Against indoctrination

A rebuttal to Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science, National Academy of Science, 1998.

by Dr Jonathan Sarfati

This article is now part of a very popular book available in our online bookstore: Refuting Evolution, a handbook for students, parents and teachers countering the latest arguments for evolution.

During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln presented one of the most famous speeches of all time—the Gettysburg Address—on Nov. 19, 1863. He pointed out that the United States of America was ‘conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ He concluded with the ‘resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom …’.

However, while Lincoln realised that this nation was ‘under God’, in the last few decades, activist judges, egged on by the ACLU, have sought to remove any mention of God from public life (see Creation and the U.S. Supreme Court). And while the founding fathers realised that ‘all men are created equal’, the modern public education system teaches that they are, in effect, rearranged pond scum.

Christian fathers have largely neglected to train their children in the ways of God, (despite Psalm 78, Eph. 6:4) and left it to Sunday schools. Even in Sunday schools, there is no guarantee of godly teaching, and the best of them avail little when the Monday – Friday schools have abolished God completely.

What has been the result? Are schoolchildren and society better off with such ‘liberating’ thoughts like being the product of purposeless death and struggle? American and Canadian students rank near the bottom in science learning compared with other developed countries. Now we have record levels of violence, drug abuse and teenage pregnancies in schools, and suicide is the leading cause of death among young people. Since ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge’ (Prov. 1:7), should we be surprised at the outcome of such godless miseducation?

The good news is, despite the indoctrination in the ‘everything made itself’ theory, many students remain unconvinced. This is largely due to the efforts of creation ministries like Creation Ministries International. As a result, the evolutionists have launched a well-publicised document to push their views even more aggressively—no less a body than the National Academy of Science has produced Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. This should not be surprising, since a vast majority of the NAS is godless to the core, as a recent survey showed (see article), and evolution is essential to their atheistic faith.

This book has been made available to science teachers across America. It contains the usual misleading pseudo-scientific arguments, advice on dealing with Christian students, dialogues and projects. Many people have asked how to respond, so this site will progressively, over the next few weeks, refute their claims in some detail. Creation Ministries International will also produce a response in booklet form.

Parents of public school children will need to be aware of what the teachers are being advised to teach. Some important preliminary points:

1. Although the book proclaims that evolution is compatible with many religions, this is because they define religion as having nothing to do with the real world. But Christianity is about the God who created the whole universe, acted within it, and took on the nature of one of His creatures in the Incarnation.
2. The book compares denial of evolution with denial of gravity. However, while gravity can be observed all the time, no one has observed life to arise from nonliving matter, multicelled creatures to arise from single-celled creatures, a reptile changing into a bird, or an apelike creature turning into a man.
3. The book calls any type of change over time ‘evolution’. Of course, no creationist denies that organisms change—rather, we deny that the changes are the sort of changes required by particles-to-people evolution, i.e., a net increase in genetic information content or functional complexity. All observed changes either reduce the information or leave it unchanged, so are precisely the wrong sorts of changes required to make fish-to-philosopher evolution plausible. So they can be prepared, readers should thoroughly study the concepts in Has evolution really been observed? (Summary article). Readers should also consult Darwin’s finches: Evidence of rapid post-Flood adaptation and Superbugs not super after all so they are prepared to answer the book’s claims that such observations support molecules-to-man evolution.

4. The book makes some accusations that creation science is ‘unscientific’. However, rather than play these word games, we should be more interested in whether creation is true than whether it meets some self-serving criteria for ‘science’. Many of these accusations are self-contradictory, showing that their main purpose is muddying the waters rather than serious discussion. For example, on p.55:

   The ideas of ‘creation science’ derive from the conviction that God created the universe—including humans and other living things—all at once in the relatively recent past. However, scientists from many fields have examined these ideas and have found them to be scientifically insupportable. For example, evidence for a very young earth is incompatible with many different methods of establishing the age of rocks. Furthermore, because the basic proposals of creation science are not subject to test and verification, these ideas do not meet the criteria for science.

While their definition of creation science is OK (except that ‘all at once’ is not the same as six days), notice that they claim that its ideas have been examined and found unsupportable, then they claim that the ‘basic proposals of creation science are not subject to test and verification’. So how could its proposals have been examined (tested!) if they are not subject to test?

Of course, we disagree that science has proved the earth to be billions of years old—see Evidence for a young world, Radiometric ‘dating’ in conflict, and Flaws in dating the earth as ancient.