[Klavalala]

i met someone the other day who believes in 7 day creationism, believes that the bible is the literal truth etc. she was american (what a surprise). (...) what is it with the US and letting religious nutters instruct children?

Even if there would be no theory of evolution, taking the Biblical creation story literal is not the way to go.
In fact it even equals taking Darwins Origin of Species as an metaphore.

Having said that, for a common human being (=99,5% of all human beings) it's a decicion who they have to believe.
1. a preacher who says it's in the Bible and there are witnesses and it's therefore true
2. a scientist who says it's in the science books and there are people who were able to reproduce these findings and it's therefore true.

For a common person it's believing one or the other.
It's easy to just say that everybody who believes creation is therefore a silly idiot.

Personally I do not like it to rely on others for my opinion.
Eventhough I'm raised in a passive creationist environment (almost everybody believed creation, not in a fundamentalist way, not trying to convince others, etc.) I do not believe in literal creation anymore. Not b/c it conflicts with science but just b/c I started to try to understand what the authors of Genesis really meant to say back then thousands of years ago. And I can't imagine that they wanted to convince us of 7-day creationism (or any variant). Taking the Genesis account literal violates the intentions of the authors of the Bible.

But eventhough I do believe in evolution and an evolving world, I do not believe that everything evolved from one (or a couple of) simple 1 cell life form. I'm not a biologe or an evolutionist so it's just a fools opion, but if I reason from my field of knowledge, computer science, then I simply can't believe that Windows 7 could evolve from DOS 4.0, not even if you copy it a zillion times, have testers remove the too bugged editions from the copy pool, and have the copy system produce more copy errors then it does right now.

The principals of evolution are there, I simply can't make the leap (of faith! imho!) from these principals to the entire system of amoebe to parrot evolution.

So from Genesis I learn that God is responsible for the existing of the universe, and that he's not a part of that universe (compared to other gods of the times of the Genesis authors). And I certainly hope that scientist will continue to try to discover how he did it and how it works.

Am I 100% right? Most probably not, I'm only 1 human being that lacks about 99,99999% of the knowledge of everything there is to know.
Am I therefore a stupid silly idiot? Perhaps, but not more then anybody else on this world who also just bases his opinion on the 0,00001% knowledge he has on everything there is to know.

Fortunately we know still a lot more then then 0,00000000000000000000000000001% people knew 300 years ago, and maybe one day we'll know 1% or 2% or more!