Two things stand out to me Steve Hendrix‘s article in The Washington Post.
One is how the Creationists from Liberty University feel as out of place and shocked by what they see at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as many atheists feel when visiting the Creation Museum.
“There’s nothing balanced here. It’s completely, 100 percent evolution-based,” said [David] DeWitt, a professor of biology. “We come every year, because I don’t hold anything back from the students.”
Replace “evolution” with “Creation” and you have the atheists’ mindset.
Two is that the article mentions Creationist paleontologist Marcus Ross:
Otherwise, the 20 students listened attentively as co-leader Marcus Ross, an enthusiastic paleontologist who teaches at Liberty, expertly explained about the world-class fossil collection and told ripping tales of the towering tyrannosaurus rex that was casting skeletal shadows over the group.
“I love it here,” said Ross, who has a doctorate in geosciences from the University of Rhode Island. “There’s something romantic about seeing the real thing.”
The last time (only time, really) I heard of Ross was a couple years ago when an article about him appeared in The New York Times — Ross wrote his doctoral dissertation at a secular school about a time period he doesn’t even believe exists:
His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross’s dissertation adviser. “He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework.”
But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.
So that’s what became of him… Ross is now peddling ignorance using a diploma bestowed upon him for work he both defended and refutes.
Ok, one other line was funny…
“Why should we be afraid to test our worldview against reality?” asked Bill Jack, a Christian leadership instructor who leads groups across the country for a company called Biblically Correct Tours. “If Christianity is true, it better be true in the natural history museums and in the zoos.”
Nice use of the word “reality” to describe the opposite of your worldview 🙂
(via The Invisible Pink Unicorn)