PZ Myers, who was the keynote speaker at the Secular Student Alliance annual conference the day after the Creation Museum visit, put it very clearly: To be able to really understand and defend your worldview, you need to understand the worldviews that are different from it. When you are presented with something that so blatantly flies in the face of what you believe or the way that you clearly feel the world works—most of us are very scientifically minded people, and some of those things in the Creation Museum were an affront to the science through which we view the world—the only way to deal with these things that so drastically differ from what you see is not to ignore them, but to go and see them and publicize them and make it public what is being said and why it may not hold up under a rational evaluation, or why it’s different, and why you feel that way. Just ignoring it lets it continue, whereas going to understand it makes you aware of it, and makes you better prepared to defend your own worldview.

Now, I was absolutely blown away by how accommodating and friendly the Creation Museum staff were. They knew we were coming; they knew exactly who we were. And there had been a little bit of tension about the purpose of our visit before we went. But after we got there, the staff were just phenomenally polite and kind and helpful, and the security guards were very polite and helpful to us. We were expecting more tension, so to have everything so polite and so smooth was absolutely great. As an organizer, that was the biggest thing for me: just how well their staff handled our group.

As far as personally, seeing the extent to which they took the literalism that is written in the Bible and turned it into an interactive, visual, explained view of the world was just phenomenal. It’s beyond my imagination, and I’m glad that people have been able to sit down and put it into sight and into words to explain it.

Lyz Liddell, senior campus organizer of the Secular Student Alliance.