Consider this:
You are fascinated by animals, and history.
You are so fascinated by sloths that you own 2 as pets, work in their environment, and generally are around sloths 24/7.
You KNOW everything there is to know.
One day, you're talking to someone who says, "hey morty, did you know they drained the swamp up in the valley, and found all these sloth bones".
You check it out, but this valley cleary hasn't seen life in hundreds, maybe thousands of years. It is a dry desert. What would sloth bones be doing here? So, you look around, and come up with a couple theories. Either this land used to be full of wilderness, OR, there was a massive flood and the water simply carried a bunch of dead sloths from somewhere further north.
You decide to test both, and start digging in the swamp and surrounding lands, and also go north, digging along the way to see if you can find more.
Turns out, you're finding more skeletons as you continue north, leaving a trail about 10 miles north to a mountain without vegetation.
Hmm, you think to yourself. Mountains provide water, and water provides vegetation. You conclude that there must have been vegetation here at one point, and possibly an entire river.
You notify some scientists, and digging starts all around the mountain. You find amber, fossilized wood, and loads of skeletons that belong to species gerneally known to live in forests. You're learning more and more about the area every day, and maybe you might learn something about what these sloths ate, how they lived, etc. You are fascinated by this discovery. Eventually you find some skeletons with some very abnormal bone structures. Then you find a bone structure of an animal you can't even identify, then you find a fossil that looks something like the size of a whale, but with legs....WTF is going on here. Some scientists carbon date the rocks and say they are several million years old.
No. No. No. The Bible clearly says that the earth is only 6 thousand years old.
CLEARLY THIS IS THE WORK OF THE DEVIL.
you say to yourself, and then you leave the scientific community and join a convent because clearly, your love of sloths and learning are all contradicted by some lines written by a man 2 thousand years ago.
