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Many, Many Pterodactyls

To get to the Toronto Airport from Waterloo and back, I usually ride the Airways Transit airporter service. It's usually quiet even when packed with students. However, the last time on my way to the airport was a little bit different...

I should have known right from the moment "Faith FM" crooned over the radio. Instead I was just concerned that I would have to listen to over an hour of "contemporary" Christian music. For those of you who know me, you can guess my horror; for those of you who don't--I'm a Christian, but I abhorr "contemporary" Christian music almost as much as Country, which I detest. Why listen to "You are so Holy" repeated a hundred times sung by people swaying around like sea anemones with their eyes closed and hands in the air when you could listen to Handel's Messiah?

As soon as we'd all paid up, the driver called out: "So what programs are you in?"

Nobody answered.

So he asked again and I thought, "Hey! A talkative driver--maybe I won't be bored this time."

After a while there were a few replies: "Math! Engineering! CS! Psychology!"

Then comes the killer question: "Are any dinosaurs still living today?"

After a brief pause, a chorus of voices shout:"Yes"

"That's right, dinosaurs still live and have always lived with man."

At this point, I'm sitting in front, next to the driver, and all I can think is: "Why me?" I know what's coming next. I even believe some of it myself, but this guy was clearly going to make me and my beliefs look ridiculous.

I thought he would restrict himself to lizards, etc, but after naming some animals (and he claimed that there were hundreds) that were proof that dinosaurs still lived, some of which were true (like the coelocanth--whose name he couldn't remember), others which are most likely fantasy like the Loch Ness monster and the plesiosaur, he said:

"What are those big flying things? Pterodactyls? They are still alive. I lived in Papua New Guinea for a while and the indigenous people had pictures and stories of big flying reptiles carrying people off. They lived at the same time as man."

Now, I'm not saying that this is impossible, but I think it would be pretty difficult not to notice a flying reptile large enough to carry someone off.

What irked me most was that he kept referring to evolutionists' lack of "proof", and the abundance of "proof" for a 6,000-year-old earth. I tried to explain to him that he was talking to people in math, and he couldn't use the word "proof" when discussing evolution because none of us would take him seriously. You cannot "prove" by example unless you're dealing with a finite set--this is Mathematics 101. Finding a fossil or something that supports your claim is not proof--it just indicates that you may be correct. On the other hand, finding something that contradicts your claim means that your claim is wrong, but it may be possible to adjust it so that things still work.

Oh, how could I forget that his claim that if you date everything correctly, nothing biological is more than 4400 years old--the time of the flood! I asked him what kind of growth pattern was used to determine this--he didn't seem to know that there were different kinds. Don't get me wrong, I don't disbelieve in the flood, it's just that there is just as much fudging going on to make numbers match up to a flood date as there is fudging to make numbers fit the time scale necessary for unsupervised evolution from single-celled organisms to humans. He also told me that at one point the temperature on earth was colder than -300 degrees. No units. When pressed, he decided that the units must be Fahrenheit, but only after being told that it was an impossible temperature in Celsius (which is what we use here in Canada).

But he continued on unfazed.

"Before that," he claimed, "everything was huge, because there was a vapor canopy overhead protecting us from the sun and the atmospheric pressure was so high. Experiments have been done by some scientist...I forget his name...which PROVE that given these conditions, tomato plants grow so large that they can produce thousands of tomatoes, and so everything before the flood was large. Which is why there is so much coal."

I'm pretty sure he got most of his information from this site: Dr. Hovind’s Creation Seminar (See credentials in link below). Interestingly, AiG has a site of arguments not to use as evidence for creation because they are incorrect or unlikely. Almost every argument on the list was presented by my driver as undeniable "proof". I particularly liked the ones about scientific evidence that somewhere we lost a day and moon dust.

Most impressive was his conspiracy theory. Apparantly scientists and scientific institutions, he gave the Smithsonian as an example, "get rid of" evidence which favours creation, not evolution. Once again, not impossible, but certainly (I hope) not likely.

It was just too perfect and sickening. As I left, he told me, "it's all in the Bible--just read it and believe." I have to say I left him hoping to be the one to find undeniable evidence that the world is more than 10,000 years old, there is no Loch Ness monster, and that the inconsistant rotation of the planets, moons, and stars can be explained scientifically.

My own opinion is that I have no idea what happened, but I have problems with just about every theory out there. I am most inclined to believe in Intelligent Design, as in God created the beginning (whatever that was) and controlled the processes that brought about life as we know it.

I find the "evidence" for uncontrolled evolution unconvincing. There is evidence of life forms that are no longer present, but there is no fossil evidence of evolution because evolution is a process that cannot be captured in rock. That is where the human comes in and says, well, this fossil is older than that one and they have similar characteristics here, so it is possible that this is an ancestor of that. But try getting a consensus on the actual lines of descent among the leading scientists in the field! And the number of fossils with proto-legs, or what-have-you, still does not show an actual "link". And there are a significant number of evolutionists who are just as stubborn and dogmatic about their beliefs as their Creationist counterparts.

On the other hand, Creationists (in particular, young earth Creationists) are often dogmatically convinced that creation as they interpret it (which they usually say is a "literal interpretation") from the Bible is true. However, it's hard to believe in a strictly literal interpretation because that would require believing that the two accounts of creation in Genesis are both literally true, which is a contradiction. But my question is, how did creation happen? Did things just appear out of nothing like a cheesy computer game: Pop! Oh, there's millions of gallons of water. Pop! Millions of tons of dirt. Dust swirls and then, pop! Here's Adam. But, oh wait, it will take a while to create Eve, we have to let Adam sleep and take out his rib to make her. Why is she much more complicated than everything else? Or maybe she isn't and she just popped out from the rib? I am inclined to believe that there was a little more time and processing involved than this. So far the most convincing (because it was not so biased) book I have read on the subject was Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe (he presents Intelligent Design as the most likely theory), and he is condemned by people like Kent Hovin for not following the Bible closely enough. Hello!! It's called Science--you do not reject evidence because it does not support your interpretation of creation. Even if you take the most conservative view out there and say that Moses wrote the first five Books of the OT, then you still have the author of Genesis writing hundreds of years after the events took place. How well could you write about events that happened in your ancestral land before your great-great-great- ... - great grandparents were born?

Also, Creation advocates like this (who probably taught my friendly driver) are just embarassing.

How do I respond respectfully to people like my driver, who are out to convert the world to Christianity by means of hoaxes and half-truths? And how can I rid myself of the desire to convert to Atheism just to spite them?

Oh, well. I'm off to church.

posted by Steph @ 9:34 AM