That statement is telling in that it essentially says,“The end justifies the means, and the argument is not about what is true and correct, but rather what helps achieve the desired goal” which in this case is the culture war. That seems to be what underlies a lot of the YEC rhetoric.
Ultimately, however, truth matters. One post mentioned the circular argument of a literal interpretation of Genesis is foundational to a certain interpretation of “science” which then is used to support the literal interpretation of Genesis. When the science is realized to be false, the circle breaks and it all falls apart to the dismay of those around. Truth, however difficult to understand, does not have that weakness.
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I just read “Finding Darwin’s God” a few months ago and that scene was in there – I believe you got the name right. Yeah, I agree that it’s a mistake to not believe that YECs are sincere – and probably the longer they have held those beliefs and the more they’ve invested in them, the more sincere they are. For me it wasn’t just about a set of beliefs – it was my entire education, my mom, my dad, my grandparents, many of the adults I’d known and learned from my whole life, my church, many books, and any other beliefs that were tied in with those.
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Flying dinosaurs in modern Africa? That does sound pretty strange.
To his credit, Dr. Jay Wile, who founded Apologia, left the organization not too long after he sold it to someone else. Wile, who is nevertheless a Young Earth Creationist, is thankfully irenic in his views towards OEC and EC folks. But when he saw that Apologia was moving more in an ideologically rigid YEC position, under the new ownership/leadership, he got out.
If Wile had stayed with Apologia, I wonder if his presence would have kept the organization from “not to be too over the top YC,” as you put it.
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That’s good to know. As much as I disagree with Wile’s YEC views, I really appreciated him as a writer. I used both his chemistry textbook and advanced biology in high school and was able to teach myself from both – he has a great way of communicating scientific ideas in a conversational way that doesn’t bore the reader.
We used Apologia Exploring Creation with Biology in a high school co-op. I didn’t want a YEC text, but it was our only option to have the labs with other homeschool students, taught by parents with a science background. I had my daughter skip the chapter on evolution, and substituted a chapter from a secular high school science textbook I had bought used. This was the textbook written by Wile, and I have to say I thought it was really poorly written and hard to understand. I can’t understand why it had so much praise as a science text. Also, many chapters were filled with critical comments about college professors who taught science, making suppositions as to why they believed in evolution that had no basis in fact. On the plus side, I guess my daughter learned how to deal with a difficult text. It should help her in college at some point.
We’re in that situation for next year. I want to do this both for the social aspect and the labs. Should I just withdraw and teach it myself without Apologia?
I found Apologia texts themselves to be very dry. The experiments for the books we used were good, and I also like some aspects of the notebooks, but the texts are incredibly dry. I think there are much better options out there.
One of the things that bothered me the most though was then they cherry picked to try and prove evolution wrong. One specific example I can think of is in the botany text they teach that bee’s and flower’s couldn’t possibly have co-evolved due to something about the ultraviolet stripes on flowers and bee’s vision. When I looked into it more after leaving YEC I found out that there is actually a lot of scholarship about this and it was enlightening to find out about how the evolution in this area actually worked. Same with evolution of the giraffe’s neck. I can see how children or younger students could be swayed by these kind of “facts”, but Apologia twists things and oversimplifies things. Well basically they tell students what they should think, instead of using critical thinking skills. I love that my kids have a thorough enough understanding of evolution to see through these things now.
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For me, I weighed the positives and negatives, and taking the class had more positives for us. While the homeschool moms who taught the class believed in YEC, one was a nurse and the other had worked in science research, so they had more of a science background than me. I felt it was more positive for my daughter to do labs with the class, learn how to take tests, and have the socialization with the other kids. So for me, the positives outweighed the negatives. But YMMV.
As I said, I had her read a chapter on evolution. I also pointed out to her statements in the chapters that I thought were deliberately misleading. I know other homeschoolers handled it by using Apologia, then teaching a short unit on evolution afterwards.
It’s hard when you’re limited with curriculum and the YEC homeschooling community. Sometimes you just have to improvise.
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Besides the expected weak young-earth arguments (“with no ozone layer in a pre-oxygen atmosphere, how could life evolve and not get fried by UV?”[underwater or under a rock would do]; the standard 2nd law of thermodynamics rules out evolution error that forgets the sun), Wile’s Apologia volumes have some odd errors. Metamorphic rocks seemingly don’t exist - igneous and sedimentary were the only types mentioned. The relationship between the speed of light in something and particle movement was also confused. Einstein realized that nothing can travel faster than the speed that light travels through a vacuum. Light travels slower through air, water, glass, etc. Wile’s textbook claims that this means that a particle in a vacuum traveling at a little under the speed of light through the vacuum would have to slow down to stay slower than the light if the particle entered the air or water or the like. But in fact particles can travel faster than light does through something; it’s a standard effect observed in particle physics. Also, Wile endorsed a lot of the bad politically conservative pro-industry popular science errors. Claiming that secondhand smoke isn’t harmful or denying global warming with a fictional and misleading graph aren’t good. Promoting skepticism to any non-YEC science claims went so far as to question atomic theory.
