In the petition which demands creationism be legally excluded from Welsh classrooms, there is a line which states: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Alice Roberts and Sir David Attenborough have all signed this petition, and so have some churchmen. But is this statement true?
We can test this by taking a Geology lesson about the hipped fossil snake Najash riogrina, now extinct.
The prestigious Scientific Publication Nature (vol. 440, p1037, 20 April 2006) informs us the snake was named after the serpent in Genesis that was cursed by the creator to crawl on the ground. The Hebrew word najash from Genesis 3 was borrowed to describe their fossil snake that had lost its legs!
Yet this petition insists: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Really? Bad education always denies students access to real data.
When students study classification, a key skill in modern Biology, do we really have to avoid telling them Linnaeus borrowed his very successful ideas from the Latin Bible’s use of the word Genus for the separate created kinds, mentioned 10 times in Genesis 1? Likewise one of Linnaeus’ best known classifications is the Arca shell, named after Noah's big boat in Genesis 6-9.
On top of that how do I help students understand the following Professor from Worcester College, Oxford: "The earliest case of systematic naming occurred about 6,000 years ago when God brought all his newly fashioned creatures to Adam to see what he would call them (Genesis 2:19)." (J. L. Heilbron, "Coming to Terms", Nature, vol. 415, p585, 7 Feb 2002).
The petitioners loudly proclaim: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Perhaps the petition should be re-titled 'How to avoid exposing students to actual evidence’.
This petition is all about how to dumb down the population so they can’t see the flaws in either atheism or evolution.
What are Attenborough and his colleagues afraid of? Anyone really interested in evidence-based science has no problems allowing students to investigate any claims about the origin and history of the natural world. They soon find out which ones stand up to testing by scientific method. But then we all know that when students are allowed to do this, they actually do discover that Genesis passes the test - and evolution always fails!
This petition which broadcasts far and wide that: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” is a thinly disguised lie, but it does lead us to push them to the wall over their final statement: “...it is vital children in Wales are not exposed to pseudoscientific doctrines masquerading as science, ” and evolution tops any pseudoscience you can name!
John Mackay is the founder and director of Creation Research. He earned his degree in geology from Queensland University, and has presented papers on rapid coal formation at the Sydney Basin Coal Conference. He has debated many of the world’s leading evolutionists and atheists. For more information visit creationresearchuk.com.
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