Parents, Teach Your Children to Think Critically about Evolution

Bonnie Alba

The Kansas Intelligent Design hearings on whether Intelligent Design should be added to public school curriculum are creating a ruckus. Unwise words are spurting from both sides and the media is into its usual slant of liberal meaninglessness.

We have these foolish words from Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Kansas University Natural History Nuseum and Biodiversity Research Center: “Intelligent design is nothing but creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” That is rational and intelligent, isn’t it?

Add to that Kansas’s goal of attracting bioscience companies who seek a work force with a solid education in chemistry, physics and biology. Charles Decedue, executive director of the Higuchi Biosciences Center is quoted, “They want people who can think critically.” Yes, read that again! Think Critically??? Guess he hasn’t heard that teaching self-esteem is more important than learning to critically think.

If I had children attending public school today, I would have to supplement their science education with the “facts” of evolution. The scientific community knows these facts but in forty years, the textbooks have not been corrected or updated. In the scientist-elitist claim to authority and arrogant dominance over science education, the loudest voices come from the Neo-Darwinist, Naturalist worldview holders who declare evolution as the cornerstone from which all else flows. Our youth are taught to never question and to “memorize” Neo-Dariwnism as the be-all of Science. Without all the facts. Where’s the “critical thinking” required?

In my last article I noted some of the fallacies of the purported textbook examples of Darwinism. I would teach my children to critically think about those and the following:

* Miller-Urey experiments presented as simulating early earth conditions demonstrating how life’s building-blocks formed. These have been discredited and no one knows exactly what the primitive air-environment was like in the beginning when non-life first popped into life.
* Darwin’s Tree of Life does not correlate with the fossial record such as the predominant Cambrian Explosion; also molecular evidence does not support a simple branching-tree pattern.
* Archaeoopteryx (don’t ask me to pronounce it) is presented as the missing link between reptiles (dinosaurs) and birds, from which modern birds arrived. Unproven.
* Homology or similarity due to common ancestry - Darwin’s “descent with modification” doesn’t agree with present genetics observations-explorations.

Note that all the above are about Macroevolution. Macro-E is the concept that all species developed from no thing (no life) into some thing (life); and over billions of years of natural selection, gradually branched into hundreds of thousands to millions of species today, all related by common ancestry. Of course we and the apes are just branches of the same limb on Darwin’s imagined Tree of Life.

There is absolutely no empirical evidence for Macro-E but it is inferred from Micro-E (genetic changes within one species), as a “tenet” of Science. Instead of science following where the evidence goes, this cemented “tenet” is held to while the evidence goes right by them. What is becoming clearer is the fact that there are those atheist elitists within the scientific community who disparage and attack anyone who questions or attempts to clarify the issues.

Besides scientists postulating on spores from outer space or aliens from another planet far away seeding life on Earth, they are left with “chance” or accident for the beginning of life. The Naturalist will stick with the miracle of an accident giving no cause to anything outside of chance. These are the robotic elitists who always point to the so-called “facts” of evolution. Their spokes-humans act as vicious attack dogs, labeling any questioners as “religious fundamentalists” or “creationists” -- without ever answering the simple questions put to them. Unfortunately, even when they admit to some of the truths of falsification -- they will say “the means justifies the ends.”

Many of these scientists do not see that they also missed learning critical thinking in their education. And they’re still missing that skill.

Whatever arises out of the Kansas hearings, America is watching. There is no doubt the issue of introducing Intelligent Design into any public school curriculum will continue to be fought against by the elitists in the scientific community. But Americans are waking up! No longer content in ignorance, they are watching as the Naturalists stand on the shifting sands of modern Darwinism, burying themselves in their own denials of the challenges to Evolution. The newest discoveries exhibit information overload and the evidence points to something besides “chance” as a causal force required to initiate life.

What is Intelligent Design? Why does “irreducible complexity” lead to ID? Why does the genetics code, bio-chemical and molecular studies point to intricate design instead of gradual selection processes? Why does the Big Bang theory point to design?

Keep asking the Questions!

[Stay tuned]

Sources:
“Evolution puts State in Spotlight,” Scott Rothschild, Lawrence Journal-World, www.ljworld.com/section/citynews/storypr/202617
“Chance on Science’s Pedestal,” #2, 04-20-05, opinioneditorials.com (archieved under “Alba”)
For Parents and Students:
“Discovery Institute,” www.discovery.org/crsc
“Icons of Evolution,” Jonathan Wells
“Wedge of Truth” and “Darwin on Trial” Phillip E. Johnson