Evolution and home-schooling redux
[Via Why Evolution Is True]
For no particular reason I could fathom, I began receiving all kinds of religous loon-mail today, including denunciations of evolution, pictures of fireworks explosions resembling Jesus on the cross, and sundry laments for the fate of my soul, all by people who have somehow failed to apprehend the sophisticated theologies of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton:
Dear Sir,
I am very upset with what you said within a recent article on yahoo. Sir, I’m going to tell you something that you need to hear. Sir, You are going to HELL. Because when GOD CREATED the Earth HE made everything perfect and in GOD’s perfect plan humans didn’t need to be evolved from monkeys. So there evolution is wrong. GO Read the bible it tells you the truth, see what GOD said about creation, not what some Man thought were we came from. Because I believe that WORD OF GOD is the truth and nothing else is. Yours truly, a GOD fearing Man
Aha, something in the press! It turns out that writer Dylan Lovan of the Associated Press just published a nice piece on evolution and homeschooling.
You may remember, early in the history of this website, that a woman wrote me about the nearly complete absence of materials to help homeschooled children, like her daughter, learn evolution. Or, rather, there are materials, but they’re all creationist pap, directed to that large segment of homeschooled kids who are being homechurched at the same time.
At Lovan’s request, Virginia Tech professor Duncan Porter and I reviewed two widely-used evolution units sold by religious homeschool outfits, Apologia and Bob Jones University Press (I’ve talked about Apologia before).
[More]
The Yahoo article is quite interesting. I found it from a Reddit link. I have really gotten to like Reddit for keeping me on the front lines of current ‘gossip’. In this case, not only did it lead me to the article but I recognized one of the scientists quoted, Jerry Coyne, whose blog I read. I noticed that the Yahoo article gave a link to Why Evolution is True so I was curious what the response would be at his blog. The Yahoo article had over 1000 responses.
As you can see, the first inkling that Coyne had of the publication was weird emails like the above. Within an hour, he was getting messages full of creationist ramblings. He put up this post and it resulted in the longest discussion thread of any of his blog posts before.
For me, the telling part of the creationist textbooks was this quote from the article:
The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.”
When the AP asked about that passage, university spokesman Brian Scoles said the sentence made it into the book because of an editing error and will be removed from future editions.
Now, I would love to know what was on the ellipsis, but I think the only editing error was that a non-denialist asked them about it. I think that the quote is actually a fair statement of the sorts of things many home schooled children of creationists are told, either officially in their textbooks or by their parents.
The quote sounds like something out of the 1600s. Galileo tried to protect himself from those whose Christian viewpoint pushed a false perspective of reality. He failed, even though he was right and religion was wrong.
This is the sort of ‘science’ that these people want to be part of mainstream biology classes. They are the ones who have been in control of states like Texas that determine the textbooks that the state will use.
It is hard enough for children to be taught complex subjects without telling them are going to hell if they follow the facts. This battle will continue for a long time here in the US. It took almost 400 years for the Church to recognize its errors with regard to Galileo’s trial. We are only about 150 years into this battle.
