Are They Really Trying to Remove Evolution?

You really can’t trust how much of the media and secularists report on the creation vs. evolution issue in public schools. Recently, the media had numerous reports about a bill in Tennessee and claimed that the bill was introducing creation in the science curriculum—some reports even called it the “Tennessee Creation Bill.” But the truth was that it was an academic freedom bill for teachers. Much of the media and secularists reported falsely on this bill. AiG writer Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell wrote a detailed response to what happened in Tennessee. Well, the secularists are at it again. In the Journal Nature, a situation in South Korea was reported this way:

A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has alarmed biologists, who say that they were not consulted. “The ministry just sent the petition out to the publishing companies and let them judge,” says Dayk Jang, an evolutionary scientist at Seoul National University.

Other secularists (and media reports) took this up claiming South Korea was being pressured to remove all references to evolution from high school textbooks.

Because I know how the media and secularists often misrepresent such situations in their attempts to denigrate creationists and rail on Christians, I decided to have our staff look into these reports, and so we checked them out with people in South Korea. AiG speaker, writer, and researcher Dr. Georgia Purdom gives us the details in her blog:

My friend “Luke” wrote, “These scientists (including myself) collected scientific evidences disproving supposed evolution facts and submitted petitions to the Korean Ministry of Education. The governmental officers accommodated petitions and many public school textbook publishers are going to delete or modify current contents of archeopteryx and horse evolution.” The scientists submitting the petition were part of a group called the Society for Textbook Revision (STR) that is associated with the Korea Association for Creation Research (KACR).

According to an article from a Seoul newspaper that Luke translated for me,

On May 16 2012, The Korean Ministry of Education announced that three out of seven governmentally approved textbook publishers accepted a petition, entitled “Gradual changes of horse evolution is an imaginary description and does not have scientific basis.” One publisher (Chunjae Education) is going to replace whale evolution in the place of horse evolution in textbook description. The other two publishers (Kyohak Publishing and Sangsang Academy) are going to delete horse evolution examples in textbook.

Although whale evolution is also an imaginary description, it is encouraging that two of the publishers are going to remove the horse evolution series completely.

So what happened is that two outdated evolutionary ideas are being removed—that’s all! But for many secularists, you’d think the sky had fallen in Korea!

I urge you to read the rest of what Georgia explains in her blog post.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken