continuation of the interview...

LINDA HASKINS, TOURIST: My kids are in public school and they hear a lot about evolution. And I wanted them to know more because we teach creation and we want them to see what God has done.

GALLAGHER: At mid-day, the group pauses for a prayer of thanks.

CARTER: Father, our Lord, thank you so much for the animals that You've created. Help us to glorify You in Your precious name. Amen.

GALLAGHER: And then the families are off to the next stop on this creationism tour, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

TYSON THORNE, B.C. TOURS: Does everybody who wears a white lab coat, are they a scientist? Depends on what you believe.

GALLAGHER: Here, B.C. guides Bill Jack and Tyson Thorne take over.

JACK: It is not the evidence that is in question. It is what? The interpretation of the evidence. Fossils are -- boring. They're piles of dead things, right?

GALLAGHER: In the background, silent, fuming, the museum's vice president. Richard Stuckey's been a chief curator for nearly 20 years.

JACK: Are you going to tag along with us?

RICHARD STUCKEY, VICE PRESIDENT, MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE: If that's all right with you.

JACK: That's fine and dandy.

GALLAGHER: Bill and Tyson spend the next two hours trying to dismantle Darwin's theory of evolution.

THORNE: According to evolution, millions of years ago, there were dinosaurs and lizards. And millions of years later, they turned into things like turtles, and iguanas, and ostriches, and polar bears, and chimpanzees.

And right here is all of the evidence for what they believe. What's here? Nothing.

GALLAGHER: The museum's displays, mere fiction, just artwork.

JACK: This exhibit is called, how old is the earth. How old is the earth?

GALLAGHER: Billions of years, says science. Not so, says B.C. Tours.

THORNE: We can look at the genealogy that's contained both in Genesis and in Matthew. We can piece enough history together with enough families to trace our heritage all the way back to Adam and Eve. And from the time of the fall on forward, roughly 6,000 years has passed.

GALLAGHER: Most scientists will tell you that's nowhere near the time needed for evolution.

JACK: Because evolution is not good science. It's a pseudoscience, but it does one thing well. It gets rid of the need for God.

GALLAGHER: By this point, Richard Stuckey is fed up. He's too polite to interrupt the tour, but he can't hide his dismay.

STUCKEY: I was offended in a sense that he was talking to very young children, and saying to the young children something that is absolutely false.

GALLAGHER: He takes us behind the scenes, to the big bone room where Charles Darwin keeps watch over dinosaur fossils millions of years old.

STUCKEY: These are authentic bones. They still have some of the original organic material preserved in them. This isn't art, this is real. This is authentic stuff.

GALLAGHER: But in this debate, one man's fact is another man's fraud.

JACK: It comes down to a question of, whom are you going to trust on this issue? It's what it really is. Is it going to be man's word or God's word? That's what you've got to ask. Whom are you going to trust?

GALLAGHER: At the end of the day, that's the fundamental question. How ordinary people view the universe in which they were born.

(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: The tyrannosaurus rex lies down with the lamb at a museum being built in the state of Kentucky. The T-Rexs there also talk and proclaim they were made on the same day as Adam.

The Creation Museum is the brainchild of a group called Answers in Genesis. Jonathan Rugman has a look there.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JONATHAN RUGMAN, ITV NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Amid the rolling hills of Kentucky the silhouettes of two stegosauruses mark the beginning of an extraordinary journey back to the dawn of time. A time when Adam and Eve walked in the Garden and dinosaurs were their friends.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You've got flesh-eating, man-eating dinosaurs basically interacting with children, they're playing with other animals.

RUGMAN: Welcome to the Creation Museum, the history of the world which turns the theory of evolution on its head. This scene, heresy to scientists, but not to the museum's cofounder, who believes dinosaurs were in the Garden of Eden just 6,000 years ago.

(on camera): These dinosaurs, they almost look like pets because they're so close to the girl.

