Stan Hudson is a wonderfully nice man who gave me an authentic Triceratops tooth he believes to be only about 4,700 years old. The consensus in science is that the tooth is about 60 million years old.

Hudson is also the one who told me that. He knows the established estimates but believes they are wrong. In his mind, scientists have been misled because they have not been reading their Bibles correctly.

Hudson is a minister and a Young Earth creationist who believes the earth is 6,000 years old. He believes a large conspiracy of scientists is stuck in an evolution paradigm, destroying religious belief and leading humankind astray.

My thought on the matter is Hudson should immediately take a flight to China where there are not nearly enough Bibles for the scientists to consult as they do their scientific research – India too, for that matter. There is a whole continent in Asia that is in desperate need of Bibles so they can do proper science. From the viewpoint of Hudson, a large portion of the earth cannot do first-rate science because they have not found the right religion.

Instead, the rest of the world is going to be fooled by the available physical evidence that evolution is true and the earth is 4.5 billion years old. To correct this terrible fallacy of following the evidence without regard to already assumed religious beliefs, Hudson has hosted an erudite and informative discussion during the last week on evolution and creation. He has named his lecture series, “In the Beginning.” To his credit, Hudson reads and studies the current research available and presents both sides of the argument – kind of. His true interest lies in proving evolution false while not straying from the scientific debate. Thus he presents all the problems of evolution without providing all the evidence for it. In this sense, polite and child-rearing Christians can go about their day armed with all the criticisms of evolution without ever having to know its strengths.

I like questioning all established fact, and I like debate, but Hudson is not having a debate. He is trying to force all the facts into his already assumed-to-be-true biblical story. In his own words, he says radiometric dating and the evidence found within the fossil layers are “a challenge” for creationism. In regards to the age of the earth, he said for creationists, “our problem is with millions.” Hudson hopes to find his conception of truth will be vindicated through the evidence, and for that I honor him. That is a noble pursuit. Currently, the only way for Hudson to overturn evolution is to attack present scientific evidence. This gave me the impression that all young earth creationists are sitting on the edge of their seats biting their fingernails in anxiety, fearful of what misguided “fact” science will uncover next.

Having heard the debates about intelligent design and now creationism, it is clearly evident that science has thrown Christians for a loop. They no longer know how to make sense of reality and the Bible hardly provides any help on the matter. Every Christian seems to have an opinion on it.

Hudson’s religion would be extremely convincing to me if the evidence we found in the material world actually reflected what we found in the Bible. I think we might all believe and most everyone would be convinced. It would tell me that God really wanted people to believe in him.