AFP profiles the "science" classes at Liberty University, to which Christian students are flocking to learn how to defend Creationism:
They plan to become doctors, researchers and professors, but these students from Liberty University, an evangelical school, also believe God created the Earth in a week, some 6,000 years ago.
Each year, a group of biology students at the Christian university based in Lynchburg, Virginia, travels to the Natural History Museum in Washington to learn about a theory they dismiss as incorrect -- Darwin's theory of evolution.
The young "creationists" examined a model of the Morganucodon rat, believed to be the first and common ancestor of mammals that appeared some 210 million years ago.
Lauren Dunn, 19, a second-year biology student, was unimpressed.
"210 million years, that's arbitrary. They put that time to make up for what they don't know," she said.
Nathan Hubbard, a 20-year-old from Michigan and a first-year biology major who plans to become a doctor, regarded the model with suspicion.
"There is no scientific, biological genetic way that this, this rat, could become you," he said, seemingly scandalized by the proposition.
...
David DeWitt, a Liberty University biology professor, opens his classes with a prayer, asking God to help him teach his students.
"I pray that you help me to teach effectively and help the students to learn and defend their faith," he says ... "Creationism and evolutionism have different ways of explaining the evidence. The creationist way recognizes the importance of Biblical records," said [Liberty professor Marcus] Ross.
He teaches his students that dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the Earth some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago during the Biblical flood that Noah survived by building an ark.
He says carbon-dating techniques that have been used to suggest the Earth is in fact billions of years old are simply not reliable.
