O’Donnell on CNN in 1996: ‘Just As Much, If Not More’ Proof For Creationism Than Evolution

As Dan Amira at New York magazine dug up, O’Donnell appeared in March 1996 on a CNN panel discussion with Dr. Michael McKinney, a professor of evolutionary biology from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

At one point, O’Donnell provided this definition: “Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.”

O’Donnell opened the discussion saying: “Well, as the senator from Tennessee mentioned [Note: it is not clear from the Nexis transcript who is being referred to here], evolution is a theory and it’s exactly that. There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put- that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it’s merely a theory.”

When McKinney objected and explained that evolution is considered a fact with evidence and experiments to support it, O’Donnell responded. “Now, he said that it’s based on fact. I just want to point out a couple things,” she said. “First of all, they use carbon dating, as an example, to prove that something was millions of years old. Well, we have the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens and the carbon dating test that they used then would have to then prove that these were hundreds of millions of years younger, when what happened was they had the exact same results on the fossils and canyons that they did the tests on that were supposedly 100 millions of years old. And it’s the kind of inconsistent tests like this that they’re basing their ‘facts’ on.”