Can a creationist and an evolutionist be in love?  I’ve got no idea.  I’m sorry to the searcher who came by ILYBYGTH in search of an answer to this timeless question.

This touching search, though, brought to mind a memory from my wasted youth.  Readers of a certain maturity may remember the other gig Leonard Nimoy enjoyed.

This episode: Nimoy In Search Of . . . Atlantis!

Every week, Nimoy hosted a smarmy pre-cable show about the search for the paranormal: Atlantis, Roswell, etc.Managing this blog has opened my eyes to some of the searching that goes on these days.  As we’ve noted here before, Google Trends offers all of us a way to take the intellectual temperature of Fundamentalist America.

The editing tools of this blog offer additional perspectives.  We can see some of the search terms that direct people here.  Some of them are just pathetic, such as one about plagiarizing “What the Bible Means to Me.”  Some of them are encouraging, like the many searches for “I Love You But You’re Going to Hell.”  Some of them tell us something about what people care about.  We see a lot of searches, for instance, for “traditional schools vs. progressive schools.”  We see searches for “Richard Dawkins is going to hell.”  And we see various permutations of searches like, “Why are fundamentalists so resistant to evolution?”

A lot of the search terms we see are puzzling.  Consider a few recent gems:

• “Tim Tebow is going to hell”
• “Santorum loves Satan”
• “Smart people become professors”
• “Mounted patrol Horace Mann”

What were these anonymous searchers looking for?  Why do they dislike Tim Tebow so much?  And how did Horace Mann get a horse?  We will likely never know, and that’s what makes it so intriguing.

Along these lines, we have a new all-time favorite for poignancy:

• Can a creationist and evolutionist be in love?

Somewhere, out there, two star-crossed lovers gaze longingly at one another, one from his Bible college dormitory, the other from the mean streets of secular public education.

If there’s hope for this culture-war Romeo & Juliet, there’s hope for us all.