Did you know that (apparently) humans walked the earth with the dinosaurs about 4000 years ago? I didn't.

I was under the impression the two never met; dinosaurs were around between 65 and 230 million years ago, and humans didn't appear (as we would know them anyway) until about 130,000 years ago.

But according to a number of Christian groups we are either (depending on who you read) being deceived by science, or the scientists themselves are merely mistaken.

Personally, I always start to get suspicious when people start referring to "scientists" and "science" generically - in my experience it indicates that what follows will probably be uninformed as the speaker can't even name discipline they are commenting on.

In this case however, I don't think that is what is going on. I seems like these sites are setup and written with the very specific purpose of creating convincing sounding counter-arguments to questions which would otherwise cast doubt on the Christian world view.

And that's the problem: the counter-arguments sound convincing. It doesn't take much of background in any one of the subjects (geology or palaeontology in this case) to spot the errors in logic, be aware of the facts that are being ignored, and recognise sloppy conclusions. But it does take some. Without that background, it would be all too easy to believe them - and considering the state of some education systems on the planet I suspect that is exactly what will happen.

These sites are even selling "educational" text books and videos for class room use.

I despair. I really do.

I won't link to these groups directly (I have no intention of helping to improve their search rankings), but feel free to check it out for yourself at c h r i s t i a n a n s w e r s . n e t / d i n o s a u r s / j - f o s s i l s 1 . h t m l