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I remember hearing about some Fundamentalist science textbooks claiming that snow had special powers as a conductor, based on a misinterpretation of the KJV translation of Job 38:22. Misinterpreting ‘treasures’, as ‘powers’ as opposed to a storehouse.
I AM SO GRATEFUL SOMEONE IS DISCUSSING THIS.
I am currently homeschooled at a co-op and I deeply wish we used standard evolutionary science books rather than Apologia. The main thing I hate about it is that they seem to consistently put down ideas conflicting with their beliefs, without giving any sort of valid evidence.
While also promoting their own theories with little to no evidence (not even their own reasoning) stated behind it.
I vividly remember one part of the beginning of it earlier this school year,
“Just because a great scientist believes something doesn’t mean you should too!” In reference to how some great renowned scientists in the past have been proven wrong. This is true, but then they proceed to claim I should believe them and not the other ones.
The ending of the book which I flipped too also bugs me, they conclude by saying “The Bible clearly does not teach man evolved from ape and the Bible also clearly teaches the earth isn’t old”
Give me a break. Catastrophism from the way they’ve taught also makes no sense.
They assume that many of the natural things we see on earth (example, the Grand Canyon) were formed through catastrophes/major events that will never happen again…
Then they mention the uniformitarian view assumes they were formed slowly through natural processes like we see today. I’m not sure if they realize that they’re essentially giving the readers a good way to criticize the catastrophist view. Major natural events that NEVER happen again? Suspicious. If it happens naturally in nature it surely isn’t a one time thing only, right? The view of natural processes we see today forming it slowly (like a river) makes more sense.
And then three more things:
- Their phrasing. “I, and a large amount of other scientists, don’t believe in the theory of Evolution” yeah, it’s not the majority.
- They contradict themselves. They mentioned that small changes in species (like longer tails or different shaped fins in fish) were possible, which, iirc, is microevolution.
- They downplay issues like the eradication of species by human activity “some sources say thousands of species go extinct every day, when in reality the number is a lot lot smaller!” And climate change (I don’t remember their exact wording but in one of the sections in the meteorology section, they mentioned how a lot of climate change probably is just natural and “still needs studies on whether people affect it or not” when it’s obvious what fossil fuels do.
I’m going to mention that not 100% of this may be correct or accurate, as some of it is based on memory (like for climate change and species eradication), but I think much of what I said holds merit.
Edit: to clarify, this is my 7-8th grade science book. It’s titled “Exploring creation with General Science” and is a general science book.
Edit 2: Another bothersome piece of “evidence” I’ve seen in the book too is an image of a fossilized fish with a small fish skeleton inside its mouth, halfway in. The fish was buried in the middle of a meal, and the book attributes that to a global flood, despite it being obvious it could’ve been a powerful local flood.
It reminds me of how appalling it is that some people I know so strongly believe that only a literal interpretation of the Bible is correct and all others (like non literal Genesis) are false. It baffles me. You can’t accept changes of species over long periods of time but you can accept a freaking talking donkey, entire global flood that covers EVERYTHING, and the fact that somehow people reproduced just fine despite having to do it through incest (Adam and Eve’s children, all of them were the only people on Earth pretty much)? The last part specifically is a tiny part of what makes me realize how not everything in the Bible is meant to be taken literally.
Although if someone has objections to any of these, feel free.
I’m currently reading a book called “The Prism And The Rainbow”, found it at our local library. I also saw Finding Darwin’s God there too but I chose the former after glancing through its contents. I’ll make sure to read it when I’m done with this book.
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Yeah, that’s pretty normal for YEC arguments.
I went through a series of videos from Genesis Apologetics that was posted a few years ago. My compiled notes on them are in the post linked below.
FYI, I’m also a student (and teaching, as well) in a co-op, but in 12th grade.
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Good to hear your impressions, @Ravetastic. It is difficult when family has different interpretations of the Bible. It seems there is little benefit to directly engaging in conflict on those things, but to try to set them aside and focus on the things you can agree on.
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The modern uniformitarian view is that geologic processes which occurred in the past operate the same as they do now. This would include catastrophic events, so catastrophism is actually a part of modern uniformitarianism.
The problem for YEC is that the features of the Grand Canyon are not what we would expect from a catastrophic event. Instead, all of the evidence is consistent with the Colorado plateau being uplifted over many millions of years and the Colorado river incising into the plateau over time.
One interesting outcome of the process of incision is that it preserves the meanders of the original river.
This is not what a catastrophic event would produce. A fast flowing mass of water does not meander in a single channel. Instead, the water would spread out and move along parallel straight channels creating a braided structure. Interestingly, this is what is seen in the Channeled Scablands in NW USA. Those features were actually created by catastrophic flooding, and it demonstrates how geologists are able to differentiate between features that form slowly and those that form quickly.
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