I got the Apple Vision Pro. It’s awesome, but to be honest, it doesn’t do much, yet. It’s amazing hardware and software, but there are few built-in apps. It’ll grow and expand, but there’s just not a lot you can do with it yet.
There are two built-in experiences to sell you on how much potential it has to sell you on how incredible this thing can / will be. They both involve dinosaurs.
In one, a large dino comes into the room. It’s very impressive. In the other, you’re fully immersed in a scene of dinos and you can look around at all the scenery surrounding you. And this got me thinking…
What if I was a Young Earth Creationist who bought this? You know, those dummies who take the bible literally and think the earth is 5-6000 years old. The ones who think either fossils are a test of your faith by god or dinos roamed the earth with humans. How would these make such a person feel?
Personally, my first dream job, as a child, was to be an archaeologist, digging up dinos, so I loved both experiences. But if I thought this was all a lie from Satan, how let down might I feel when those are the best parts of my new, expensive toy?
This was my first thought when I awoke this morning. I’m typing it right after I woke so I don’t forget, such as we forget the details of dreams. Apologies for typos. I’m not proofreading it. I’m grabbing some caffeine and getting my day going. I just wanted to capture this silly, ironic idea. Btw, the AVP is still truly awesome and I don’t regret the purchase.
FWIW, the vast majority of YECs fall into the latter category because, while the timeline of dinosaurs is explicitly contradicted by their interpretation of the Bible, the existence of dinosaurs isn’t. Remember the guy who had that famous debate with Bill Nye? The venue for that debate was a “Creation Museum” featuring life-size animatronic dinosaurs living with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. It’s the same organization that spent ~$100 million to build a 500-foot-long replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, featuring dinosaurs in pens aboard the Ark (“Don’t worry guys, Noah probably took baby sauropods so there’s plenty of room for them on board”).
Creationist organizations lean hard into dinosaurs as an outreach tool because everybody agrees they’re awesome. They’d probably wax poetic about how amazing these creatures of God’s creation were, lament that the dinos we’re seeing in AR are a pale imitation of the dinos our Biblical ancestors saw in real life, and then condescendingly rant about how “secular science” is trying to drive a wedge between mankind and Biblical truth with its assumptions about “millions of years.”
I went to a talk (“The Truth About Dinosaurs”) that a YEC took me to. It was posited that some of the bones were real and others were a test of our faith.
It’s really cool how the all-loving entity that created us tries to trick us so we go to hell.