When should you introduce your child to evolution?

I’m not sure I understand your question, dcscccc, but I’ll try.

Much like Christy, I talk about traditional young earthism to my children. I make sure they know that I respect their Christian schoolteachers and friends who believe that God created the world in six literal days, and that they shouldn’t go around school saying, “Well MY dad says…” I tell them that there are different ways of reading the Bible’s stories, that I read those stories differently, and that nature tells us that the universe is billions of years old, and wow, isn’t God amazing?

Today I asked my eight-year-old, “Now, hon, you haven’t gone around school telling them God took billions of years to create the world since we last talked, have you?” And she said, “No, but I know God took billions of years to create the world. He’s still creating the world!” I said, “Wow, I agree, honey! But what do you mean by that?” and she said, “Well, he’s creating babies in wombs, and making seeds grow, and making the sun rise and the moon set.”

Out of the mouth of babes…

I don’t teach “creation science” to my kids, because I don’t think it’s true and I don’t want them to grow up confused and unnecessarily distrust God when they find out that the absolutely overwhelming weight of the scientific evidence points to an ancient earth and modification by descent. It’s the same reason I don’t teach them about Santa Claus.

I know you won’t agree with that, and that’s okay. We’re still all in this together.

Peace to you —

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tnakhs for your nice coment amwolfe. although the evidence for special creation isnt in the level of the the evidence about santa claus:

have a nice day

Hi DCS4Cs,

By “creation science,” I meant primarily the way that many try to contort the evidence to allow for, say, dino-human encounters, or a worldwide flood, or a 6,000-year-old earth, or what have you.

I have much less of a bone to pick with our brothers and sisters in the ID movement that accept both an old earth and modification by descent but who also see some sort of special creation in the mix. And I’ll stop there because if not I’m afraid Eddie will sniff out some inadvertent misrepresentation of ID and respond with a long reading list. :slight_smile:

(Eddie, if you’re reading this… It’s a joke. I’m kidding. :slight_smile: )

34 posts were split to a new topic: Is evolution “God-guided”?

Why? Genesis is not for children. It is filled with genocide (the flood), child abuse (Abraham/Issac)

Speaking of Grandmother Fish, HHMI BioInteractive is now streaming the three episodes of Neil Shubin’s series Your Inner Fish. Originally on PBS, this Emmy award-winning series is narrated by Neil Shubin (the paleontologist who discovered Tiktaalik), and is based on his book. Perhaps this would be interesting for parents to watch with their children. Shubin is an excellent speaker. I heard him at a museum event for families once, and he treats the questions of the tiniest children with great respect, never talking down to them. Check it out!

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“Grandmother Fish” is a picture book for preschoolers That’s an age group where you do have control over what they see and do–even the clothes they wear. (Better enjoy that last one while it lasts.)

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Young children always want to know “where did I come from?”. Grandma Fish is a wonderful way to answer a very basic question to a child.

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Who cares? About this did we come from monkeys. And this is stupid, really, to make a distinction between monkeys and apes in a discussion like this; to me it reveals the shallowness of evolutionary thought, to meet the “did we come from monkeys” question with a technicality that has no real bearing on the question. None. At all.

And as far as when should you introduce your child to evolution… this is another cannard. They will introduce evolution to you, and then you will have to deal with it. Unless they are living on antartica with the penguins. Unless you mean… “when should you begin indoctrinating your child into evolutionary thought?..”

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JohnZ:
It is a fact, beyond all reasonable dispute, that if you trace your ancestry and your dog’s ancestry backwards you’ll eventually hit a common ancestor. It is a fact, beyond reasonable dispute, that when you eat fish and chips you are eating distant cousin fish and even more distant cousin potato.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: God’s interventions?

Wish I could like this comment more than once

  1. I’m not propagandizing my children by reading them Grandmother Fish. Now, if I wanted to tell them about TULIP… that would be propagandizing. (In other words, “propagandize” is a subjective term usually use only to refer to the teaching of things with which we vehemently disagree.)
  2. Modification by descent is not speculative.
  3. The specific mechanisms of evolution may be in dispute, but the fact of life unfolding over a billion-plus years (via modification by descent) is not a paradigm that will ever be overthrown by science. I’ve read Kuhn and studied the history of science at an Ivy League university. But nobody is going to come out and say in 2015 that elliptical orbits don’t exist. And nobody is going to scrap modification by descent and an old earth. (To be clear, that is the subject of Grandmother Fish, not irreducible complexity or natural selection and random mutations as sufficient motors of evolutionary change.)
  4. I’m not subjecting my kids to culture wars. I’m teaching them about the amazing way God created the universe.

If there were a great book to teach my preschooler about comparative linguistics, I would totally read it to her. Just for the record.

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Surely the only way to introduce a child to evolution is to warn that it is not how God says He did things. God Created. That is very hard to do, even for Him. But that is what He did and Adam came about instantly not over eons of time. The Bible clearly warns us not to go along with evolution as it is an error to do so. Therefore in answer to the question “When should you introduce your child to evolution” the answer must be AFTER YOU HAVE INTRODUCED YOUR CHILD TO GOD.

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For crying out loud, why don’t we just draw devil horns on poor grandmother fish? Children love animal stories and can learn rudimentary information about most subjects. At one museum family event I went to there was a very young boy who asked Neil Shubin, the guest speaker, if he used chemistry in his research.

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