Twenty-five years ago he enrolled at Capital Bible Seminary near Washington, D.C., where he earned degrees in Greek, Hebrew and theology. He now runs his institute out of two small rooms wedged into a mini-mall five miles south of Lancaster. Cutouts of dinosaurs decorate the walls and shelves are stocked with stuffed dinosaurs and other toys, books and videotapes. Curtis said he is not influenced by other religious scholars who have been willing to accept evolution, or even by the 1996 announcement by Pope John Paul II that evolution is compatible with Christian belief. Without Adam and Eve, he said, the whole picture falls apart.
Many scientists acknowledge that evolution can be hard to swallow.
In a recent talk in Philadelphia, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called evolution a threat to man's superior place in nature. We look in it for divine wisdom. By the 1700s, long before Darwin, people saw evidence in rock formation, and in fossils, of an older Earth. Darwin was not the first to propose that living things had changed over time. A turning point came in 1925, when Tennessee science teacher John Scopes was tried and convicted for breaking a state law forbidding the teaching that human beings evolved from animals.