Introduction

Children lined up row upon row, mouths open, and eyes agog, as they look up at a museum's hairy half-man, club in hand, and listen to their group leader repeat:

There are three important force fields associated with planet
earth, a gravitational field, an electric field, and
a magnetic field. The gravitational field attracts us to
the earth, preventing us from flying off into space as the earth

One of the most widely circulated anti-creationist articles to appear in many years was recently published in the New York Times Magazine. There was nothing new or significant in the article, but it has nevertheless been reprinted in whole or in part, under various titles, in newspapers from coast to coast and overseas, and has probably turned many people against creationism.