Seven-Day Wonders

Unfair Park | Bible Girl:

“ ‘If it's true that the earth is millions of years of age and that death has always been a part of creation,’ Lindsay says, ‘then death is just a natural cycle. Therefore the Bible is false, because the Bible says that death came as a result of man'’s sin. That caught my attention.’ ”

Ed Cognoski responds:

Lindsay is "Dennis Lindsay, president of 'Christ for the Nations Institute', a mission-oriented Bible school in southern Dallas with a Pentecostal-charismatic flavor."

Rather than draw the logical conclusion that the Bible is, in fact, creation myth, tribal history, nationalist propaganda, poetry, theology, all mixed up, Mr Lindsay decides that the evidence of his eyes and logic of his brain must be wrong and the millennial-old writings of a religious sect in the Middle East must be useful as a modern science textbook, inerrantly true about geology, biology, archaeology and all other scientific questions. Why? Because otherwise... it wouldn't be.

But enough of the idiocy of creationism. Bible Girl tries to present a silly argument for creationism while keeping it at arm's length so that people won't accuse her of being just as looney as Mr Lindsay. She says things like:

I did think it a bit odd -- well, maybe even a tad embarrassing -- to cling so tenaciously to the young-earth view, that our planet is a mere 6,000 years old, based on the genealogies in the Bible.

but then says,

Even so, many of us evangelicals would prefer to politely sidestep the whole creationism thing.

Sorry, Bible Girl, that won't do. Either you believe the nonsense that Mr Lindsay is selling, or you don't. Sidestepping it is an admission that you can't put two and two together yourself. You can't imply that it's a tough call and both sides make some good points. Because you never come right out and say Mr Lindsay is loonier than a Canadian water fowl, you show yourself to be a looney, too, just as much as someone who says they'll "tiptoe around" little green men in flying saucers or leprechauns or whether two plus two equals four or maybe, three, because of something about the Holy Trinity or some other Biblical pretzel twisting logic.

By the way, that moon dust argument for a young earth? Scientists estimate that the moon collects about an inch of space dust per billion years. Or about 4 inches over the lifetime of the moon, pretty much what the Apollo astronauts found. The creationists' claim that a 4 billion year old moon would have a hundred-foot-thick layer of space dust is based on false assumptions. You don't really think NASA would have sent a manned lander to the moon if they thought it would disappear in a hundred-foot-thick layer of space dust, do you?

Bible Girl may not be interested in science, but that doesn't excuse her from using the good sense God gave her. Reject creationism for the nonsense it is.