Teaching or Misleading?
29/06/12 04:37
Different people can certainly draw different conclusions from the same source. I’ve known this for a long time. My brothers and I might describe a shared experience in an entirely different manner. I can read a book and think I know what it said and then find someone else who claims the books says something else. There is nothing unusual about this at all.
Conflict arises, however, when someone claims that his or her interpretation of a particular piece of evidence is the absolute truth. Accident investigators discover quickly that an eyewitness can be absolutely convinced of a “fact,” only to find another eyewitness who is absolutely convinced of a different “fact.” The courts are filled with lots of “he said – she said” arguments.
So it should come as no surprise that Christians have developed differing views on the meaning of the Bible over the centuries. Charles Darwin thought that his theories of evolution pointed to the greatness of God and the power of the Creator. Others deemed him to be a heretic and his views to be anti-Biblical. These days most people who argue against Darwin’s theories have never read “origin of the species.” Sometimes I wonder if they have read the Bible. That is, obviously an overstatement, but the conclusions they draw from the Bible do sometimes amaze me.
The textbook “Biology 1099” produced by Accelerated Christian Education curriculum says that Scotland’s mythical Loch Ness monster is real. It states that the monster has been recorded on sonar and described by eyewitnesses. It states that the beast is a living dinosaur, a plesiosaur. This, the book claims, proves that dinosaurs and humans have lived together on the planet and that scientific evidence about the dating of dinosaur fossils is wrong. The argument, they claim, “proves” that the earth is not as old as claimed by science, but rather was created in six days of 24 hours each in their literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.
There is much about the argument that I do not understand. I am a devoted student of the Bible and try to live my life according to Biblical principles. My study of the Bible has led me to the conclusion that God’s time and the human way of measuring time are quite distinct. God is eternal. As the Psalmist states, “A thousand years in God’s sight are but as a watch in the night.” The eternal God doesn’t use human definitions for time. What length is a day to God? To believe that it is 24-hours demands that the believer also believe that God only cares about one planet: earth. I don’t think it is the case, but I wonder if those people also believe that God made only one planet.
Instead of looking for God in every element of the universe, they seem to be confining God to just a very narrow corner. The argument seems to be for an image of God that is much smaller than my belief in a God of all time and all space. Each discovery of history being longer than previously discovered, each description of the universe being larger than previously known seems, to me to be an exciting affirmation that God is larger than we imagined and eternity is longer than our brains can comprehend.
This doesn’t seem to be the view of the ACE curriculum. Instead of allowing science to discover more and more about the nature of God’s creation, they seem to want to confine scientific discovery to their narrow set of Biblical interpretations. Then they present their conclusions as absolute facts – as if their point of view is the only one acceptable for a Christian.
Even if you embrace their view of history, however, I do not understand how they come to the conclusion that a myth that has been associated with hoax after hoax over the years is fact. I don’t understand how they claim some of the hoaxes to be fact. There is no corroborated sonar mapping of any monster in Loch Ness. There are plenty of unveiled hoaxes that claimed to be eyewitness accounts. If they are interested in Biblical Truth, why do they claim the existence of a creature that is not mentioned in the Bible? Yes the Bible does mention gigantic sea creatures. In Hebrew Leviathan is named. However, the creature could be a whale or any number of other sea creatures. The assumption that it is a dinosaur seems to be far fetched since there was no human knowledge of dinosaurs at the time of the writing of the Bible.
I am sure that someone who was involved in the development of the textbook could present an argument for their point of view and cite biblical verses to support the book’s claims. The existence or non-existence of the Loch Ness monster, however, doesn’t seem to be addressed in the Bible. And Loch Ness is hardly an ocean.
More frightening to me, is that such teaching, presented in textbooks will lead, I am afraid, to many students who begin to doubt the veracity of all religious teaching. When they discover the mistakes of this textbook, how are they to discern if any religious teaching is authentic? There are plenty of agnostics and atheists who have discovered false teaching from religious authorities and used it as an excuse to discredit all religious teaching.
I once said to a friend that my biggest fear about incorporating Biblical teaching into the school is that I wanted my children to have high quality faith education and that I feared that the school wouldn’t be in a place to make good decisions about what beliefs to teach. It is one thing to have your child exposed to mistaken scientific theory. It is another matter entirely, in my mind, to have them exposed to bad theology. But then my standards for theology are high. I believe that theology is, as has been historically taught, the “queen of the sciences.” Good theology is subject to the most rigorous of scientific inquiries, not exempt from examination and testing.
