a hard or a soft case with that, sir?"

Perhaps the biggest thing the citizens of the "Queen of the West" have to tell a tall tale about is the Creation Museum. Twenty minutes outside of town, just over the Kentucky border, it was placed here with prayerful care to be accessible and available to the greatest number of American pilgrims coming by road, presumably in surreys with fringes on top. Build it and they will come. November was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species last February the 200th anniversary of the birth of its authorso now seems like a good time to see what the world looks like without the benefit of science. Or spectacles. Although both these anniversaries seemed to pass without ever troubling most Americansthere were precious few …