Creation, Evolution, Science and Education
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Psalm 14:1
“If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.” Richard Dawkins
Last June, Gallup came out with a poll which showed that 46% of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. Fifteen percent believe that humans evolved with no involvement by God. Gallup has asked this same question eleven times since 1982 and through the past 3 decades, there is not much difference in the results percentages.
106 of our nation’s universities and colleges were started on the Christian faith, to be higher centers of theological studies and seminaries; these schools include Harvard, William and Mary, Princeton and Yale. In public elementary schools, up until the early 1900’s, books for studies included the Biblical based Blue Back Speller and New England Primer, Beauties of the Bible from 1806, Instructions for the Better Government & Organization of Common Schools from 1819, A Common-School Grammar of the English Language, 1871 and Bible Readings For Schools, 1897 and all of these books had Bible references throughout.
When President Andrew Jackson signed legislation for the establishment of the Department of Education, it was as meant to improve American education at local and state levels only. The first commissioner had a staff of three and two rooms in Washington D.C to run the agency. This is inconceivable in our modern education system which is based in Washington DC’s enormous Dept. Of Education and federally mandated cross the board, one size fits all style standardized testing and programs such as the much debated common core. Add the massive unions, specifically the NEA, which is behind most of what is foisted on local school boards.
We are so far removed from what the founders envisioned for education in the United States. Consider the words of Noah Webster, the “father” of early Education who said, “The Bible was America’s basic textbook in all fields.”
And this from Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense:
It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences, and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles: he can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.
Our nation was for the most part a Christian nation in our laws and in all areas of society up until the early to mid-1900’s, and until the Scopes trial of 1925, and the removal of prayer in schools after one atheist, Madeline Murray O’Hare won a case in the Supreme Court in 1963, our schools reflected the rest of our society, in that the Bible and Godly principles were still taught. The final scrubbing of any mention of God or the Bible came in 1980 with the Stone vs. Graham decision in the Supreme Court when it was ordered that schools remove the 10 Commandments, based on fear that “it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments…”
Even though there is still a Constitutional right of freedom of religion, the only religion that seems to be attacked in schools and everywhere else is the Christian religion, especially if it is based on strong belief in the Bible. What is interesting in cases such as the theory of Evolution being taught in Schools is that Christians were, and still are judged as narrow minded, simple, backward and anti-science if they want Creation taught alongside.
In so many areas in today’s science community, if one comes out for creation, that person is ostracized and often blackballed by their peers.
Now let’s consider the case of well-known media personality, Bill Nye “the science guy”. While Bill Nye is not a scientist, he is actually an engineer by trade, but he has come out multiple times claiming that Creationism isn’t appropriate for children, even going so far as saying if one denies evolution that’s completely inconsistent with the world we observe. He then implores not to teach children Creation because “We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need engineers that can build stuff and solve problems.” Because according to him and other evolutionists, one can’t be a literate voter, taxpayer who builds stuff and solves problems if one is a Bible believing Christian.
Mr. Nye is at it again, now that he’s agreed to a debate with Christian Creationist Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum. In a recent interview where he was asked about the debate, which is coming up February 4th, Nye had this to say, “It’s not in the national interest, I’m not sure, this is one of the things I’d like to find out… Is if this guy (talking about Ken Ham)… Really believes this, or is he in it for some other reason. Because it’s so extraordinary, I mean it’s so out of your everyday experience and so inconsistent with everything we observe...”
It’s interesting what he claims, yet when looking at some of the most scientific and mathematical minds throughout history have been… Christians or at least had a belief in a Creator God. For many of them, their faith was their motivation behind their discoveries. They saw the world around them, saw as being part of creation and they wanted to discover how God worked things all together.
I can’t help but think of men like American naval officer Matthew Maury, and his reading the Bible passages in Psalm 8:8, The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas, and Ecclesiastes 1:6, The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits, caused him to search out the ‘paths of the seas. Maury is considered to be the father of oceanography, and while there are suggestions that Ponce de Leon and Benjamin Franklin mapped out gulf streams previous to Maury’s discoveries, in 1847, Matthew Maury published his first chart of winds and currents based on ships logs. He also established the practice of international exchange of environmental data, trading logbooks for maps and charts derived from the data. Incidentally, he was working on his research near around the same time Darwin was working on his “Origin of Species” which came out in 1859.
Consider the oldest book in the Bible, Job. In Job 38:31, God asks Job, “Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades Or loose the belt of Orion? Binding Pleiades suggests that the stars move and are not fixed in proximity to each other. Until the invention of the telescope it was impossible to think that these stars moved because they were always seen together. The Reverend John Michell in 1767 calculated that the probability of a chance alignment of so many bright stars was only 1 in 500,000, and speculated that the Pleiades and many other clusters of stars must be physically related. When studies were first made of the stars’ proper motions, it was found that they are all moving in the same direction across the sky, at the same rate, further demonstrating that they were related. In the last century astrophysicists have discovered that the stars of Pleiades move in unison with each other, and are thus gravitationally bound. They have also discovered that the stars in the belt of Orion are free agents that are not gravitationally bound and the three stars that comprise Orion’s belt appear to be closer together than the outer stars in the constellation, but are actually farther apart.
There are many scientific facts described in the Bible which weren’t discovered to be true until modern equipment was available to study things such as thermodynamics, Isaiah 51 and Hebrews 1, hydrological cycle, Job 36, Ocean currents, Job 38, and the fact that man as described in the Genesis account as made from dust, in fact does have the very same elements as soil.
There are scientists, physicists and mathematicians throughout history who were men of deep Christian faith, and there are just as many today who find ways to solidify their faith in the Creation account as well as science.
The point is, and what it really comes down to, is teaching only one is doing a disservice to true science which is knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation. It is only since the theory of evolution, and the indoctrination into our public schools and academia that the one theory has been taught as absolute, and any mention of Bible accounts of Creation has been not only left out of discussion completely, but has marginalized anyone who questions the theories. People like Bill Nye the so-called science guy have a false notion that Christian parents don’t want their children to learn science. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Every home school parent I know, including my own family have since the earliest grades taught both evolution and creation, and let our children work out methods and discoveries that strengthen their beliefs. There are true inconsistencies in evolution theories, and there are many unanswered questions in Creationism, and while Christians may fall back on our faith in God, and the fact that there will always be questions, evolutionists have a smug and sometimes arrogant attitude that their inconsistencies are because they haven’t found the answers yet, but they don’t give the same courtesy to Creationists.
It will be interesting to see how the debate goes, and if or what kind of thoughts Mr. Nye will come away from it. I’m not going to even think he will come away with a belief in God, but it would be a nice surprise if he came away with a newfound respect that not all scientists believe the way he does, and that one can believe in the Bible and still love science.
