No doubt you saw them. Right around mid-April many major newspapers carried (coordinated?) articles and/or editorials deploring the supposed fact that "the teaching of evolution in schools is being squeezed out by pressure from religious conservatives and other groups" (AP, April 10, 1998). However much as I might wish it were so, I see no such national trend. Instead, most thinking people immediately recognized these articles as yet another desperate ploy to turn public opinion against Christianity in general and creation in particular.
Having thus created a "horrible" problem in the minds of the reader, the articles offered a solution—a new set of guidelines for more extensive and effective teaching of evolution prepared by the National Academy of Sciences. This book, containing every successful argument for evolution (whether or not it is true) and specific guidelines on how to deal with dissenting students and parents, is to be made available to every science teacher.
The guidelines, entitled "Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science," was authored by a panel of scientists and educators, including several well known for their personal crusades against creationism. Predictably, it claims that the fact of evolution must be foundational in every course.
But the guidelines contain a strange mixture of outdated science, extreme opinions not held by many evolutionists, and outright deception. As a sampling, it compares disbelief in evolution to disbelief in gravity, obscuring the fact that no one has ever observed gravity to be violated, but never has anyone observed real evolution to happen. Moreover, it repeats the common error that variation and adaptation are examples of evolution.
It is true that something is malfunctioning in our schools. Recent studies have placed American and Canadian students at or near the very bottom in science when compared with other developed countries, in spite of the cost per student being much higher. But is teaching more evolution the solution to this problem, or is it the cause? Fact is, the scores have gone down while evolution teaching has increased and the Christian worldview systematically removed.
It seems to me that evolution teaching has been quite effective. Decades of teaching students that they evolved from animal ancestry by purely random processes like mutation and natural selection, that there is no Creator to whom they are responsible, that there are no absolutes in morality, has brought us to this point. Can evolutionists legitimately blame the situation in today's schools, whose students murder classmates and teachers with no remorse, where premarital sex and sexually transmitted diseases are common, where suicidal thoughts plague many, on lack of better evolution teaching?
Evolution is not just a view of life's history, it is a worldview with a disgusting view of an animalistic past, an amoral view of the present, and a hopeless future of annihilation to contemplate.
Yes, I think evolution has been taught well enough. Now all of society must suffer the consequences.
*Dr. John Morris is President of ICR.
