The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Read Online Free

of evolution.
    ‘The first dinosaurs look like dinosaurs,’ he says. ‘The last ones look like dinosaurs too. So within that timeframe – even if you did put it at millions of years – they produce their own kind, just as Genesis says.’
    ‘But hang on,’ I say. ‘If humans have been here since day one, that means we must have existed at the same time as dinosaurs.’
    ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘When you look at so-called mythical stories of dragons, they’re real. St George really did fight a dragon.’
    ‘But there are no dragons in the Bible.’
    ‘There are quite a few dragons in the Bible. Go to Job 41:14. It talks about a creature with huge teeth and a terrible mouth that breathed fire.’
    ‘Does that mean that Noah had dragons on the ark?’
    ‘Obviously.’
    By now, enough water has been sucked out of the pit that working geologist Liam Fromyhr can use the scene to tell me why he is convinced that the majority of his colleagues are mistaken in their belief that layers of earth or ‘strata’ are laid down over millions of years. For creationists, of course, these trees and the strata that they lie in will probably be around six thousand years old.
    Liam points to a fossilised tree, a beautiful coppery piece of rock in which it’s still possible to make out individual rings in the ancient wood.
    ‘This is a polystrate fossil,’ he says, ‘which means it sticks through several strata at once. This means the layers must’ve been laid quickly enough to cover the tree completely before it decomposed. We’ve got three metres of strata here. So conventional thinking would assume they were laid over three hundred thousand years. But as you can see, we’vegot a log sticking right through them.’ Liam gives me a long, steady look. ‘Now, logs don’t hang around for three hundred thousand years.’
    I turn to John.
    ‘So if these fossils are six thousand years old, this must mean they’re actual trees from the garden of Eden?’
    He considers for a moment.
    ‘Well, this is a tree which, due to some circumstances, has been catastrophically pulverised into sections. You can see another one over there that has gigantic cobbles up against it. The size of the cobbles tells you that the water has been going pretty fast.’
    ‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘Are you telling me these trees were knocked over during Noah’s flood?’
    ‘Basically.’
    I bend down again to look at them. These old conifers, I can’t help but notice, are normal sized and not – as they should be, according John’s theory – gigantic trees, grown to an awesome monstrous splendour in a nutritionally, atmospherically and environmentally perfect Eden.
    ‘They’re not particularly massive, are they?’ I say.
    ‘Oh, these are just fragments,’ says John. ‘Is this a small tree trunk or a branch from a big tree? You just can’t tell.’
    ‘You do expect to find some gigantic trees, then?’ I ask, vaguely. ‘At some point?’
    His eyes scan happily over the trunks.
    ‘Eventually.’
    *
    ‘I’m going to say some things that might stretch your little brains today,’ John says from his lectern in front of the altar. It is Sunday morning and he has invited me to watch him preach at the Gympie Community Church. ‘I’m going to be talking about homosexuals. Open your Bibles at Leviticus chapter 20 verse 13. “If a man lies with the male as with a woman, both men have committed an abomination, they shall surely be put to …? Death.”’
    Behind either side of John’s head are large banners, painted in happy colours by the neighbourhood’s children. One says ‘Love’. The other, ‘Joy’.
    ‘Isn’t it true that today we have gay bishops?’ he says. ‘Isn’t it true that we have lesbian preachers? But in the Bible it says homosexual bishops, lesbian preachers, thieves, extortioners, adulterers, murderers and revilers will end up where?’
    On an adjacent wall are their companions, ‘Gentleness’ and