The above video was picked up by PZ Myers and was the source of much amusement among his followers. GOP candidate Darren Baily looks to be a young earth fundamentalist and apparently believes that dinosaurs and humans co-existed. Bailey, a likely Trumpite & Hamite, repeatedly responds to the interviewer's question about whether humans and dinosaurs co-existed with the question "Were you there?".
I too was amused, especially over those people in dinosaur suits who attend Baily's rallies and send up his views; that's democracy at work for you. And yet I was horrified at the same time to think that this kind of intellectual degeneracy is being promoted in the name of Christianity.
The eye watering stupidity of Bailey's response is evidence of just how intellectually run-down Christianity is in some parts of the US (and in the UK too). Of course, human beings can't be everywhere at once and many conclusions have to be drawn without eyewitness data, via abductive inference based on evidence (e.g. crime, deep space, the inside of the Sun and planets, complex software bugs, technological malfunctions, historical mysteries, claims about fairies at the bottom of the garden, ....etc.) In short Baily et. al. are undermining the whole providential rationality of our world with a postmodern take on science. I have a feeling it's no coincidence that Christian young earthism, fideism and gnosticism saw growth in the 1960s around the time postmodernism was geminating too.
Another source of mindless irrationality is the following epistemic (Often heard from Ken Ham) :
Everyone has the same evidence, but different interpretations occur because of different starting points.
...as if some there was no such thing as some world views joining the data dots more consistently, succinctly and predictably than other world views; the latter being more probable than the intellectual ad-hocery of young earthism: Another postmodernist take on science!
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