Is it possible? Can it be that the Religous Right has gone so far over the edge in promoting ignorance and distrust of facts and science that some of its biggest perpetrators are feeling a little guilty and are trying to walk it back just a bit?

On Tuesday’s 700 Club, a viewer wrote [televangelist Pat] Robertson that her “biggest fear is to not have my children and husband next to me in God’s Kingdom” because they question why the Bible could not explain the existence of dinosaurs. “Look, I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop [James] Ussher wasn’t inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years,” the TV preacher explained. “It just didn’t. You go back in time, you’ve got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things and you’ve got the caucuses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas.” “They’re out there,” he continued. “So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don’t try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That’s not the Bible.” “If you fight science, you’re going to lose your children, and I believe in telling it the way it was.

Excuse me for a second while I pick my jaw off the ground. Maybe because I never traveled in evangelical circles, I had honestly never heard the whole "the Earth is 6,000 years old and Jesus rode on dinosaurs" notion until about 20 years ago, and then suddenly I heard it everywhere. It was difficult to understand how so many people could deny the vast array of evidence in front of them like a badge of honor. The whole Creation Museum outside Louisville, Kentucky, was promoted by Robertson's CBN network when it opened was predicated on this very notion.

It's an amazing thing to hear Pat Robertson actually advising a follower to not fight science.