When should you introduce your child to evolution?

“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?..”

14 posts were split to a new topic: Science and Prayer

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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14 posts were split to a new topic: Does Romans show that Christians cannot accept evolution?

Are you suggesting that “Grandma Fish” should come with warning labels?

5 posts were split to a new topic: Does the Bible teach a flat Earth?

Fwiw, I would imagine most people responding on such boards have read Romans in its entirety several times, including the atheists :slight_smile: (which I am not).

Well, all of you have managed to completely disintegrate into the typical “Eddie wishes BioLogos used different words” and “Patrick thinks Christianity is useless” and “George wants us to be EGGs” thread that I think we have already had at least seventeen times. Could we reign it in please and return to the actual topic of this post?

Actually, I agree with Eddie here. A three year old doesn’t usually know squat about reproduction, ancestry, or genetics, and probably has a limited and still developing concept of “relative.” This Grandmother Fish book is just going to be a book about animals with the kind of repetitive refrains that preschoolers enjoy. The idea that it is really paving the way for important future scientific knowledge seems kind of silly to me. I don’t buy it.

As far as I can tell, the main reason someone would own this book would be so the parents could show off how progressive they are to their progressive friends, or make a statement to their Christian relatives who would be annoyed by the book. If that’s what floats your boat, fine. But, I can think of a bunch of other learning activities that would be equally or more developmentally appropriate than reading this book.

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It depends on the child.

But it’s very sad that people would see this book as inappropriate! Oh well, I remember seeing the film “Jesus Camp,” a genuine but kooky religious camp where indulging in Harry Potter books or films was strictly forbidden.