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I'm afraid that the more cynical views of standards are probably right.  In
addition to preferring controversy to conveying facts, they generally are
promoting a relativistic viewpoint.  As a result, they're hostile to both
conservative religion (e.g., in portraying the Promise Keepers conventions
as chauvinistic) and science (e.g, in not trying to get accurate
information on scientific topics), which both claim to be dealing with
objective truth.
        In dealing with such pseudoscience, we need to be careful to
understand the viewpoint of the person in question.  I didn't see the show,
but the descriptions sound more closely akin to the "Chariots of the Gods"
line of pseudoscience than "scientific creationism".  10,000 years seems to
have replaced 6000 as the young-earther's preferred age, but neither fits
with man being "millions of years older than previously thought".  The
claims of ancient high technology are also much more typical of the ancient
space aliens and psychics crowd than the 7-day creation crowd.
        The question of the Bible's usefulness as a scientific treatise is
the right issue in dealing with "scientific creationism", but it must be
approached cautiously.  For someone who falls in the "believer" category,
arguing that the Bible may be accurate without being precise and asking
what the original intent of a passage was should be effective (assuming
open-mindedness).  Given that ancient Hebrew had a relatively limited
vocabulary with high flexibility, there's reasonable grounds for
questioning whether the word translated "day" in Genesis 1-2 was originally
intended to mean 24 hours.  However, if the "believer" suspects you're
trying to confine the Bible's sphere of relevance to making them feel good
or behave, they won't listen.

David Campbell   "old seashells"
Department of Geology
CB 3315 Mitchell Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill NC 27599-3315
bivalve@email.unc.edu