During my recent sojourn in Disney World, I began thinking about really big numbers as I tried to calculate the total value of that enterprise as a whole. I knew the Magic Kingdom theme park was built in the early 1970s, at the cost of roughly $331 million dollars. More than two decades later, Disney's Animal Kingdom Theme Park was added at the cost of a cool $1 billion. Epcot cost about $1.4 billion to construct, more than twice its estimated budget. Golf courses, hotels, shopping malls, Hollywood studios, infrastructure: it was pretty easy to estimate the net worth of the forty-seven square mile intelligently designed world of alternate reality would run into the hundreds of billions, perhaps as much as $1 trillion dollars. Mickey Mouse is worth a considerable amount of money. We're talking about some really big numbers. Given the fact that advocates of evolution seem to frequently argue that I fail to grasp the significance of a really big number, as I rode around on the monorail and pondered the value of Walt Disney World, the idea for writing this article popped into my head while I watched a river of cash flow through the Magic Kingdom. If only that were the case...I almost wish that I couldn't grasp the concept of a really big number. After all, ignorance can be bliss. The sad truth is that I’m constantly worried about big numbers. I'm painfully aware that the amount of outstanding federal debt for the United States is currently well over $16 trillion dollars. Granted, it is more money than I've ever seen, but the numbers do follow a … [Read more...]