When you work in a national park, especially one that involves prehistory or any type of discussion about dinosaurs or the age of the Earth, occasionally you’ll get the visitors who are convinced that you’re all Godless atheists. They seem to have one purpose for visiting the park…to loudly announce that you’re leading people to hell for teaching evolution.
If you have children, think back to the first time one of them asked you, “how was I born?’ or ‘how did the baby get into Mommy’s tummy.” My mom’s official story when I first asked was that she went to the hospital to have me and when she woke up, there I was and because she had a C-section, every word of it was true. She just omitted a few details, mainly because I was about four-years old at the time. Fifth grade was the Year of The Talk. This is when all the boys went to one classroom and all the girls went to another and we watched puberty education movies that were made sometime in the 70s. When my mom found out this was going to occur, she wanted to beat them to the punch with the whole baby-making discussion. When I got in the car after school one day, both my parents were in the front seat. My mom handed me two age-appropriate books and said, “Here you go. Read these.” Then I opened the books and commenced reading. I was speechless. I was horrified. Not only did my parents do this, but they did it TWICE! And this was my reaction at the age of 10.
But think about it. What did you tell your children? Or what will you tell them? If your child is four-years old, are you going to give them the fulsome, scurvy truth? Maybe you’ll tell them just enough to satisfy their curiosity. Or maybe you’ll tell them something metaphorical, like a seed growing in Mommy’s tummy. If you tell them something metaphorical, do you feel that you’re lying to them? Obviously not. You’re explaining it to them in a way they can understand and process the information. In the end it really doesn’t matter if they hatched from an egg or were picked from the cabbage patch. The point is that they are here now and they have God-given purpose.
The Genesis story was not intended to be a science textbook. The point of the Creation story was to set the God of Israel apart from the gods in other contemporary creation myths, particularly the Babylonian creation story. There are common threads that run through creation stories across disparate cultures. They feature a pantheon of gods, born by various means, all jockeying for power. The creation of Earth and humankind is incidental. Not so in Genesis. God almighty, the uncreated I AM, spoke a word and creation happened. He spoke a word and humankind came into being and man was created Imago Dei. We were not an afterthought or something that just happened. We were created with a purpose.
How did God do it? I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I think the evidence points to the fact that the process itself took a lot longer than seven 24-hour days, more like billions of years. It doesn’t make the Creation story less true. The division between day and night wasn’t even created until the fourth day, so how long were the first few days? Christians who insist that any deviation from a literal seven day creation is heresy and create junk science to fit the seven day mold create a stumbling block for those who might otherwise believe. It’s also not science. Real scientific inquiry seeks the truth, not to validate one’s own agenda.
We’ve actually had people visit parks and insist that dinosaur bones were placed by Satan to deceive humans. There are also people who believe that dinosaurs and man roamed the Earth together and that man hunted the dinosaurs. And they breathed fire, by the way. Did you know that?
Maybe God created dinosaurs because dinosaurs are just AWESOME! I mean seriously, what’s not to love about dinosaurs? Think about it. What else can capture the imagination of a three-year old boy like the idea of a T-Rex? That’s because the T-Rex is the most awesome, bitchin’ dinosaur ever. But if man and T-Rex had roamed the Earth at the same time, well, survival of the fittest and all. Asteroid, enter stage right. Goodbye Age of Dinosaurs, hello Age of Mammals.
That whole tidbit in the above photo about Darwin renouncing evolution on his deathbed is pure horse crap. It’s revisionist born-again history at its finest. At the time he wrote On the Origin of the Species, Darwin still believed in a Creator that allowed the world to develop through natural processes. While I don’t agree with every aspect of Darwin’s theory, his contributions to our knowledge about the natural world are significant.
The above visitor comment was written by some kid in 1994. Hopefully by now he’s indulged in some of that fancy book learnin’ and discovered that science and faith aren’t mutually exclusive.
The Conservative Conservationist 