And The Lord Saw That Evolution Was Good

The recent discussion of the new creationist theme park reminds me of an incident from my childhood. I was pretty big into dinosaurs for many years, so I read pretty much every book I could find about them. Well into the obsession I got hold of a creationist dinosaur book. It had stuff in it about how they found human footprints inside dinosaur footprints and how the "leviathan" in the Bible is a dinosaur. It was also the first place I had seen it explicitly stated that there were two views on the origin of species, evolution and creationism. I already knew all about evolution from the other dinosaur books I'd read. And I was well versed in the Genesis story, since I'd been a regular attendee of Sunday School. But it wasn't until I read this book that I really thought about how the two stories conflict. I was pretty confused (as were my parents -- they'd never heard the kind of claims that the book made). So we talked to our pastor about it (this was at a mainstream Lutheran church). He pretty much assured us that the book was crazy. So for my first experience with the religion-science battle, religion happily ceded ground.