Creation theme parks in NYT and a poll

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/arts/01DINO.html

"Mr. Hovind, a former public school science teacher with his own ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, and a hectic lecture schedule, said he had opened Dinosaur Adventure Land to counter all the science centers and natural history museums that explain the evolution of life with Darwinian theory."

I'm curious to see what DUers think about the origin of species:

Back in the 90s it was "Scientific Creationism".

Words like these are used to try to get the bible to be taught in Science class.

please explain. For example, do you feel that the Democratic party is not accepting of this viewpoint.

It hinges on whether you believe in God or not. Personally I believe in intelligent design and life evolved to a certain point and then God presented himself to humankind and that is when we were endowed with reason and other cognitive abilities that distinguish us from animals

You can believe in God and still believe in evolution.

i just think my theory keeps both arguments congruent, except for fundamentalists who take everything literally

My dogs are smarter than your average B* voter.

Talk to someone who is a DNA expert. It's in every living thing's genes...the genes of our forebears in earlier forms.

Fundies are like druids. They are just superstitious crackpots. Smirky, of course, is one of them

Druids are considerably more advanced than the average fundie.

Do you believe the earth is 6000 years old or 15 billion years old?

I have no problem with people saying that evolution was the mode and the Big Bang was 15 billion years ago, but that some higher force had some influence on the process.

year old earth, you're slightly off your rocker either way ;-). The earth is estimated to be around 5 billion years old. 15 billion is the estimated age of the universe.

Is that the people who take the book of Genesis at face value are more often than not unwilling to accept the world as it is. They somehow believe that Earth is the only inhabited planet in the universe, and that we, meaning humans, are "special" because of it. While a lot of people might scoff at the thought of other living beings elsewhere, most are not so egocentric that they think we're somehow "special" if we are alone, which I doubt very much.

The thought that we're just one of what might be considered a "fluke" of nature, or the product of some process that involved "lesser" beings on this planet, is appalling to those who feel humans are the end all of life.

I once read an interesting theory, BTW, in reference to intelligent life on Earth. Technically, Earth is a water planet, with more surface covered by water than by land. It seems logical that one of the more advanced species on Earth would be an animal who lives in and around that water. By that rationale, it's been speculated that either dolphins or whales are more intelligent than humans, but because we don't have a common method of communications, we can only surmise how smart they really are.

There are some people who accept the bible as allegory, and can believe in evolution as the method a "god" might use to create the planet and its inhabitants. However, it's only those who get their sole "scientific" intelligence (an oxymoron for most creationists) from the bible who need to smarten up. Bible study is great to calm one's soul, to seek answers and to be comforted, but it's not the only book in the world, and far more intelligent studies have proven that evolution is NOT just some hokey hypothesis that was invented "yesterday." In fact, humans have been stupid for so long that most advanced scientific theories have been rejected constantly through the ages to the point where you wonder how some scientists felt in their own time, being ignored for their wisdom, theories and discoveries.