Out Of Town

Friday, March 23, 2007

I'll be spending this weekend camping and hiking in southern Utah with friends and family. Our frequent trips to the great National and State Parks always conjure the memory of a trip we took a few years ago with some very good, very evangelical Christian friends.

Dave and I stood overlooking the massive canyon carved from the rock by the Colorado River at Dead Horse Point. Dave read from an etched-metal sign to his young daughter. "This canyon was formed from millions of years of erosion by the swift and muddy water of the great river..." He was then quick to teach the youngster that the sign was, in fact, incorrect. "Actually, this canyon was formed only thousands of years ago when God flooded the Earth at the time of Noah. The Earth is not even millions of years old, as we know from reading the Bible."

"Wow," I thought, "he's gonna have some 'splainin' to do when we get to the dinosaur footprints this afternoon."

Instead of trying to reconcile the timeline of the Bible with the observable facts of science, as I did for many years, I have found it much simpler to conclude that Bible is simply wrong. Trust me, that was no easy thing to do in my mind. But once I did, my mind was suddenly clear, no longer muddled with the distracting explanations of global flood geology, dinosaurs from other planets and near-history creationism. The natural world suddenly made sense.

In other words, once I stopped believing in bullshit, it was easy to stop believing in bullshit.

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