I first heard Ken Ham speak in Mississippi State’s Humphrey Coliseum, his Australian accent and commanding grasp of genetics enough to keep even me – a tired mom without a single scientifically-inclined bone in her entire body – interested for hours. After those lectures, my husband and I went home with a stack of Ham’s books and the hope of one day visiting the place he was, at the time, only dreaming of building. Ten years later we did.

Snow was falling this past Saturday in Hebron, Kentucky, when we arrived at the Creation Museum, a unique, 70,000 square-foot facility that opened in 2007 and attracted more than a million visitors in its first four years. Run by the non-profit ministry Answers in Genesis (not to be confused with answers in Google), the museum has a simple goal: defending the biblical account of creation in a culture that no longer believes it is true.

That’s right. No big bang theories there. The Creation Museum just might be the only science museum around that purports a Christian worldview, and at a cost of $27 million to construct, its Bible-in-3D look is about as far from a flannel graph Sunday School presentation as you can get.

With a walk through history as its centerpiece, the facility has interactive exhibits similar to the high-tech stuff of Disneyworld, right down to its life-like models with dirty feet and moving eyeballs. That’s thanks to Peter Marsh, an artistic genius who also designed the popular “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

On the day we visited, the pressing crowd included all age groups, from silver-haired seniors to toddlers sitting high atop their dads’ shoulders. Lines lingered long over petrified logs and a clutch of fossilized dinosaur eggs from China, then wandered through an archaeological site where two paleontologists were shown to reach different conclusions about a bone discovery: “Can you dig it? We’re looking at the same facts, but from a different perspective,” a nearby sign reads.

Later, the crowd would watch footage of the Scopes trial and view holograms exposing the anatomy of Lucy, the poster girl/chimp for human evolution. Remember her from your junior high science book?

In addition to the walk-through area, visitors could choose to visit other venues, like a planetarium, petting zoo, insectarium, zip line and canopy tour, botanical gardens and my favorite, the special effects theater.

The Creation Museum draws crowds from all over, but it also draws more than its share of controversy. The biggest beef, as expressed by PBS’ Bill Nye the Science Guy in a recent debate with Ham, is that creationist/young earth beliefs will stifle scientific progress – sort of like when Galileo was forced to recant his beliefs in a sun-centered universe. Ham answered that argument with examples of several notable creation-believing scientists, including one who invented MRIs.

Guys like Nye shouldn’t be overly concerned, though, since all our tax-payer supported institutions lean his way. Take Mammoth Cave National Park, located just two hours south of the Creation Museum, for example. The phrase “millions of years ago” is listed in displays so often that it has an abbreviated form – MYA – all its own.

But for those who find the “goo-to-you”, “molecule-to-man” model of how we came to be hard to swallow, there is, thankfully, at least one museum left that won’t give you heartburn. Ten hours to Kentucky just might be worth the trip.

 Wesson resident Kim Henderson is a freelance writer who writes for The Daily Leader. Contact her at kimhenderson319@gmail.com.