Doubting Darwin

The sky is falling! Many interest groups and journalists raced to tell that to the public when a modest but important bill became law in Tennessee early in April.

 The law instructs teachers and administrators to "create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues." 

What's not to like? The law, similar to one in Louisiana, also protects teachers who help students (I'm quoting from the official legislative summary) "understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught. ..." Oh, here's the problem: Evolution is one of the theories that can now be analyzed and critiqued. 

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, and many others have gone ape over the inclusion of evolution. They revere critical thinking and the freedom to explore, but not when it might produce irreverence toward their idol.   Continue at  Marvin Olasky

Read About Abortion Reality, if You Dare

Discussions of abortion are sometimes high up the ladder of abstraction, with terms like “pro-choice” and “a woman’s right to choose” thrown around. 

Here’s part of yesterday’s testimony before a congressional committee of Dr. Anthony Levatino, a New Mexico pro-life physician who once was an abortionist with 1,200 killings to his discredit. Then his daughter died in an auto accident, and he changed his views and stopped doing abortions. Now he tells the truth with specific detail: 

“Imagine if you can that you are a pro-choice obstetrician-gynecologist like I once was. Your patient today is 24-weeks pregnant. At 24 weeks from last menstrual period, her uterus is two finger-breadths above the umbilicus. 

“If you could see her baby, which is quite easy on an ultrasound, she would be as long as your hand plus a half from the top of her head to the bottom of her rump not counting the legs. Your patient has been feeling her baby kick for the last two months or more but now she is asleep on an operating room table and you are there to help her with her problem pregnancy.  Continue at Marvin Olasky

The Tragedy of American Compassion

Tragedy and Compassion – two words that we don’t normally associate together. How could compassion be tragic? While we likely have different levels of bad news in mind when think of tragedy, we are all in agreement that tragedy is bad and something ought to be done. Although I think the TV news industry is working hard to widen the definition to include hangnails.

Compassion is a bit more complicated. We tend to think of compassion from the same perspective that we think of love – the unbiblical, Greco-Roman emotional view. Americans view compassion today differently than we did 250 years ago. We want to “relieve suffering” but don’t stop to think about the proper way of doing this, or even if there is such a thing. There are some issues – life threatening, for example – for which rapid elimination of the threat is proper. But there are many life issues that are the accumulation of bad decisions for which there is no proper quick relief. We can look at G.W. Bush’s policy in the Middle East, thinking the solution there was to quickly implant democratic governments. People will not value the liberty a representative government of laws brings until they realize their need of it. Small children will not realize the value of math if mom tells them the answers rather than teaches and asks diagnostic questions.  Keep Reading >>>

God and Evolution

Today, the overwhelming majority of American kids receive a Darwinian or neo-Darwinian education. They learn at schools and then colleges that they are just matter, the result of occasional mutations and survival of the fittest. Christians over the decades have debated whether the earth's history should be measured in thousands or billions of years, but—until recently—almost all stuck by the biblical account of God creating every kind of plant and animal in six days (perhaps longer than 24 hours). Almost all believed that God created Adam from dust, and Eve from Adam.

For decades an attempt to make Darwinism acceptable to Christians, "theistic evolution" (TE), lurked in the background but made almost no inroads among Bible believers. A December 1997 article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society—"Theistic Evolution: Deism Revisited"—began by observing that TE "has not proven to be the mediating position once hoped for." Taylor University professor Michael A. Harbin noted that Bible scholars criticized TE for being unbiblical and "more deistic than theistic." Read it all HERE