Put Me Down as In Favor of Separation of Church and Zoo

This seems kind of dumb:

A mayoral candidate in Tulsa, Okla., is reportedly putting a Christian creationism exhibit in the Tulsa Zoo among her top priorities, along with addressing crime and budget issues.

Republican Anna Falling says the people of Tulsa must recognize that God needs to be honored in the city, Tulsa World reported.

"If we can't come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come," she told the paper.

As part of that effort, Falling has resurrected a failed push for an exhibit at the Tulsa Zoo that would tell the Genesis story of God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh, originally proposed by Christian activist Dan Hicks in 2005, Tulsa World reported.

"Installation of this exhibit at the Tulsa Zoo was raised in 2005, discussed, vetted and resolved in a very public process involving the entire community," Zoo officials said in a prepared statement, "A public vote four years ago by the Parks Board resolved the issue."

The zoo currently has a display of the earth's creation from a scientific point of view and an elephant-like statue said to represent the Hindu god Ganesha, Tulsa World reported.

Falling, a former city councilor and founder of several Christian non-profit groups, also stressed the need to reserve leadership positions for those who will "honor God," the paper reported.

Can't we just go to the zoo and look at the animals?

Although I'm a Christian my own views on creation differ somewhat from the more fundamental beliefs such as what they're promoting in Tulsa.

I was attending a mid-week Bible study one time and the pastor opened the floor to questions about anything that was on people's minds. A woman asked how dinosaurs fit in to the whole six day creation theory. The pastor's explanation of how dinosaurs co-existed with man was so tortured as to be mockable. He was a smart guy but it took a lot more than faith to believe the tale he was telling.

I'm definitely not a "monkey-to-man" evolutionist, but at the same time I have difficulty with the concept of a strict six 24-hour day creation given the ample geological evidence that the earth is far older than the 5,000 years the strict creationists believe. There is a happy medium and that's pretty much where I come down.

The happy medium says that there is a God who set the whole of creation in motion, and the complexity and diversity we see today just couldn't happen by chance. The one big variable is that nobody knows for sure how long God's "day" was. Certainly he could have kicked everything off in short order, but based on evidence we can see in the geological and fossil record I tend to believe those days could have lasted millions of years as things developed. Moses, who wrote the creation story down, was certainly not a scientist or have a basis to understand the concepts involved in the development of the universe over millions or billions of years. He wrote it the way he understood it.

Of course, we could all be wrong. Hopefully someday He'll explain it all to us. In the meantime, let's just go to the zoo and look at the animals.