MIKE ZOWATH, CREATION MUSEUM: The Bible says that man was created on day six. The animals were created on day six, so logic -- if the Bible is true, logically they would both be interacting together until the dinosaurs died out.

RUGMAN (voice-over): The Bible doesn't actually mention dinosaurs and scientists say they died out long before man, but this place is full of them.

The Evangelical Answers in Genesis movement raising $25 million to build a museum with one basic message: that God created the world within one very busy week.

ANNOUNCER: It's time to take up the sword of God's word.

RUGMAN (on camera): To its critics, this place is nothing more than a Hollywood theme park. But to its many supporters, it's a museum devoted to historical truth, the latest frontline in America's culture war between scientific theory and religious belief.

(voice-over): In the museum's fossil room, Mr. Zowath shows me a dinosaur specimen commonly dated as 450 million years old.

(on camera): I mean, the scientific establishment would say that dinosaur is millions of years old.

ZOWATH: Correct.

RUGMAN: What do you say?

ZOWATH: That dinosaur is 6,000 years old based on what the Bible says about dinosaurs and when they were created.

RUGMAN (voice-over): This time scale based on Biblical genealogy, going all the way back to what will eventually be the museum's star attraction, the Garden of Eden itself.

ZOWATH: So we're walking into a Garden of Eden look.

RUGMAN: A plastic reptile previously seen in the film "Crocodile Dundee" now guarding the birthplace of mankind.

ZOWATH: And God creates Eve and brings Eve to Adam and that will be replicated somewhere around here, somewhere in this general area.

RUGMAN: And inside what they call their war room, this museum's designers are not some freakish minority. A poll last year suggesting that only about 1/4 of Americans believe in evolution, almost half espousing the view that man, created in God's image, does not share any common ancestry with monkeys at all.

HENRY BRINTON, PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER: I think creationists feel very threatened by the advances of science.

RUGMAN: Clergyman Henry Brinton, a trained biologist as well as priest, now so worried by the rise of Biblical fundamentalism that he's teaching Darwin in Sunday school to counter the creationist message.

BRINTON: I would not want my children taken to that museum by a science teacher and exposed to that material as a scientific approach to understanding the world because it is not. The scientific record, the geologic record, does not support a 6,000 year old earth.

RUGMAN: The word made flesh here in Kentucky and already a major tourist draw, religious Americans flocking here over a year before the museum is due to open.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And it affirms what we believe.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What we believe, right.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That God created the world.

RUGMAN: The Reichs (ph) from Illinois, delighted with a natural history museum which contradicts every other.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Even my college degree from the University of Michigan, which has a wonderful natural history department, tried to teach me that evolution was correct, and I said no, I'm not going to believe you.

RUGMAN: School children lured no doubt by these impressive animatronics and a 40-foot high tyrannosaurus rex, which we're told boarded Noah's Ark two by two despite its carnivorous grin.

(on camera): If Noah took the T-Rex, wouldn't he have eaten the other animals?

ZOWATH: Well, no. The fear of man wasn't put into animals until after the animals came off the ark, after the flood, according to Genesis 6-9.

RUGMAN: But you might come across a book that explains evolution or scientific theory in such a way that makes you think, well, maybe the Bible isn't the be all and end all.

ZOWATH: And the answer is, that really isn't going to happen. The Bible is the be all and end all, it's our authority.

RUGMAN (voice-over): Jonathan Rugman, Channel 4 News, Petersburg, Kentucky.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: We take another break. When we come back, why some Americans simply don't believe modern biology.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MANN (voice-over): Church and state are separate in U.S. law, up to a point. President Bush recently tried to nominate a candidate to the U.S. Supreme Court at least in part, he said, because of her religion.

GEORGE W. BUSH, U.S. PRESIDENT: People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers. They want to know Harriet Miers' background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions.

Part of Harriet Miers' life is her religion.

(END VIDEO CLIP)