5 Crucial Reasons to Teach Creationism in Public Schools

Should creationism be taught alongside evolution?  Is it fair to give students only one theory to believe?  Is it legal to do so in the public schools?

There are No Criticisms of Evolution

There are no criticisms of the theory of evolution in any of the textbooks or course materials, despite the fact that evolution cannot be stated as a scientific law and remains, for well over a century, a theory.  For one thing, evolution cannot be validated to be factual because it cannot be proven through scientific testing.  How can evolution ever be established to be conclusive by empirical scientific methods?  Can evolution be observed in a laboratory?  Is evolution repeatable?  Is it predictable as to what will mankind look like in a million years from now?  How can it be falsified?  The classic historical structure of having scientific beliefs pass from theory to law is by having something be observed, repeated, to make predictions based upon those observations and have a repeated outcome and then falsify that the results.

Evolution is a historically based theory based upon assumptions from what took place millions of years ago.  What are missing are the gaps of transitional fossils that establish one specie evolving into another, new specie.  When there is yet another claim that a missing link has been found, the question arises, where is the chain in the first place?  How can we claim to have found a missing link while there isn’t even a chain?  Maybe you’ve seen the images or pictures of man evolving from apes in textbooks.  What are missing are transitional fossils between the ape and man so educators have to depend upon images and drawings to try and establish a connection.  Why?  It’s because there are no fossils that they can take pictures of to display as proof.  Scientists have at their disposal, hundreds of millions of fossils and fossil samples, yet not one set of transitional fossils revealing specie evolving into another has ever been found.  Despite untold millions of categorized fossils their remains no set that establish a new life form evolving from another.  This fact was not lost by Darwin who said that he was troubled by the lack of fossil evidence showing that new species arose from previous ones.

Critical Thinking Skills

It seems that public schools value critical thinking skills yet they are cramming an unproven theory down the student’s throats and so it appears that they won’t even consider other possibilities.  These educators are like dictators who essentially spout “It’s my way or the highway.”  Since educational leadership want students to think “outside the box” in the other disciplines, why aren’t they allowed to do so regarding the theory of evolution.  They say that they want the students to use their minds to solve problems, analyze issues, to critique thesis’s, but how can a student do this if they are taught that the theory of evolution has no alternatives.  There are no other options, no other possibilities. They are taught that there are no exceptions to the theory of evolution.  Even the educational textbooks are silent on the problematic areas of evolution.  For example, evolution does not address the question of where did the universe come from.  How did the universe come into existence?  How did life arise since we know for a fact that life cannot arise spontaneously?  The theory of evolution is like coming into a movie that is half way through to the end.  What happened before life got here?  How was non-living, inorganic matter able to come to life?  The theory of evolution only deals with the fact that life had already existed and that life forms evolve into new species.  It seems to me that they are leaving out some crucial components.  It doesn’t address the cause of these effects, how a universe from a singular point began or what forces were involved and necessary to have that first spark of life occur. What about the Cambrian Explosion, a layer where almost every single life form is found in fossil form with few ancestral fossils before it or no new life fossil life forms above it?  This sounds more like a philosophy than it does a science. Children should be at least exposed to or taught other views and be allowed to make their own decisions based upon the information or the lack of information that they have.

Give Parents What They Want

A 1991 Gallop Poll (Nov 28th, 1991), which was the last time a comprehensive polling results on a national scale was undertaken, indicated that 47% of Americans believe in creation over evolution and 40% believe that God used evolution as a process of creating life.  A few had no opinion and so that left only 9% of Americans who believe that God was not involved and that only naturalistic means were the cause of the origin of life.  Since almost 9 out of every 10 Americans believe that God was involved in creation and just under half of those believed that the origin of life was not naturalistically caused, why do almost 100% of college professors and staff teach that evolution is the only option possible?  These professors and the colleges seem to be in the minority, yet they do not tolerate differences of opinion or belief, even though the theory of evolution has never been comprehensively established as a fact.   Why not let people choose what they want their children to learn?  Don’t these professors and colleges work for the students who pay their salaries or the parents who educate their children?  Why is there no tolerance for those who differ in opinions and hold to a different belief than an unproven, untested theory?  Good question.  Children should be taught that evolution is only a theory and to see that a theory is not the same as a scientific law like Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.

Freedom of Speech

I believe that students should have the option of stating their own beliefs and base them upon what findings they gain in their education.  Former President George Bush once said that “Both sides ought to be properly taught so people can understand what the debate is about. Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought [and] people ought to be exposed to different ideas.”  Academic freedom is what brought the theory of evolution to the classrooms in the first place and so what is wrong with the idea of allowing others to provide their views on how life came into being and if it did evolve or didn’t evolve.  Shouldn’t we let them freely express what they believe and provide the reasons for why they believe what they do believe?  Good science has always allowed for controversy in the classroom and so educators should allow for rational scientific discussion and criticisms of the theory of evolution.  By the way, educators should not state that evidence for Darwinian evolution is overwhelming and indisputable.

