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If I say the sky is red, and grass is purple, because I was honestly raised to believe these things, does that mean that a debate over whether clear daytime sky on Earth is blue or red is merely a difference of opinion? I'm fine with you thinking the sky is red, but if you claim that you are mindful of science in the same breath, I'll laugh myself to death.

Okay, I won't call it a strawman, but it is certainly a questionable example.

A better one would be if you were raised to believe that at some point in the past, the sky was red. (Purple grass currently exists, native to northern Africa I believe, so makes for a bad example.) The plain truth is that neither you nor I have any direct experience of what the sky looked like millions of years ago, and a red sky is an entirely plausible concept. There may be a total lack of evidence for both cases, in which case it is obviously a matter of opinion. There may be more evidence for a red sky in the past than a blue sky, in which case it is a matter of how much faith one places in the evidence, and thus at its root still a matter of opinion.

Let's say for example that a series of dreadfully ancient cave paintings were found and all of them that had sky in the background showed it as being red. This is still not a lot of evidence to go on, but it is again plausible to believe that the sky was (at least local to the cave painters) red. It is also plausible to believe that sunset had a special significance for the painters' culture, so they depicted only sunsets (sans sun, naturally, because that would make it too easy...er, i mean, it was too holy to make an image of) in their paintings, and the limited set of colors they had to work with resulted in a uniform red.

Which of these is more plausible? I don't know. I don't know if the chemical makeup of the atmosphere would permit a red sky while supporting human life, but that would be another source of evidence for or against its existence. Your opinion will be swayed by the amount of evidence that you see for each side, and what you count as "evidence" rests on the amount of trust you place in whoever did the calculations or found the paintings or what have you. The whole point of this example is to demonstrate that yes, the past really is a matter of opinion or, if you prefer, "open to interpretation." Witness the revisionist histories and continuing debates of the US: was Lincoln a great liberator or a strong authoritarian? What does the 2nd Amendment really mean? What caused the beginning and end of the Great Depression?

Now, back to dinosaurs. We have a lot of fossil evidence pointing to dinosaurs and man being separated by great gulfs of time. This evidence relies upon our geological model of strata, carbon dating, and likely a bunch of other things that I'm too ignorant to know about--I was never very interested in dinosaurs. However, there is also evidence, including cave paintings amusingly enough, of dinosaurs coexisting and interacting with man. See the images here; I am aware that the page is advocating coexistence due to creationism but the evidence stands on its own. It is possible that each and every painting, relief, and figurine could be explained away and require no coexistence, but it is statistically unlikely. Yet nobody but the Creationists ever mentions this evidence; because it doesn't fit the standard model it simply gets pushed aside.

This is not the scientific method at work.

In conclusion, we know less than we think we know, only fools are positive, facts are rarely as solid as they appear, etc. It's not as cut-and-dry as you have been led to believe, as is the case for several other fields of science that I've looked into.

I also wonder why it is perfectly acceptable to be excited over the possibility of not finding the Higgs Boson which, to my understanding, would invalidate the standard model, yet it is not accepta

Some of us are at least willing to accept that the ancient word translated "day" in Genesis has more possible translations than "a 24 hour period"

Exodus 20: 8-11 "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. You shall labor six days, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. You shall not do any work in it, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your man-servant, nor your maid-servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates;for in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day, and made it holy.

Since the genesis account is interpreted to mean six 24 hour periods in the ten commandments ...

Exodus 31: 16,17 Therefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever; for in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.'

... and in other parts of OT law ...

Mark 10: 6-9 But from the beginning of the creation, 'God made them male and female. For this cause a man will leave his father and mother, and will join to his wife, and the two will become one flesh,' so that they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate."

... and Jesus teaching on marriage and divorce seems based on a literal interpretation of Genesis, specifically that "from the beginning of the creation, 'God made them male and female'" which directly contradicts evolution, it would seem that some one who wants to interpret the creation account in any other way is effectively claiming that Jesus was mistaken about creation. For such a person to claim to be a follower of Jesus as the Messiah is problematic to say the least, as they are effectively judging some of his teaching to be false.

As for the possibility of dinosaurs walking with humans, I encourage you to consider two things:
1. The historical artifacts depicting dinosaurs pictured on this site: http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/ancient/ancient .htm
2. The fact that when soft tissue was found in dinosaur bones there has been no questioning of the age of the bones, it has been widely and automatically accepted that soft tissue can last for 65 million years, even though it was previously "known" that this couldn't happen. This seems to bring into serious question the objectivity of mainstream scientists. Why has the age of the bones not been questioned?

I only did a quick search of Google and came up with this (Yes, it's a "Christian" site) http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/ancient/ancient .htm/ and countless others of cave drawings of dinosaurs (or dragons). You should try doing a search of OOPARTS (Out Of Place Artifacts) some time, some really weird stuff out there.

But I really doubt we are taking cave drawings as proof these days other wise you would be believing in some truly odd things. But I don't see how cave drawings have any bearings on whether or not something existed as there are countless things and animals not depicted in any cave drawing. Not all civilizations practiced cave drawing anyway, which shows why we have so many artifacts, tablets, containers and the like which also depict animals long thought extinct.

But I am sure whether or not you believe these things are real I am sure you will just pass them off as chance or pure imagination. Heck, with enough time I am sure they could have formed by chance! Yep, thats it!

There are lots of ancient drawings which look like dinosaurs but they are usually referred to as dragons http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/ancient/ancient .htm

http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/ancient/ancient .htm

Do a little reading before you post. There are even fossilized dinosaur tracks with human footprints going through them. http://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks.htm

we have dinosaurs fossils and still they don't believe dinosaurs existed, for $DEITY's sake!

Well, I don't know anyone who doesn't believe dinosaurs existed, but I do know people who think that the bible's "behemoth" was a dinosaur and that dinosaurs and man coexisted. Given all the examples of dinosaur like depictions in ancient art like the examples at this creationist website: http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/ancient/ancient .htm I don't think it's unfair to say that it is a reasonable standard of evidence which should cause us to at least question if man and dinosaurs did live at the same time.

Ah, yes, I should have googled this first.

Particularly interesting experiments were conducted by the late Dr. Kei Mori of Kao University in Tokyo. Dr. Mori raised plants under special light that filtered out IR and UV radiation. His unique process of fiberoptic sunlight collection and transmission, called "Himawari Sunlighting", is now marketed worldwide. At first Mori feared the filtered light would be detrimental. But after extensive experiments he claimed it could promote healing and "because the ultraviolet is blocked, this sunlight does not fade fabrics or damage skin." (Gilmore, Elaine, "Sunflower over Tokyo," Popular Science, May 1988, p. 75.) One long-lived tomato plant was grown in a special nutrient-rich solution to be exhibited at the Japan Expo '85. Under piped sunlight and controlled atmosphere, this tomato tree grew over 30 ft high and yielded more than 13,000 ripe tomatoes during the six months of the Expo! (Hiroshi, Koichibara, "Tomatomation," UNESCO Courier, March 1987.)