AS ROBYN ROSS explains in a fascinating piece for the Texas Observer, the tiny town of Glen Rose occupies an interesting place in the debate about creationism:

In other words, there are a lot of people in Glen Rose who believe that the world is perhaps 6,000 or 7,000 years old. It might seem like a hard belief to maintain, especially when your town is criss-crossed by dinosaur tracks that are roughly 113m years older than that. Complicating the picture is that a lot of people in Glen Rose also maintain that some of their town's fossils are human tracks—that is, that there is a physical record of a time when man and dinosaurs walked the earth together. So in addition to Dinosaur World, the town boasts a Creation Evidence Museum, and all in all, between the religious tourists and the dinosaur enthusiasts, this adds up to a $23m tourism industry.

That sounds like the set-up for a joke. But what I found interesting about this piece is that Ms Ross interviewed a lot of locals, and although it's not a scientific survey, the comments she presents demonstrate some considerable diversity among the sceptics. That is, it's not a simple are-you-for-Darwin-or-agin-him kind of picture. I think this is often true of sceptics, and neglecting to realise that pushes us to see things in starker terms than actually apply.

First of all, you have people who believe in creationism for what we might characterise as quasi-empirical reasons. Ms Ross goes for a hike along the river with one resident who explains to her that he believes dinosaurs and people co-existed because he's seen the tracks together. "If the river weren't up, McFall explains," she writes, "we'd see man tracks just a few feet away, in the same strata of rock as the dinosaur tracks." While this might be a local idiosyncrasy, Glen Rose being one of the few towns touting physical proof of the failure of the theory of evolution, it parallels the argument behind intelligent design. Incidentally, people who take this view sometimes suggest that science is no less mysterious than religion. "The only conflict we have is when people move from metropolitan areas and have different value systems," says a woman who Ms Ross meets at a tractor pull. The founder of the Creation Evidence Museum tells her that "it requires more faith to believe [evolution] than it does to accept one single postulate." The implication is that science, like religion, is a value system.

Secondly, you have people who believe in creationism because they want to believe in it. This category can be broken down into people who want to believe for normative reasons, and those who want to believe because they have a pragmatic interest. The former view is poignantly summarised by an elderly lady who tells Ms Ross that she was raised as a churchgoer, but started to believe in science when she was at university and married a secular man; only after divorcing, after 29 years of marriage, did she come back to the fold. The theory of evolution, she concludes, is "the worst thing that ever happened to me." There are others who seem to tacitly support creationism, or at least stay out of the debate, because they have a vested interest in the subject. A man who runs a fossil shop in the shadow of the Creation Evidence Museum: "You ask me what I believe in, it's the almighty dollar."