Utterly Meaningless

That reminds me of a story of my own family. We were in Atlanta visiting my family and were driving to a restaurant with our boys and my oldest nephew who would have been probably 8 at the time.
My oldest was reading a book about dinosaurs when they got to the facts at the end. My nephew refused to even listen to or read the facts because, as he already knew, the earth is not millions of years old.
Growing up Baptist, I never even believed in dinosaurs or the factual knowledge based on fossils. We were basically led to believe that the scientists had to be wrong, that the evidence found in fossils was being misinterpreted. We were taught that those “crazy scientists” could reconstruct a false dinosaur from what was actually the tooth of a very common pig.

Hey, Daryl. Is there a post on your blog in which you explain your beliefs about this sort of thing? I’m not sure how to begin to search for that. Thanks, Gary

“Beliefs?” Science is not properly characterized as a “belief.” Don’t fall into the “evolution is a religion” BS trap.

Try YEC, creationists, creationism, or ID.

In a nutshell, I’m a scientist. The best evidence we have shows that the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old and that dinosaurs and humans are separated by about $65M years of evolution. YECs (Young Earth Creationists) such as the ones in this article reject all of the scientific data in place of using the Bible as a science book.

This fine example of strict bible literalism is downright comical. Just because the english translation from the original hebrew comes out as “day” doesn’t mean that the word actually means 1 revolution, or 24 hours, or anything of the sort. As I have understood it, the word has a number of possible interpretations, one of which simply implies an indeterminate amount of lapsed time.

I also laughed at the spurious and specious addition of dinosaurs to the book of Genesis. I read that passage only a few weeks ago and don’t recall any mention of dinosaurs being created on the sixth day, leave alone the previous five. Rigidly forced interpretation of the addition of animals to include dinosaurs is something of a stretch.

I find it interesting that so many are willing to jump through intellectual flaming hoops in a vain attempt to make logical the creation because or in spite of evidence one way or the other. It is still possible to believe that God created the world without having to believe that he did so in a 144 hour timeframe, and it is not impossible that God used and uses evolution to further things along.

Again, coming back to biblical literalism, I find it amusing that though it is apparent that metaphors and imagery are used in many places in the bible, some people doggedly will adhere to the belief that the words of the bible are incontrovertable fact. I would wager that many of those who believe so are ignorant of hebrew traditions in doctrine, teaching methods and culture, perhaps grossly so. If they knew even a small fraction of what there is to know in these areas they wouldn’t go around trumpeting such silliness, especially not so smugly certain in the correctness of their beliefs.