Evolution is Bad Science

Mankind used to believe that the earth was flat and that if a ship sailed too far it would end up falling off the edge of the earth.  That is because we believed only with our eyes.  The theory of evolution is much like this in that a theory or belief is taught as scientific fact because of what they perceive even though nothing could be further from the truth.  Teaching evolution as fact is just plain bad science.  Evolution is closer to a philosophy than it is a science.  One example is that mutations are a good thing.  I heard about a dairy farmer who had a dairy cow that gave birth to a calf with two heads.  That is a mutation.  The problem was that the calf died since it was sending different signals to its digestive system and survived for only a few days.   If you had asked the dairy farmer if that mutation was an advantage, he would have said no because the calf died.  I have never seen or heard of a mutation where it helped the specie propagate or survive and become a better organism.  If you asked biologists if mutations are a good thing, they might give you a funny look because mutations are basically a change that takes place in the nucleotide sequence within the genome of an organism.  These mutations are the result of DNA or DNA genomes that were unrepaired and will lead to errors in the replication process of additional cells.  Even so, evolutionists claim that mutations are how life forms eventually evolve into a new life form.  Evolution requires positive mutations, which are so rare that scientists have problems finding them in nature.  What they do find are mutations that are extremely harmful and sometimes fatal to the organism.  In order for evolution to work it needs an increase in information by means of positive mutations.  The only problem is they can’t find where this occurs by natural means.

Another good example of bad science in the theory of evolution is that they keep claiming to find missing links and that these links are the “smoking gun” of evidence in the fossil layer.  The only roaring evidence is the roaring silence in the fossil record.  This was exactly the reason that Darwin had great doubts in his theory because he couldn’t find any transitional fossils showing evidence that specie evolved into other life forms.  And how do they explain the Cambrian explosion or the Cambrian rock, where there are exceedingly few fossils that come before the Cambrian layers. There are primarily only three such fossils and they lay adjacent to the Cambrian layer, as close in fact as to almost appear in that layer. One example is the Cloudina and Namacalathus mineral tubular fossils.  Despite the claim that they are millions of years old they remain virtually unchanged today from when they first appeared! Then there are the Mollusc-like Kimberella and its trace fossils (also unchanged as of today) and then the Mollusc-like Kimberella and its trace fossils. Needless to say, these too have not changed at all.  Why haven’t they evolved or changed by increased information as a result of “positive mutations?” Incidentally, the Cloudina are the oldest known evidence in the fossil record of the calcified skeletal formation in metazoans, a prominent feature in animals appearing in the Early Cambrian and not before.  There is also good fossil evidence that exists for the appearance of gastropods, cephalopods and bivalves which are classified as Mollusc-like Kimberella and its trace fossils, which by the way, are also found in the Cambrian period.

Recently, the fossil record of the earliest animals from the Ediacaran to the Cambrian was made but the dating and interpretation of these remain controversial. As Wikipedia has stated, “The long-running puzzlement about the appearance of the Cambrian fauna, seemingly abruptly and from nowhere, centers on three key points: whether there really was a mass diversification of complex organisms over a relatively short period of time during the early Cambrian; what might have caused such rapid change; and what it would imply about the origin and evolution of animals. Interpretation is difficult due to a limited supply of evidence, based mainly on an incomplete fossil record and chemical signatures remaining in Cambrian rocks.” So, it is not only up to interpretation but this interpretation is difficult “due to a limited supply of evidence” and it is “based mainly on incomplete fossil records and chemical signatures remaining in Cambrian rocks.” The words “interpretation” and the fact that there is a “limited supply of evidence…due to an incomplete fossil record” sound highly speculative and subjective at best.

Conclusion

Part of the reason that creationism or at least, intelligent design should be allowed to be discussed in the classroom is because evolution presents a world view without God and that there is only “survival of the fittest” and that there is no real purpose for mankind other than “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.”  The theory of evolution portrays mankind as only a collection of molecules as a result of blind, accidental chance with the only reason we were born was to survive.  God did create us for a purpose and it wasn’t to be moved up to the highest order on the food chain.  It was to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.  We have a purpose in life and God’s will is that we believe in the Son of God.  To reject God as Creator is to imply that God did not create except by random chance or blind occurrences by way of evolution or that there is no Creator at all which denies reality (Rom 1:20’ Psalm 19:1).  Creationism should be taught but it should begin at home.  Those who claim that God used evolution to complete His creation are robbing God of glory and God will not ever share His glory with another (Isaiah 42:8).

Jack Wellman is Senior Writer at What Christians Want to Know whose mission is to equip, encourage, and energize Christians and to address questions about the believer’s daily walk with God and the Bible. You can follow Jack on Google Plus or check out his book Blind Chance or Intelligent Design

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