noise to signal

More on the creationists

Saedigh is trying to give me an aneurism by forwarding me more stories about fundamentalist idiots.

The Bible as museum guide

God made dinosaurs on the sixth day of Creation, the same day he made people, according to Rusty Carter's interpretation of the Bible.

"The word 'dinosaur' was not invented back then, but in Job 38, there's two large creatures, behemoth and leviathan," said Carter, director of the Littleton-based Biblically Correct Tours, as he prepared to give his first tour of the school year.

Either or both creatures were probably dinosaurs, he said.

Nineteen kids trailed behind Carter on Saturday morning at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, most of them nodding knowingly as their tour guide pointed out flaws in exhibits.

"What do you guys think? Is the world really 4.5 billion years old?" Carter asked. "Nonsense!" one girl called out. The adults in the group smiled.

Carter said demand for his religious tours of secular sites has been continual since the company's founding in 1988, but the media's attention has exploded recently as local and state school boards across the country debate how to teach evolution.

[ . . . ]

For Tanner Cameron, a fifth- grade student at Shaffer Elementary, a public school in Littleton, life's history finally began to make sense Saturday.

"Ohhhh," he said as Carter's colleague Tyson Thorne explained how fossils form. Thorne's story included water, mud, sudden catastrophe ...

"They're fossilized from the flood!" Cameron exclaimed. "So maybe the dinosaurs became extinct because of the flood?"

The biblical flood fossilized dinosaurs, Thorne said, but dinosaurs made it onto the ark - all the animals did. He suspects Noah brought baby dinosaurs (because who would want an adult tyrannosaur around?), and the creatures succumbed to overhunting or climate change.

As I said in response, "Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah."

I once asked a very orthodox Yeshiva student about evolution and whatnot. He said that they didn't really see a contradiction between believing that the bible is literally true and that science shows the world was billions of years old. "We can't limit God with human logic," he said. "Science is a tool God gave us to explore and celebrate creation." Maybe that's why they kicked us out of every country in Europe at one time or another: we don't use our faith as an excuse to be stupid.

(Some of us, unfortunately, use it as an excuse to be racist... but that's a whole 'nother story.)