Published: 24 September 2008(GMT+10)
There have been many examples of evolutionary falsehoods used to indoctrinate students
into evolution. The list includes
Teaching lies to kids is OK!
But at least one evolutionist is happy to use falsehood, as long as the end result
is more students believing in evolution.
2
An evolutionary True Believer and educator, one Bora Zivkovic, Online Community
Manager at PLoS-ONE,
3 proudly
stated:
‘it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the
students.’ 4
And by ‘inaccuracies’, he didn’t mean approximations or simplifications
(e.g.
pi ~ 3 or 22/7
for quick calculations, or the
octet rule taught to beginning chemistry students), but outright falsehoods — using
analogies that he knows are inaccurate, and
ideas he
states are false.
For example, he discusses a common evolutionary propaganda tactic, NOMA (non-overlapping
magisteria), invented by the late
Marxist Stephen Jay Gould.
This pretends that science and religion are two non-intersecting categories of thought,
so cannot prove or disprove each other. We have shown that this is a form of the
fallacious fact-value distinction, and is philosophically bankrupt (see
Stephen Jay Gould and NOMA). Zivkovic
agrees that it’s false,
but justifies its pretence all the same:
‘You cannot bludgeon kids with truth (or insult their religion, i.e., their
parents and friends) and hope they will smile and believe you. Yes, NOMA is wrong,
but is a good first tool for gaining trust. You have to bring them over
to your side, gain their trust, and then hold their hands and help them step by
step. And on that slow journey, which will be painful for many of them, it is OK
to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students. (emphasis
added)’
I.e. so never mind such archaic concepts as truth: the important thing is that they
accept evolution!
Zivkovic continues by praising an account of a Florida teacher and fanatical evolutionary
activist, David Campbell
5
in the
New York Times.
6
This teacher used an argument about the changing face of Mickey Mouse as an example
of ‘evolution’. Of course, this is just another form of Berra’s
Blunder, and
Zivkovic agrees that it’s fallacious. Yet he justifies
teaching it:
‘If a student, like Natalie Wright who I quoted above, goes on to study biology,
then he or she will unlearn the inaccuracies in time. If most of the students do
not, but those cutesy examples help them accept evolution, then it is OK if they
keep some of those little inaccuracies for the rest of their lives. It is perfectly
fine if they keep thinking that Mickey Mouse evolved as long as they think evolution
is fine and dandy overall. Without Mickey, they may have become Creationist activists
instead. Without belief in NOMA they would have never accepted anything, and well,
so be it. Better NOMA-believers than Creationists, don’t you think?’
Once again, better to have them believe overt falsehoods than deny the
evolutionary religion.
So what is Zivkovic’s motivation? In his own words:
‘Education is a subversive activity that is implicitly in place in order to
counter the prevailing culture. And the prevailing culture in the case of Campbell’s
school, and many other schools in the country, is a deeply conservative religious
culture.’
Translation: educrats like him are rather proud of trying to undermine Christianity,
and so much the better if it means opposing the worldview of the parents of the
students he teaches. This should be a lesson for Christian parents, as Christian
author and columnist
Cal Thomas points out:
‘The tragedy is that too many conservative Christian … parents who
want their children to have a different worldview—their own—willingly
participate in the destruction of their children’s minds by turning them over
to a way of thinking that is antithetical to their beliefs. Parents who worship
at conservative churches on Sunday willingly send their children to schools five
days a week where what they are taught undermines what they learned in church and
at home. They would never think of taking their kids to a church that teaches doctrines
opposed to their beliefs, but they don’t give a second thought to doing the
same thing by sending them to government schools. It makes no sense.’
Worse, the Christians parents
pay the misotheists to program
their children in a value system diametrically opposed to their own! It’s
like Moses handing over shekels to the Canaanites to teach paganism to the Israelite
children.
