Creationists, dinosaurs and 9 year olds

Linked through Twit­ter, I stumbled upon an art­icle about a young 9 years old girl ques­tion­ing the age of a moon rock, being taught by Cre­ation­ists. To be hon­est, I never heard of Cre­ation­ists before — here in Europe, we don’t get to hear about them (maybe they don’t even exist here, I dare to hope). Fol­low­ing the article’s men­tion of Ken Ham and the Answers In Gen­esis web­site, I looked for, and found it. Out of curi­os­ity, I opened the first blog link on their web­site. It was “Dino­saurs and the Bible”.

Read­ing through the first few para­graphs, I was intrigued — the writer was not refus­ing to accept their exist­ence. But the left hook strike came a few more para­graphs later, under the sub-headline “When did Dino­saurs live?”:

When Did Dino­saurs Live?

The story we have all heard from movies, tele­vi­sion, news­pa­pers, and most magazines and text­books is that dino­saurs lived mil­lions of years ago. Accord­ing to evol­u­tion­ists, the dino­saurs “ruled the Earth” for 140 mil­lion years, dying out about 65 mil­lion years ago. How­ever, sci­ent­ists do not dig up any­thing labeled with those ages. They only uncover dead dino­saurs (i.e., their bones), and their bones do not have labels attached telling how old they are. The idea of mil­lions of years of evol­u­tion is just the evol­u­tion­ists’ story about the past. No sci­ent­ist was there to see the dino­saurs live through this sup­posed dino­saur age. In fact, there is no proof what­so­ever that the world and its fossil lay­ers are mil­lions of years old. No sci­ent­ist observed dino­saurs die. Sci­ent­ists only find the bones in the here and now, and because many of them are evol­u­tion­ists, they try to fit the story of the dino­saurs into their view.

That made me speech­less. Not a single men­tion of the radiomet­ric dat­ing tech­nique. We’ve been taught this in 9^th grade in phys­ics class, it’s not like it’s some­thing secret, or even dif­fi­cult to com­pre­hend. Dear Ken Ham, the bones do have labels attached to them telling how old they are. The detailed descrip­tion of what radiomet­ric dat­ing is can be found in the art­icle linked first in this post.

I wanted to say that to him dir­ectly. Tell him that the bible is too, just a book, and he wasn’t there when Jesus sup­posedly lived and died. I wanted to e-mail him — yet he provides no pub­lic e-mail address. The feed­back tool on their web­site requires my full name and address to leave them a mes­sage. I’m speech­less. All I could do is write this up.