IS PAT ROBERTSON REALLY DISAVOWING CREATIONISM?

From the Houston Chronicle's Sci Guy blog:

Enter Pat Robertson, who appears to have become the voice of reason. According to CNN, here’s what he said in response to a question Robertson fielded Tuesday from a viewer on his Christian Broadcasting Network show “The 700 Club.”

“You go back in time, you’ve got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things, and you’ve got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas,” Robertson said. “They’re out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth, and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don’t try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That’s not the Bible.”

Before answering the question, Robertson acknowledged the statement was controversial by saying, “I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this.”
“If you fight science, you are going to lose your children, and I believe in telling them the way it was,” Robertson concluded.

More here, including a link to the CNN piece.

When I first read this I was wondering if it actually says what Sci Guy says it does.  The comment isn't straightforward as quoted, so I clicked through to the CNN link to read some more.  And it actually appears that Robertson is, in fact, suggesting that science has it right in terms of prehistory.  I'm assuming the reason his statement is so circuitous is because he really does fear creating a shit storm among his viewers.  And that may very well happen: intense creationism, of the five or six thousand year old earth variety, is extraordinarily widespread among the fundamentalists and evangelicals who make up his audience.  It's a tribal identity thing.  To fuck with that is to fuck with the structure upon which these people place their own self-value.

On the other hand, only Nixon can go to China.  So this might be a big deal.  I mean, Robertson doesn't own the psychotic religious right; he's just an influential figure.  But that's what it would take to put any cracks into all this "young earth" nonsense these crazy creationists push, an influential figure.  So I'm cautiously optimistic.  I'll move onto optimistic without any qualifiers when a couple more of Robertson's ilk join in.

Here's hoping.  It would be nice to stop thinking these people are nuts.  A lot of them are really nice folks.

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