So, I won’t be endorsing the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, despite its common use among Christian homeschoolers. It is not just inaccurate science. It is mistaken Biblical interpretation and lazy theology. I don’t expect, however, for my opinion to deter any of the writers, publishers, or customers of the books.
Conflict arises, however, when someone claims that his or her interpretation of a particular piece of evidence is the absolute truth. Accident investigators discover quickly that an eyewitness can be absolutely convinced of a “fact,” only to find another eyewitness who is absolutely convinced of a different “fact.” The courts are filled with lots of “he said – she said” arguments.
So it should come as no surprise that Christians have developed differing views on the meaning of the Bible over the centuries. Charles Darwin thought that his theories of evolution pointed to the greatness of God and the power of the Creator. Others deemed him to be a heretic and his views to be anti-Biblical. These days most people who argue against Darwin’s theories have never read “origin of the species.” Sometimes I wonder if they have read the Bible. That is, obviously an overstatement, but the conclusions they draw from the Bible do sometimes amaze me.
There is much about the argument that I do not understand. I am a devoted student of the Bible and try to live my life according to Biblical principles. My study of the Bible has led me to the conclusion that God’s time and the human way of measuring time are quite distinct. God is eternal. As the Psalmist states, “A thousand years in God’s sight are but as a watch in the night.” The eternal God doesn’t use human definitions for time. What length is a day to God? To believe that it is 24-hours demands that the believer also believe that God only cares about one planet: earth. I don’t think it is the case, but I wonder if those people also believe that God made only one planet.
Instead of looking for God in every element of the universe, they seem to be confining God to just a very narrow corner. The argument seems to be for an image of God that is much smaller than my belief in a God of all time and all space. Each discovery of history being longer than previously discovered, each description of the universe being larger than previously known seems, to me to be an exciting affirmation that God is larger than we imagined and eternity is longer than our brains can comprehend.
This doesn’t seem to be the view of the ACE curriculum. Instead of allowing science to discover more and more about the nature of God’s creation, they seem to want to confine scientific discovery to their narrow set of Biblical interpretations. Then they present their conclusions as absolute facts – as if their point of view is the only one acceptable for a Christian.
Even if you embrace their view of history, however, I do not understand how they come to the conclusion that a myth that has been associated with hoax after hoax over the years is fact. I don’t understand how they claim some of the hoaxes to be fact. There is no corroborated sonar mapping of any monster in Loch Ness. There are plenty of unveiled hoaxes that claimed to be eyewitness accounts. If they are interested in Biblical Truth, why do they claim the existence of a creature that is not mentioned in the Bible? Yes the Bible does mention gigantic sea creatures. In Hebrew Leviathan is named. However, the creature could be a whale or any number of other sea creatures. The assumption that it is a dinosaur seems to be far fetched since there was no human knowledge of dinosaurs at the time of the writing of the Bible.
I am sure that someone who was involved in the development of the textbook could present an argument for their point of view and cite biblical verses to support the book’s claims. The existence or non-existence of the Loch Ness monster, however, doesn’t seem to be addressed in the Bible. And Loch Ness is hardly an ocean.
More frightening to me, is that such teaching, presented in textbooks will lead, I am afraid, to many students who begin to doubt the veracity of all religious teaching. When they discover the mistakes of this textbook, how are they to discern if any religious teaching is authentic? There are plenty of agnostics and atheists who have discovered false teaching from religious authorities and used it as an excuse to discredit all religious teaching.
I once said to a friend that my biggest fear about incorporating Biblical teaching into the school is that I wanted my children to have high quality faith education and that I feared that the school wouldn’t be in a place to make good decisions about what beliefs to teach. It is one thing to have your child exposed to mistaken scientific theory. It is another matter entirely, in my mind, to have them exposed to bad theology. But then my standards for theology are high. I believe that theology is, as has been historically taught, the “queen of the sciences.” Good theology is subject to the most rigorous of scientific inquiries, not exempt from examination and testing.
So, I won’t be endorsing the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, despite its common use among Christian homeschoolers. It is not just inaccurate science. It is mistaken Biblical interpretation and lazy theology. I don’t expect, however, for my opinion to deter any of the writers, publishers, or customers of the books.