Zivkovic is not alone
Other evolutionary propagandists are also on record as setting greater store on
evolutionary indoctrination than critical thinking and learning facts. E.g. the
atheistic anti-creationist
Eugenie Scott, leader of the atheist–founded-and-operated and pretentiously
named
National Center for Science
Education, tacitly admitted that if students heard criticisms of evolution,
they might end up not believing it!
‘In my opinion, using creation and evolution as topics for critical-thinking
exercises in primary and secondary schools is virtually guaranteed to confuse students
about evolution and may lead them to reject one of the major themes in science.’7
‘ … I would describe myself as a humanist or a nontheist. …
I have found that the most effective allies for evolution are people of the faith
community. One clergyman with a backward collar is worth two biologists at a school
board meeting any day!’8
It should be pointed out that not all atheistic evolutionists agree with teaching
NOMA, e.g. William Provine, biology professor at Cornell:
‘Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud
and clear … There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any
kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am
going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for
ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.’9
‘ … belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have
a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is
indistinguishable from atheism.’10
Richard Dawkins and
P.Z. Myers are other
misotheists
who despise NOMA. And they made this, as well as their hatred of Christianity, very
clear in their interviews shown in the
movie Expelled. Some evolutionists have criticized
Expelled for
showing this: but these evolutionists’ problem is not with the opinions of
these two, but that
they give the game away. Such evolutionists would clearly
prefer Zivkovic’s NOMA approach, but would probably rather he was not openly
proud of his deliberate deception.
The foundational issue
Many Christians expect evolutionists to be honest and fair. Indeed many are. But
we should not be too surprised whenever someone who denies an
absolute moral Lawgiver chooses to trangress moral/ethical bounds deliberately,
and what’s more, proclaims it as a worthy act. As explained in
Bomb-building vs. the biblical foundation, the claim is not that atheistic
evolutionists cannot be moral, but that they have no objective basis for their morality.
While some creationists have been known to lie, this is
contrary to their
professed belief system, and not something they will openly defend or promote, as
Zivkovic does. When evolutionists lie, it is
consistent with theirs. For
example, we have a page,
Arguments
we think creationists should NOT use, which is the 8
th most read
article on our site, and more popular than any article about arguments we should
use. But where are the corresponding evolutionist-authored ‘Arguments evolutionists
should not use’, mentioning the points at the top of this article?
As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) puts in the mouth of
the Grand Inquisitor in
The Brothers Karamazov, ‘Without God, everything
is permissible; crime is inevitable.’ So when Christians debate atheists,
or send their kids to secular schools, they should heed the warning of the 18
th
century British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke: ‘There is no safety
for honest men but by believing all possible evil of evil men’ [meant inclusively
in those days].
11
Related Articles
Further Reading
Related Media
References
- Sibley, Andrew, A fresh look at Nebraska man, Journal of Creation
22(3): 108–113, 2008. Return to text.
- Smith, Anika,
Lying in the Name of Indoctrination, Evolution News and Views, Discovery
Institute, 27 August 2008. Return to text.
- An open-access journal from the Public Library of Science.
Return to text.
- Zivkovic, Bora (aka “Coturnix”), Why teaching evolution
is dangerous, <scienceblogs.com> 25 August 2008. Return to text.
- Harmon, Amy, A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science
Clash, New York Times, 23 August 2008. Return to text.
- The New York Times also whitewashed Stalin’s genocide—see the first paragraph of Misotheist’s misology: Richard Dawkins attacks Michael Behe. Return to text.
- Larry Witham, Larry, Where Darwin Meets the Bible, p. 23,
Oxford University Press, 2002. Return to text.
- T.J. Oord and E. Stark, A conversation with Eugenie Scott, Science and Theology News, 1 April 2002, quoted in J. Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery Publishing: Washington, DC, 2006), p. 175.; emphasis added. Return to text.
- Provine, W.B., Origins Research 16(1):9,
1994. Return to text.
- Provine; W.B., ‘No free will’. In Catching up
with the Vision, p. S123, ed. Margaret W Rossiter, Chicago University Press, 1999.
Return to text.
- Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p.
249, 1790. Return to text.
