A tow-headed lad wearing a Cub Scout hat piped up first. "God did!"
"It's okay," Jack replied. "You can say the J-word here. Now, all of you this time: Who designed the elephants?"
John Johnston
Three kings (from left): B.C. Tours founders Rusty Carter, Tyson Thorne and Bill Jack.
John Johnston
Man in white: Tyson Thorne wears a lab coat when he leads creationist tours of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Related Content
More About
All the children: "Jesus did!"
Thorne and Jack then divided the tour group in half. Jack took his charges to see the African wild dogs, where he asked the kids, "Now, why do we need these fences between us and those dogs?"
Quickest to reply was a boy wearing a shirt that bore the words "What part of 'y'all' don't you understand?" He said, "Because of sin."
"That's right," said Jack. "Because of sin. Because before sin, there were no predators, because there was no death. Is death a good thing?"
"No," came the chorus.
Satisfied with the lesson of the wild dogs, Jack went on to the giraffes. There are seven bones in a giraffe's neck, he told his group. "Evolutionists believe those bones stretched over a long period of time, but can you stretch the bones in your neck?"
"No!"
"So how do you think the giraffe got such a long neck?"
"Jesus!"
Jack smiled. "That's right."
A terrified peacock sprinted past, three giggling public-school kids in hot pursuit.
Jack's half of the B.C. Tours group proceeded in a quiet, orderly fashion to the zebras.
"Why do you think the zebra has stripes?" Jack asked.
A boy wearing a Federal Bureau of Investigation, Knoxville, hat ventured a guess: "Camouflage?"
No, not camouflage. Patiently, Jack explained again how before the fall of Eden, there was no death, hence no predators, hence no need for camouflage. "Let's try again. Why does the zebra have stripes?"
The kids defaulted to their standard answer: "Jesus!"
"Kind of," said Jack. "But not quite. The answer is really that the zebra has stripes to glorify God. God made all the animals for his own glory. They're for our enjoyment, but they're for His glory."
Jack used the camel exhibit to illustrate the Bible's account of Abraham's servant choosing a wife for Isaac. "He said, 'Whoever waters my camels and gives me a drink of water, she shall be the one.' He chose her because she had a servant's heart."
The last animal on Jack's tour was the hippopotamus. Jack talked about how the hippopotamus is fiercely territorial and one of the most dangerous animals in Africa. Then he explained that upon the Second Coming, while all the non-believers are roasting marshmallows in Hell, all those who trusted in Christ will be able to swim and play with the hippopotamus, because everything will be like it was in Eden.
"One day, we'll all be able to swim with sharks and scratch lions behind the ears," he said. "Won't that be cool?"
"I'm going to have a pet cobra!" one boy exclaimed.
"I'm going to ride on tigers!" another cried.
Jack had one final, important point to make. He set it up by quoting God in the Book of Job:40:15-18:
Look now at the behemoth, which I made along with you; he eats grass like an ox. See now, his strength is in his hips, and his power is in his stomach muscles. He moves his tail like a cedar, the sinews of his thighs are tightly knit. His bones are like beams of bronze, his ribs like bars of iron.
The word "behemoth" is footnoted in most Bibles as "a large animal, exact identity unknown." Many biblical scholars point to the hippo as a likely candidate. But Jack has another theory. "Look at that hippo's tail," he said. "Does that look like a tail the size of cedar tree?"
"No!"
"Well, what other animal can you think of that is massive and super-strong that has bones like beams of bronze and a tail the size of a cedar tree and who eats grass, who God made along with man?"
"Dinosaurs!"
"That's right," Jack said. "There's the evidence, right there."
But then, where are the dinosaurs today? If they were created by God at the same time He created man and all the other creatures, why aren't they still around?
"It is a bit of a mystery," admits Thorne, "but we do know from the Bible that people used to live for a long, long time. Eight hundred, nine hundred years was common. Now, what if the lizards of today lived that long, too? Can you imagine how big they would have been? That's one possible explanation."
But when you have faith, you don't need to nitpick little things like the fossil record.
At Colorado Christian University, Thorne had a professor who believed that the first twelve chapters of Genesis were fabricated tales meant to teach us lessons about God and human nature. "He thought there really was no Garden of Eden," says Thorne, incredulously. "Well, I'm sorry, but if you take out the first twelve chapters of Genesis, you can pretty much throw the rest of Christian ideology away, because it's all founded on Genesis.
"The Bible teaches us that God protects his word. He says not one thing will disappear from His word. Not one jot, not one tittle. His word's as true today as it was yesterday as it will be tomorrow. And I gotta believe that. If I don't believe it, then the whole Bible isn't worth believing."
