You know you may have gone too far right when Pat Robertson starts schooling you in science.
The televangelist and host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club likely stunned some of his viewers on Tuesday when he flatly rejected the creationist claim that Earth is only 6,000 years old.
“You go back in time, you’ve got radiocarbon dating, you got all these things, and you’ve got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas,” said Robertson Tuesday. He continued, “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.”
Robertson’s comment was in response to a viewer who had written 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.”
But arguments like these that question the planet’s age are not strictly limited the 700 Club and its viewership.
Back in September, Georgia Congressman Paul Broun made headlines when he claimed that evolution and the big bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of Hell,” and that he believed the earth was less than 9,000 years old.
And when Fla. Sen. Marco Rubio was asked about the age of the planet in a recent interview with GQ, the rising GOP star dodged saying, “I’m not a scientist, man.”
Pat Robertson concluded his response to the viewer with a warning: “If you fight science, you’re going to lose your children, and I believe in telling it the way it was.”
That may be good advice for the GOP as well.
Emma Margolin
Emma Margolin is a reporter at MSNBC.com.