Answers in Genesis: Upholding the Authority of the Bible from the Very First Verse

The following testimony really outlines the ultimate motivation for the Creation Museum:

. . . I wanted to let you know how the Creation Museum made an impact in a teen’s life here in Michigan. We have been praying for [a young man] who is in our youth group . . . . [We have] been burdened for his soul, especially since he was dating a girl who was agnostic and didn’t want him coming to church.

Two weekends ago [the young man and a friend] went with another church to the Creation Museum for the weekend . . . . [He] was very interested in all the facts that he hadn’t seen before, and kept mentioning it all made sense. After seeing The Last Adam, [he] was very quiet.

Well, that next week [he] accepted Christ as his Savior, broke up with his agnostic girlfriend, and has been coming to our church and is interested in one-on-one discipleship!

We praise the Lord for the museum, as it really made a lot of things clear for [this young man] and helped to open his eyes to his need for Christ! (From Michigan).

BEING SALT AND LIGHT

One of the things I have said many times is that the more AiG gets information into Christians’ hands, the more we will see them using this information to challenge wrong ideas. Here is a great example—a letter an AiG supporter wrote to the school her daughter attends:

I am writing to you with a concern about a topic being discussed currently in 4th grade social studies. Please let me first emphasize that I have no issue with any teacher. I have the highest regard for the staff at Sherwood, and have always been pleased with the quality of teaching that happens every day.

My concern is with the curriculum that teaches “race” as a way to classify people. I believe just using that term sets up the foundation for racist thinking. Last week our daughter . . . came home creating a chart to talk about her ancestry. To be clear, she made the chart herself. One column of that chart was titled “race,” and under that she had written “white.” White is a color, not a race. There is one race, the human race.

The concept of “race” being a classification system for humans based on skin color or other facial characteristics is based in the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin propagated this view in his book The Origin of Species. In fact, what many do not know is that the subtitle of Darwin’s famous book was The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin then followed up with a second book more dedicated to the topic of “races” in The Descent of Man. This evolutionary thinking on races asserts that some “races” are more “evolved” or developed than others. This view defined the evolutionary thinking of the early 20th century that included treating the Aborigines in Australia as “sub-humans” or Darwin’s “missing link,” including the display of Aborigines in zoos and the hunting of their remains for museums around the globe (including the Smithsonian).

Sadly, Darwin’s concept of differently evolved “races” of humans persists today, at the highest and most respected levels of the evolutionary scientific establishment. Indeed, this past October (2007), Nobel laureate geneticist Dr. James Watson was quoted in the British newspaper The Independent as saying: ‘There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.’

Not only do I believe these evolutionary concepts of “race” to be wrong, I believe them to be destructive to my efforts to teach my children that all individuals are indeed ‘created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights . . . .’ I am attaching a book, Darwin’s Plantation, that describes this far better than I could. Unfortunately, this theory has caused tremendous damage to millions of individuals and to our ability to love one another as equal members of the same race–the human race.

“[The teacher] explained that classification is not the focus of the lesson, and I am certain no one is teaching that one “race” is better than another. However, simply teaching the evolutionary view that people of different skin tone are different “races” can lead to such thinking. No matter how small a part of the curriculum this might seem, it is there. We should be able to celebrate our diversity and ancestry without fostering false notions of evolutionary classification and division.

This is hardly the first time we have run into evolution in the classroom, but I find this instance distressing. I am asking you to please carefully consider exactly what is being taught here. Do Ohio mandates really call for students to be taught there are different “races” based on skin color?

Thank you for your help and understanding. Please feel free to keep the attached materials and share them with the fourth grade teachers I have copied on this letter.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying.

Ken

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