idragonspyro asked:
Hi Neil!
Weirdly specific….question? Comment? Idk.
Recently I was given the opportunity to visit my friend’s church and ask his pastor questions about certain things our friend had told us - many of my friends are atheists and were not raised heavily Christian, and I myself am Jewish. A lot of our questions to our friend tend towards things like what beliefs are ACTUALLY held abortion, queer rights, etc, but one extra question I was about the dinosaurs - specifically their seeming non-presence in the Garden of Eden.
I had asked this question to my rabbi, whose response ran along the lines of Genesis being a lot more metaphorical than a factual account (don’t know how common this is even among other Jewish theories, but I found it interesting), so I wanted to see how the pastor’s response differed.
And. I gotta say. Was not expecting the answer “when God created the world he created in such a way as to appear entirely complete” - basically, God created the world with fossils already in it.
Which, of course, made me think about “fossils are just a joke that the scientists haven’t managed to figure out yet.”
So, Mr. Gaiman, I guess my question is - did you know this was a real thing people believed, or was it accidental?