Just When You Thought The Ball State News Would Die Down...

While the ties to Ball State University are, admittedly, somewhat stretched, the media is playing this one up for all it is worth.  Seth Slabaugh writes:

Toy dinosaurs at the juice and coffee table greeted members of Grace Baptist Church during a seminar on a recent Saturday morning.

The reason for the toys?

“Dinosaurs and the Bible” was a key presentation at the creationist event.

Guest lecturer Jay Wile, a nuclear chemist who taught at Ball State University during the 1990s, presented the group evidence of dinosaurs living alongside humans in recent history.

“I am sure you disagree with most of what was in my presentations ... and I have no problem with that,” Wile told The Star Press after his talk. “Disagreement is one of the many things that makes life interesting. I just ask that you treat me fairly in your disagreement.”

So, despite the fact that all of the available evidence puts the dinosaurs and humans at 65 million years apart, and despite the fact that the dinosaur remains that we do have are fossilized and couldn't possibly be six thousand years old, some wall engravings and verses from the Bible that mention "the behemoth" are enough to argue that dinosaurs and humans coexisted?  Really?  They continue:

He next displayed photographs of Native American rock engravings of “incredibly accurate” depictions of dinosaurs at Natural Bridges Monument in Utah and at Havasupai Canyon in Arizona. He also showed photographs of a 13th century Cambodian temple’s rock sculpture of a stegosaurus with plates on its back, as well as two sauropods drawn on the tomb of Richard Bell, a Bishop of Carlisle, who died in 1495.

“No paleontologists were around back then,” Wile said.

True, but the fossilized bones were and, like the remains of Gigantopithecus, would serve to allow the locals to envision what the beast must have looked like. As it turns out, Stegosaurus remains are found mostly in Asia, specifically southern China.  Lo and behold! An alternate explanation that also happens to fit the evidence.  This kind of thing is just depressing to read. 

Jonathan Merritt: Why conservative Christians should oppose teaching the Bible in public schools

Jonathan Merritt of the Religion News Service suggests that it would be a very bad thing for public schools to teach the Bible.  In the wake of Mark Burnett and Roma Downey's History Channel miniseries The Bible, he writes:

Two days before the first episode aired, however, the couple penned a controversial opinion column in The Wall Street Journal titled, “Why Public Schools Should Teach the Bible.” They argued that public schools should encourage or perhaps mandate teaching courses on the sacred book. This should apparently top the list of priorities in a time when America’s educational system is faced with depleting resources and failing to keep up with the rest of the world’s students.

Christian pastors and leaders in social media lauded Burnett and Downey’s article as wise and appropriate. And while the timing of publication could not have been more perfect—the article reads like a thinly veiled marketing piece with a commercial for the television show inserted as the seventh paragraph—the  arguments are worth considering.

The crux of the problem is, as Merritt sees it (and I fully agree with him) how would the Bible be taught? He suggests that it would not likely be the Bible that most evangelicals want taught. For example:

Those who teach these courses will most likely be non-literalists trained at secular state universities, not homeschooled conservative evangelicals or Bible college graduates. They may believe that the many “seeming contradictions” of the Bible are actual ones. If asked, they may teach students that the stories of “Jonah and the Whale” or “Noah’s Ark” are mythic allegories, rather than historical accounts of miraculous events.

Do the Christians crying for a reintroduction of Bible courses want their children taught, for example, that the creation account in Genesis is little more than pretty poetry? It’s safe to assume they do not. But most haven’t thought this deeply about the issue.

I have used this argument against the teaching of young earth creationism in schools. Typically, when Christians advocate this kind of thing, they are unaware of the insurmountable scientific problems associated with these views.  Aside from the fact that it is ersatz science, teaching these arguments in a public school setting would paint a target on those cherished beliefs and open them up to complete ridicule when it is discovered that they don't hold up to even rudimentary scientific examination. If Christians thought this one through, they would not want this.