A couple of days ago I got a call from a CNN producer who’s helping to put together a story on Pastor Russell Johnson. I gather it’s going to be shown later this week on Anderson Cooper 360. Anyway, she’d run across the photo of Pastor Johnson and me on The Ohio Twenty-first and thought I’d make a good interview.
Before I get into that, however, I need to wrap up an entry I began back in September,. As so often happens, I lacked the time to finish it. I’ll have to give you a very short version now. . . .
Mike Riddle, the speaker from AnswersInGenesis.Org, offered quite an extensive and well-designed PowerPoint presentation to about seventy people assembled in the Fairfield Christian Church sanctuary to hear him. It had its share of problems in logic — sometimes the Bible was used to interpret the geological evidence, sometimes vice versa, so that the argument betrayed some circular reasoning. It also played a little fast and loose with the facts. For instance, it showed a pretty impressive-looking canyon in Washington state, known to have been carved out well within a week or so in the 19th century, and averred that the Grand Canyon had been carved out in identical fashion and speed by Noah’s Flood. I would think that to make such a claim, in each instance you would at a minimum have to discuss the relative hardness of the ground. The walls of the Grand Canyon, I know, are formed mainly of limestone and sandstone. He didn’t mention the composition of the canyon in Washington state. I suspect there was a reason for the omission.
I did learn, however, why, in Christian fundamentalist theology, it’s so important to establish that the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old. There’s no time to rehearse those details, though. And it doesn’t really matter. For two reasons.
The first is personal to me. My brother and his wife are conservative evangelicals who, over the years, have abandoned evolution in favor of creationism. My brother used to send me books on the subject. What he did not do was invite me to spend Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays with his family, and aside from my sister, who also is a conservative evangelical and who doesn’t invite me, either, I have no other immediate family. A couple of years ago I was driving several hundred miles to spend Christmas with the familiy of a friend. From a hotel room en route, I phoned my brother and in the course of our conversation, said that I felt hurt that he did not invite me for the holidays. He bristled a bit, then said implacably: “Lori [his wife; not her real name] hates you.”
Concerning whether Christianity has any truth to it, that spoke to me a lot more loudly than creationism.
For Mike Riddle, though, creationism matters. At the end of his talk he offered an account of how came to be a Christian — in evangelicalspeak, his testimony. He told of a night in a silent hotel room when a personal crisis drove him to open the Gideon’s Bible in the dresser drawer. He began reading the first chapter of Genesis. “I knew I couldn’t believe any of the rest of the Bible,” he told the audience, “unless I believed the first chapter.”
(Continued)
About a year ago my significant other — clumsy name but the best I can do — became a volunteer at a local animal shelter, 
