Dinosaur Discomfort Syndrome

How many fundamentalist Christians who claim Evolution is false and Creationism is the truth really believe that, deep down? I know many fundamentalists don't really know the facts and details of Evolution due mostly to their willful ignorance of the subject, but they all know at least something about it. I'm sure there isn't a single citizen of this country who doesn't know about dinosaurs and the fact that they lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Many know about Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus. Who hasn't heard about Neanderthal Man? Most everyone has at least a small bit of knowledge about Evolution. Enough, possibly, to make them feel a twinge of discomfort when they think about the story of Genesis. Or at least, it should.

How many fundamentalists protest the fact of Evolution simply because it is what they're expected to do in order to maintain their biblical infallability/literalist views? How many really feel - somewhere deep in their own minds- how shaky that argument really is? How many KNOW that something isn't quite right?

I know of at least one person who has admitted just that very thing. I don't think she even realizes what she was actually admitting, but it came out, nonetheless. This is a person I know very well so I won't name her. She told me that it always bothered her "about the dinosaurs". She said she had always loved seeing drawings of dinosaurs and reading about them when she was a child and that they facinated her all her life. After she reaffirmed her Christianity in her older years (after she was 50 or so) she said knowing the dinosaurs existed millions and millions of years ago "bothered her." Then, amazingly, she said "So I just decided not to think about it." I said something about evolution and she (again, amazingly) said, almost hatefully, "That's just a theory." And then she quickly changed the subject.

Decided not to think about it.

I was completely dumbstruck by that comment. That isn't even cognitive dissonance! She was willfully, consciously denying something she knew was true to somehow salvage her young earth creationist belief! And she has been denying it for a couple of decades now. I've never encountered that before. I have known a lot of people who are in denial about one thing or another, but they don't seem to be quite conscious of that. At least, they would deny being in denial! But to deny a fact on purpose? She didn't even try to convince herself that dinosaurs must have existed more recently, alongside humans. She just decided not to think about the subject at all. How the hell do you even DO that? How do you take something we know is real, that we have undeniable evidence for, and weigh it against something for which there IS no evidence, and choose on the side of no evidence? Choose no evidence when you already accept the side with the evidence? She had already accepted the dinosaurs existed millions of years ago, and she still does. But at the same time accepts that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. And this is actually a sane, fairly intelligent woman. She is forcing herself to believe something that contradicts facts she also accepts. I don't even know what to call that. Desperation?

But this also made me wonder about how many other fundamentalists feel the same way she does? How many are actually aware that their beliefs don't stand up to what we actually know about our world and our universe and our origins? And how many make a conscious decision to just not think about it instead of doing what we non-believers did when we realized the facts of nature don't match what the bible says? Is it that they want so desperately to believe God is really there that they can somehow seperate reality from their beliefs?

That would seem like enough to drive someone insane. Maybe it eventually does.