An Alternate Reality: A Visit to A Creationist Conference

While most paleontologists see the six-inch long serrated teeth of tyrannosaurus rex as evidence of its carnivorous past, creationist Jason Lisle takes a more optimistic view.

“God didn’t make monsters,” he says, explaining his theory of the dinosaur’s diet. “The first T-Rex would have eaten plants. Dinosaurs, along with all animals originally, were vegetarians.”

“People say, ‘wait a minute – but T-Rex has those incredibly sharp teeth.’ And indeed, T-Rex had six-inch serrated fangs – perfectly designed for ripping and tearing into watermelons, and cantaloupes, and cabbages and all kinds of fruits.”

“You see, you think of a watermelon as soft. But in order to get to the soft stuff on the inside, you have to cut through the hard outer exterior. But not T-Rex. He was quite ready to eat it off the vine.”

Besides prompting some to consider whether their dentist is a creationist, Lisle’s coconut-eating tyrannosaur may inspire only ridicule. The cartoons he brings with him tonight suggesting a 6000-year-old Earth show raptors and Stegosauri outfitted with saddles, a caveman fighting an infant T-Rex, and Adam and Eve strolling in the Garden of Eden alongside triceratops.

“Dinosaurs were docile, gentle, when they were first created,” says Lisle. “All life’s animals would have been gentle when they were first created.”

But while tonight’s presentation this April evening features plenty of “Flintstones”-esque imagery, it reveals a deep divide in how many Americans interpret the world.

“We ultimately view the world through Biblical Glasses or Secular Glasses — evolutionized glasses,” says Lisle. Lisle, one of half of all Americans who believes that God created man in his present form, rejects evolution because it represents what he calls “an erroneous world view” – one that depends on man’s “fallible methods” rather than a literal reading of the Bible to determine the validity of scientific theories. In a country increasingly polarized by the “Darwin Wars,” his lectures this weekend show through the lens of dinosaurs how starkly Americans may differ in their views of what constitutes reality.

“This is a very basic form of logic, very easy,” Lisle says. “T-Rex is a land animal. Land animals were created on Day 6, according to the Bible. Therefore, T-Rex was created on Day 6.”