Visit to the Adventist Creationist Center on the banks of the Paraná River

Contemporary Argentina is composed of an overlapping of geological, cultural, and museum peculiarities. Museums, as is well known, respond to waves, trends that impose an architectural style, a graphic design, or the mere need to possess a collection.

The itinerary begins on the banks of the Paraná River, visiting very recent creations such as the Malba Puertos , built in 2024 on a 21st-century concrete stratum. Then, crossing the river via a railway complex with abandoned trains on their tracks and trees peeking through the windows. A little further on, you'll cross the Entre Ríos dunes of Ibicuy and, that same afternoon, you'll arrive at Libertador San Martín, Puiggari , or any of the prosperous villages of the Volga Germans who arrived at the end of the 19th century. In San Martín , we recommend the museums housed in the Adventist University of the Plata , home to the sanatorium and the famous healthy living clinic.

Just a few meters away, since 2023, there is the Creationist Resource Center and the Center for the History of the Colony and Adventist Work in the Country. Both, impeccably designed, are located in the homes of the professors who, in the past, came from the United States to teach at the agricultural and religious school, which was transformed into a university in 1990 and recognized by CONEAU ( National Council of the Argentine National Council) during the 2001/2002 catastrophe.

That site, called Bella Vista , had been created in 1898, although it was also known as “Hill of Hope”, a sister city to Loma Linda, California , where almost half of the residents are members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church . In 1904, this church, founded in 1863 and guided by Ellen White , bought a complex in that area of ​​the United States to create a sanatorium, a nursing school and, in 1905, Loma Linda Foods , another activity in which they stand out globally, including in San Martín which, according to the 2022 census, has about 9,500 inhabitants, which increases thanks to the 3,400 students at the university.

The museum, as part of it, was named in honor of David Rhys (1915-2014), born into a Baptist family in Gaiman, Chubut, who, after converting to Adventism, sent David to Entre Ríos. In the 1940s, Rhys became interested in the geology and paleontology of this area, which, since the voyages of Charles Darwin and Alcide D'Orbigny , has been one of the country's fossil meccas. He began collecting the remains of extinct mammals while earning his diplomas from the Paraná Normal School and later, a degree in theology and Near Eastern archaeology from the Washington Adventist Seminary and a doctorate in geosciences from Riverside, California.

The Rhys Museum houses part of his collection, as well as those of other amateurs and professionals in the region, such as Carlos Federico Steger (1925-2018) from Tucumán, a theology graduate from the Colegio Adventista del Plata , a professor of Economics at the National Teacher Training Institute , a museologist, rector of the South American Headquarters of the Geosciences Research Institute (GRI) of the UAP, a member of the Argentine Paleontological Association and the Association of Natural Sciences of the Litoral . Until his death, Steger traveled throughout Argentina and abroad giving lectures on the confrontation between evolutionism and creationism, geology, and the Great Flood. In addition, he explored the ravines of Mesopotamian streams and rivers and other paleontological reserves in the country and in North America.

The director of the Center—open every day except Fridays and with free admission—is Samuel Abdala, who collaborates with researchers from Conicet (National Institute of Technology) in Diamante, Entre Ríos . He studied geology at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and earned his doctorate from the GRI (National Research Institute of Geosciences) in Loma Linda. The author of a series of geological-creationist adventures (Intrigue at Hearst Castle, presented at this year's International Book Fair), he moved to Argentina to direct this center, which houses skeletal pieces and models of large Pampas mammals: glyptodonts, saber-toothed tigers, and a mastodon, whose defenses are on display in the museum. Everything, except for a Patagonian dinosaur egg and the Stegers rocks, is of local origin.

These are pieces that the Center keeps labeled, without religious interpretation and quoting Darwin, as in the case of the toxodonta, which, dated to the "Quaternary formations," is described as one of the fossil mammals that most caught his attention. The model on display is based on the image published in 1988 in the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals: A Visual Who's Who of Prehistoric Life , a work coordinated by the Scottish popularizer Dougal Dixon. Abdala is not responsible for either the assembly of the museum or the models, which were already in place upon arrival and were made in Rosario and other Argentine cities.

The Adventist view of evolution appears separate from the fossils, on panels on another wall that explain Creation from the perspective of intelligent design and the seven-day chronology. It is here that it is worth referring to the American historian Ronald Numbers (1942–2023), who in 1992 published The Creationists , a work on the anti-evolutionism of some English-speaking Protestant groups and their geology structured around the biblical Flood.

The second edition of 2006 highlighted the importance that, in that same context, had acquired the idea that evolution, far from being governed by contingency, was governed by the Creator's master plan. One of the most interesting chapters dealt with the founding of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) outside San Diego and the Geoscience Research Institute (GRI). These initiatives, in the late 1950s, were initiated by a group of Baptist and Adventist geologists and paleontologists who wished to explore these areas from a religious perspective.

Today, the Loma Linda Institute of Geosciences (GIS)—where Rhys worked and Abdala trained—has become the most important center for creationist research, including laboratories and doctoral programs. From there, Rhys promoted geoscience symposia in Spanish-speaking countries and the opening of the GRI in Entre Ríos, which Stegers directed.

When Numbers published his work in 1992, the Adventist Church had 5 million followers worldwide; today it has reached 25 million. Those years coincided with the emergence of facilities that use the format of a natural history museum as a pulpit for creationism and intelligent design. But they also coincided with a demographic shift in Latin American religiosity, which has shifted toward the various evangelical branches and, with it, toward topics previously absent from the public arena.

Roman Catholicism, let us remember, has remained unfazed by the origin or age of the Earth, or rather, it hasn't intervened in questions of evolution for over a century. Not surprisingly, Numbers' work focused on the United States, Australia, and Great Britain , a region where museums emerged, comprising modest halls but also monumental Disney World- style installations.

South America had nothing like it until five years ago. While the Brazilian Creationist Society dates back to 1972 and Stegers had directed the GRI since 1991, the first Adventist museums began to proliferate in 2020. Today, the list includes the Orígenes Center in the Galapagos Islands, Cooksonia in Cochabamba, and centers in Chillán (Chile), Ingeniero Coelho, and Cachoeira (Brazil) . The Galapagos Museum, located just a few meters from the Darwin Foundation, offers an alternative to tourists who don't want to consider the islands "the cradle of evolution."

But our trip was more modest and concluded with a stop in Diamante , where a monument commemorates the marine invasion of the Miocene , a time that, for many, never existed. Like the customs house and the port railway, which are still there, though no one sees them and many wonder if they're just another remnant from when the river was a sea.