Do you even wonder how the young-earth creationists manage to cope with some rather obvious bits of evidence such as Dinosaur bones?
Well, you need wonder no more, because Ken ham has announced that they are getting their very own real dinosaur in his Creation Museum and that it will soon be on display …
Last year, the Peroutka Foundation donated a world-class skeleton of an Allosaurus, called Ebenezer, to the museum—and Ebenezer is going to be unveiled Memorial Day weekend! It will be opened to the public on May 24.
OK, so what is the deal here, how do they rationalise away having an exhibit that contains a real Dinosaur that is millions of years old, and yet believe that the earth of only 6000 years old, how exactly does that work and become possible for them to square this rather obvious circle?
Apparently like this …
dinosaurs were created on Day Six of the Creation Week and that most of the fossils of dinosaurs were formed during the Flood of Noah’s Day about 4,300 years ago
Evidence for this claim?
Oh come on, you can guess, if asked, it will be, “The bible says …. yada yada yada”, and that’s it, that is their entire argument.
Now that last point is perhaps the best illustration of the real problem here.
It might indeed be tempting to think, “Ah, you have muddled up a few facts, here let me explain the actual evidence for what we know“, and then end up becoming a tad confused when you discover that creationist thinking is immune to our modern scientific understanding.
But how does this work, what exactly goes on inside the head of somebody to render them immune to evidence-based science?
Well, it works like this …
the government is imposing the religion of evolution and millions of years on children visiting the Smithsonian
… and there encapsulated in that one sentence is how you rationalise it all away – the thought that science is just a religious belief.
I’m familiar enough with Ken’s arguments to know that if you drilled down into this a bit more, he would then start babbling about “observational” science vs “Historical” science, and would play the “were you there?” card, and yes I don’t need to explain how crazy all that is, so my point here is this, the problem is not missing information, misunderstood information, or an educational gap, but rather something else.
To encapsulate the core problem in one word, the issue is “faith”.
Once you buy into the concept of pretending to know things you do not actually know (faith), then you can rationalise almost anything at all that conflicts with the belief being embraced. It is this mode of thinking that needs to be dealt with because it is the foundation that all the other crazy stuff rests upon.
If you attempt to engage and debunk the creationist claim, then you will fail; it is far more effective to debunk the foundation that it is all resting upon.