A look inside a Creationist 'science textbook,' -- for those with strong stomachs! [View all]

[LongTomH]

This comes from the 11-Points blog: 11 Eye-Opening Highlights From a Creationist Science Textbook:

A few months ago, I was reading about homeschooling, because I do things like randomly reading about homeschooling. I read an article that mentioned a family using science textbooks produced by Bob Jones University. (If you're not familiar, that's a large, for-profit, evangelical Christian university in South Carolina.) I had to see what one of those textbooks was like. I bought one for a few bucks on Amazon and a few slow shipping weeks later, I had my answer.

Here are some pix of pages from the textbook:

This is the first paragraph of the book and while, on the surface, it's about the Moon, it's actually setting up the thesis statement -- and perpetual paradox -- of the entire textbook. This is a science textbook struggling at all times to find the balance between science and faith. And here, they establish their default position on that issue, which is actually deviously clever: Forget popular opinion, science and faith are not mutually exclusive. In fact, because none of us was there to witness the origin of things, science IS faith. And we operate under that paradigm for the rest of the book.

Note the usual Creationist conflation of theory with guess. They do that a lot.





I got a lot of this sort of thing in the Church I was raised in. See why I escaped as soon as possible?

And to cap it all up.....



This one's worthy of Bill'o the Clown. "Tide goes in.....tide goes out! You can't explain how!" Have these numbnutz never heard of electrons?

And I have a theory (or is it a guess?) of why the book was done that way. By going strong on God early, sprinkling in a few Bible quotes throughout, and occasionally dropping in a completely ridiculous page like the one on electricity, the book comes off more like a propaganda tool than an educational one. All that science in the middle is presented on equal footing with all the young-Earth creation theory in the first chapter -- and with the pages on electricity and the Moon's role in the Rapture. It sets everything up to be an all-or-nothing truth. "Well, all this matter-of-fact science I'm reading seems very thorough and researched, so the stuff I read earlier about the Moon and Biblical theory must be right too, by association."

It's like me saying, "I don't believe in creationism, intelligent design or talking dogs." By putting the last one in, I'm suggesting all three are equal. I'm suggesting creationism is as outlandish as a talking dog. And to an eight-year-old reading that, that subtext can sneak right on in.

There are plenty of mainstream and liberal Christians, and some scientists, who try to reconcile science and faith; but, they do it without distorting scientific fact!