A long time ago, while mulling over the insanity of becoming a Christian, I attended a Bible study deep in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. It was early spring 1979, and I wasn't eager to throw in my lot with the crew of perky believers who wandered around campus perpetually turning the other cheek.

A classmate invited me to attend the Bible study off campus because he suspected my faith was wavering even before it got off the ground. "You have a lot of questions," he said as we drove through a generic Southern California suburb at dusk looking for his friend's house. "Let's see if we can get a few of them answered so you can make a decision for the Lord."

We were the last to arrive. Every square inch of living room was filled with righteous virgins who wore gingham dresses or polo shirts that smelled of apple pie and soap. I stood in the dining room near the kitchen with other stragglers feeling alienated from the whole thing. Looking around, it wasn't hard to figure out that whatever happened between me and God wasn't going to involve these people, that was for damn sure.

Standing in the center of the room was the evening's guest speaker, a middle-aged academic from the local creationist think-tank. Lanky and professorial, he regaled us with stories about how he decimated evolutionists in debates across the country.

Occasionally he punctuated his monologue with "Darwinism is a lie" and "Carbon-14 dating is scientifically untenable." He insisted that no one was obligated to believe anything as intellectually shoddy as evolution in 1979. The world was a little over 10,000 years old if it was a day, a proposition he was willing to prove with chalk and a blackboard if necessary.

During the question-and-answer period, mine was the only hand that shot up. I asked him about the dinosaurs, imagining that it was probably the first time anyone ever bothered asking such an obvious question.

"Dinosaurs? What about them?" he said, as if expecting me to fill in the geological record in the dim recesses of my own brain. "Isn't it obvious that humans and dinosaurs co-existed until Noah's flood swept them away? Secular science is in denial about human footprints found side-by-side with dinosaur tracks on ancient river beds in Texas. Evolution can't explain it. Creationism can."

I smiled wanly and looked at my watch. Several outrageous leaps of faith are part of the package when one becomes a believer -- the most preposterous being the odd business of Jesus rising from the dead -- but there was no way I would consider "The Flintstones" closer to truth than Charles Darwin. Dino going for walks with Fred 8,000 years B.C. is a miracle even more staggering than the Resurrection.

My friend wasn't in a hurry to leave, though. He didn't need much convincing that the Earth was barely older than one of the ancient fruitcakes that circulate uneaten during the holidays.

Still, I give the creationist from 25 years ago more credit for intellectual honesty than proponents of "intelligent design" theory who are attempting to smuggle creationism into public schools by questioning the viability of evolution.

There was a time when creationists readily conceded that their "theory" was based on a literal reading of Scripture that traces the origin of mankind back to the chronology found in Genesis. There was none of this semantic hoohah about evolution being a "theory and not a fact" that impresses so many good Christian folk today.

These days, neo-creationists obscure the religious roots of intelligent design even though they know their "science" couldn't stand apart from biblical revelation. Presenting intelligent design as a religiously neutral theory is a bigger lie than any so-called inconsistency found in Darwinism.

At the root of this shell game is an embarrassment about God's ability to work through nature using the evolutionary process. Will someone explain why a 15 billion-year-old universe is any less miraculous than the one conjured up in biblical poetry? As Jimmy Fallon once cracked on "Saturday Night Live," the only compromise between the two will be an eventual agreement to start calling dinosaurs "Jesus Horses."