The Museum of Creation and Earth History was created by the Institute for Creation Research, an organization founded in 1970 to produce and promote the case that Genesis accounts of creation are literally and scientifically accurate. The ICR's approach has always combined religious conviction with claims of scientific validity — the organization employs people with advanced degrees who produce papers and books arguing for young-earth positions. The museum was conceived as a public-facing venue for this work: a place where visitors could see the arguments made visual, where the exhibits would communicate what the ICR's published materials argued in prose. It opened in Santee, in San Diego's East County, in 1992.

The museum's central assertion — that the Earth is 6,000 to 10,000 years old rather than the 4.5 billion years established by radiometric dating, stratigraphy, and multiple independent lines of scientific evidence — shapes every exhibit inside. Dinosaur displays present these animals as contemporaries of early humans, a claim contradicted by a fossil record that separates the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs from the appearance of Homo sapiens by approximately 65 million years. The Grand Canyon, one of the most studied geological formations on Earth and a textbook example of slow sedimentary deposition and erosion, is presented as a product of rapid catastrophic flooding during the biblical flood. The museum also contains a walk-through Garden of Eden and scale models of Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel, situating these as historical rather than allegorical events.

The Institute for Creation Research moved its headquarters from California to Dallas, Texas in 2008, and with the move came a separation from the Santee museum. The facility was sold to the Life and Light Foundation, led by Tom Cantor, which continued operating it under the same name and with the same educational mission. In 2013, the San Diego Museum Council denied the museum accreditation — a decision that placed it outside the consortium of institutions whose members exchange exhibits, collaborate on programs, and meet professional standards for collection management and scholarly practice. The denial was not surprising given the museum's explicit rejection of scientific consensus, but it formalized the institution's status as something apart from the mainstream museum world.

Museums make arguments about the world. The argument the Museum of Creation and Earth History makes is that the world is very young and was made in the manner described in Genesis. That argument is maintained in the face of evidence from physics, chemistry, biology, paleontology, and geology that points in a different direction. The museum exists because a substantial number of Americans hold young-earth creationist beliefs, and because those beliefs are important enough to some families and communities that they seek out educational experiences that affirm rather than challenge them. Whatever one thinks of the content, the museum is a genuine artifact of American religious culture — a physical institution built to make a set of claims about the age of the Earth, maintained for decades, and visited by people who find the claims worth making.