FAITH AND SCIENCE

WASILLA — A former sporting goods store in a Parks Highway strip mall is probably the last place you’d expect to find bona fide dinosaur skeletons and 400-year-old books.

But then Origins: The Museum is not exactly your typical museum.

Curator Joel Lampe said he believes the exhibit is one-of-a-kind in that the museum has combined religious texts with scientific artifacts and treatises. The writings of Darwin, Newton and Copernicus stand next to an original King James Bible from 1611 and fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most museums separate science from religion.

“Show me a museum that shows Darwin, DNA, dinosaurs and the Dead Sea Scrolls on one floor,” Lampe said. “This is the first time this museum concept has ever been attempted.”

He said he could sum up the exhibit with a pair of questions: “Where do we come from? Why are we here?”

Science and religion attempt to answer those questions, but in Lampe’s mind, both are unanswerable.

“Where did God come from?” would be the question for religion. Science has never been able to answer, to his satisfaction, the question of, “where did matter come from?”

Another way the museum is atypical is it’s not connected to any university or institution, and the plan is not to show the pieces in any museums. Lampe said the idea there was to avoid letting any bias — be it pro-science or pro-religion — creep into the show.

“There is no agenda here other than ‘here’s the evidence, come to your own conclusions,’” Lampe said.

Lampe said the idea is to put the exhibit up in Wasilla then take it on the road. Wasilla is something of a test bed.

“Why Wasilla? Well, why not Wasilla?” Lampe said.

He added that there were a couple of factors playing in Wasilla’s favor. First was that Wasilla is a small town and is therefore a great place to get feedback from visitors.

Which, ultimately, is the goal of this first showing. Lampe said he’s not interested in money at all — he doesn’t expect to recoup even the insurance costs — but rather he wants to know what visitors think.

The second thing that played in Wasilla’s favor, Lampe said, in purposefully vague tones, had something to do with the city’s proximity to the man who owns everything on display.

Lampe wouldn’t explain, or say anything about that man, except that he’d acquired the items on display through auction houses, private collectors and from museums that were closing.

Everything on display is genuine — from fragments of the meteor believed to have killed off the dinosaurs to the 350-million-year-old trilobites to a microfiche copy of the King James Bible brought to the moon aboard Apollo 14 to the five complete dinosaur skeletons and one triceratops skull.

“There’s no such thing as a replica in this museum,” Lampe said.

If there’s an enemy of his show, Lampe said, it is Aristotle, who got so many things wrong. The ancient Greek philosopher was responsible for the long-standing misconception that the earth is the center of the universe, and yet stood unquestioned for a very long time. Lampe also doesn’t care for forces that would try to repress the evolution of human understanding or try to keep out new ideas in favor of the old.

And, watching Lampe in action tossing off dates, delving into biology, physics and cartography and explaining the various intersections of faith and science, it’s hard not to see where that antipathy comes from.

This stuff gets him excited. It’s an excitement that’s hard to miss, like when he’s standing next to the huge, wide-open jaws of a giant, prehistoric shark.

“What killed this thing was lack of food,” Lampe said. “It had to eat 15,000 pounds of food a day. I mean, just to sustain itself!”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.

If You Go:

What: Origins: The Museum

Where: The Shop Rite Mall, 449 W. Parks Highway

When: Oct. 20 through Nov. 28, open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.

How much: $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and children