Dippy is, apparently, a common name for pet diplodocuses. The statue of a diplodocus outside the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh is fondly known as “Dippy,” as is the fossilized remains of one such dinosaur from London’s Natural History Museum. The London Dippy is on tour, or at least has been. I learned about the fact that Dippy was in Norwich Cathedral just a day or so after the exhibit closed (I wouldn’t have been able to make it in any case; I mean I haven’t been able to get to the Pittsburgh Dippy and I live in the same state). There are still plenty of photos on the cathedral’s website. It’s a striking juxtaposition. A massive stone building constructed to a medieval conception of God and one of the best examples of evolution, far older than the church on several orders of magnitude, peacefully coexisting.
John Bell Hatcher, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
American evangelicalism has a much harder time accepting science. I’ve been writing about change recently. One of the changes in western thinking has been to move from the “I told you so” of clerics to the “I can show you evidence” of scientists. Those who like others to tell them what to think have a difficult time letting go of medieval notions of the world—that it’s flat, and young, and about to end, as if God has a very limited imagination. We now know that the world has been here far longer than one interpretation of the Bible posits, but that doesn’t make it any easier to have a conversation about it. Many religions want to claim knowledge that can’t be questioned. And yet, dinosaurs and cathedrals seem to mix well.
The assumption that those who think differently are evil, or are inspired by evil, is one of the most insidious children of monotheism. With one God comes the idea of only one way to understand that deity and all other interpretations come from that divinity’s arch-enemy. It’s a view of the world that struggles with change. Historians, even those of us who focus on the history of religions, tend to take a long view. It’s possible to trace the development of ideas that have lead to the strange juxtapositions of our modern world. Apologists so convinced of their interpretation of Genesis that they think the Bible wouldn’t have found dinosaurs worth remarking about, for example, and then cramming them on the ark. Others, it seems, welcome dinosaurs into cathedrals. Which is a better way to be humble before God?
