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On an old, popular post called, "Answers in Genesis: 'Unicorns are Fucking Real'," just received the following response:

I just wanted to let you know that Christians are not idiots and I immediately noticed you left out significant parts of the verses. The word "unicorn" in the Bible is referring to horned livestock, just as "Behemoth", "Leviathan", "dragons", and "flying serpents" were actually all dinosaurs. I am 14 years old and I just completely obliterated you argument within five minutes. Nice one. Real mature.

My first thought is, honestly, "You poor kid. You are on the verge of adulthood and you still believe in Santa." You have all the evidence for Santa that you do for dinosaurs. The only difference is that someone told you that Santa wasn't real.

I wonder if this is the first time a teacher has talked to you about the age of the planet (I teach argument, writing and American lit/culture at a major university). This is not your fault, however, and I won't direct my ire at you. You deserve a better answer than that. You clearly deserve a better than what you have been given so far.

First, from the point of view of my specialty, academic argument, you haven't actually "obliterated" my argument. You have made what we would call "bald assertions." You are just proclaiming. You don't offer evidence that what you are saying is true. So, this Mitchell person in the original Answers in Genesis article says, "unicorns" over and over. She is talking about one-horned animals. That's what the "uni-" is. One. Single. Horn. Now, she may have a crummy translation, and the Bible could actually read in its original "horned livestock", but she is clearly trying to find some way to justify the single-horn theory by offering narwhals and rhinos, neither of which actually has a horn (the rhino's is keratin, not a bone horn; the narwhal has an elongated tooth, not a horn). She is really saying that there were really unicorns--one horned (the"-corn", as in the word "cornucopia" [horn of plenty], means "horn"), which may or may not be livestock. Both, given what we know lived in the region, are absurd.

When you say Behemoth, Leviathan, dragons, and flying serpents are dinosaurs, well, you are, again, just proclaiming that and not offering evidence. And you are specifically making the type of assertions that allow you to hold on to what you already believe, even when you see that there are real problems. You are not sticking to the available evidence. You are grafting stories and explanations to make something that is not unified into something that seems unified. Now, you can say all the critters that we don't see in the modern world were actually something else, and you can even say that they were dinosaurs, but to persuade me, and remember, I've been in college as long as you have been alive, so I have high standards; you need to show me the physical evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. I will believe that if you can show me good evidence. I really will.

I can't be sure that anyone has ever really explained to you how we have come to the conclusion that dinosaurs and humans never coexisted. I am going to explain to you how we concluded based on physical evidence that dinosaurs were not contemporaries of man.

First, there is the fossil record. No human fossil has ever--EVER--been found in the same rock layer as a dinosaur fossil. Not a single one. That alone would convince me--one single verifiable instance--that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, regardless of whether or not I had a Bible. If you bring me that evidence, I will have to change my entire position on human-dino cohabitation. Seriously, you ask your pastor/parents about that. I'd love to see it if he can point me to it. Well documented, verified by academics and published in a respectable journal. That's it. It would make their careers. Scientists totally groove on overthrowing ways of thinking, and this would be HUGE!

We have numerous ways of figuring out how old things are, especially radiometric dating, a very useful tool when it comes to calculating how old things are. Certain atoms (isotopes) decay into other elements at a specific rate and have never been observed to naturally decay at other rates. If we know how much of the isotope and the elements that it decays are in a sample, we can calculate how long it took for that ratio to be achieved. And there are dozens of isotopes that this method works for, several yardsticks that we can use to figure out how old something is. But how do we know that they are correct yardsticks, that the number of years is actual? Because several different yardsticks agree about how old samples are. We are getting consistent results. We are doing something right. There is a little wiggle room for interpretation, of course, a couple percentage points either way, but not enough to account for the difference between my time scale of the planet and yours (4.54 billion vs. 6,000 years--a ratio vast, vast ratio of difference--orders of magnitude). We are talking about millions of samples being tested and finding agreement across all of them about the age of the rocks on the planet. This includes lunar samples from the Apollo missions and meteors. All of them show that we are talking about billions of years. All of them.

We can see the realignment of magnetic particles in rocks along the earth's magnetic field lines depending on when they were formed. Again, consistent across strata. And it's not just geology and chemistry. Astronomy and astrophysics attest to an ancient, ancient universe. Sometimes these fields of study converge: at the 65-million year line (the K-T boundary), all around the world, we have a thin layer of an element, iridium, rarely found on earth, like a dusting. You see, that thin layer has 1000 times the expected amount of iridium in it. Before that line, we see non-avian dinos. After that line, none. Absolutely no non-avian dino fossils have been found above the K-T boundary. Something added that iridium and dispersed it, and meteors have iridium in the right ratios. Sounds like a meteor extinction event to me.

The burden of proof is therefore on the person telling me that the planet is young and that dinosaurs, which are consistently and only found in rock layers that are dated by multiple methods to 65 million years or older, lived alongside people.

Now, I've told you exactly what it will take convert me. What would it take for me to show you that you were wrong?

HJ