According to the new hire at Answers in Genesis, Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, there are perfectly good reasons so many scientists reject Creationism.

They go to public schools, for example. And how do you expect to learn any real science when the curriculum is dictated by practicing scientists and expert educators and you use textbooks that don’t have “Bible” on the cover?

They also don’t read any Creationist literature. If they did, he argues, they would totally abandon that whole “we need evidence” nonsense.

… most people go through the public school system, and they hear from an early age just evolution. They never hear, and they are not taught even to consider, an alternative hypothesis. So they are taught from an early age to suppress the truth, and so this is just the fruit of an educational system that ignores the opposition. Also, by and large, they just don’t read our literature. They’re ignorant. Now, sadly, the professing Christians who hold evolution (for example, the BioLogos community) also seem to practice the same thing. In the few interactions I’ve had with their scholars, whether it’s theologians or scientists, they are clueless about anything scholarly that we’ve written. I’ll ask them, “Name the last young earth creationist scholarly book you’ve read.” The response: “I don’t know.” Have you read Coming to Grips with Genesis? No. Have you read Earth’s Catastrophic Past? No. So why don’t more people accept this? Because they’re totally ignorant of what we’ve printed. And they don’t want to consider it.

As someone who has plenty of experience going through and teaching in public schools, I wish students were exposed to evolution as much as Creationists think they are. There are so many instances where teachers downplay the subject as much as possible just to avoid any nasty phone calls from parents — or they don’t really understand it to begin with.

Opposition isn’t the problem. No one ever said, “Let’s keep Christian beliefs out of the science curriculum.” Instead, public schools focus on evidence-based, foundational concepts. Creationism is kept out for the same reason the Flying Spaghetti Monster is kept out. It’s just a belief. There’s no science to back it up.

The people who accept and understand evolution aren’t missing out just because they don’t read the pseudo-journals that Creationists create in an attempt at relevance. Their version of “science” is trying to guess how many “frog kinds” were on Noah’s Ark.

It’s like saying scholars of colonial America can’t understand the Salem Witch Trials unless they read the Harry Potter books.

I don’t need to waste my time on fiction in order to grasp reality.

(Image via Shutterstock. Thanks to Dan for the link)



