Creationist Beliefs

Date: January 20, 1992 Forrest Mims III (The Scientist, Oct. 28, 1991, page 12) responds to the three questions I posed in my letter in the July 22 issue of The Scientist [page 12]. The first concerned the creationist claim that animals were drowned by the Great Flood, and the fossilized bones of the best swimmers are in the top layers. The book Scientific Creationism (San Diego, Creation Life Publishers, 1974, pages 118-20) states that fossils of "mammals and birds would be found in general at

Written byThomas Jukes
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I next asked if Mims holds the creationist beliefs of coexistence of humans and dinosaurs, and Noah's taking of dinosaurs on the Ark. Creationists, starting in 1950, publicized the story of the Paluxy River Footprints, claiming that these showed human footprints superimposed upon those of dinosaurs. They distributed a movie, Footprints in Stone, making this claim.

The myth was exposed in 1982-83, as described in Creation/Evolution (5[1]:1-52, 1985). Following this, creationists stopped distributing their movie, but the fable is still in their literature, including the claim that dinosaurs were on the Ark. See T.H. Jukes (Nature, 308:398-400, 1984), which also describes the campaign against the teaching of evolution. It started before the 1925 Scopes trial, and includes harassment of teachers. Mims says "it's the Darwinists who incessantly campaign against the teaching of creation."

Actually, Darwinists oppose it in science classes, but have no objection to its being taught in social ...

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