“Hunting for Truth” in the Secular Media!

The American newsweekly U.S. News and World Report features an April 10 story (“Hunting for God on a Creation Safari”) that misrepresents the creationist movement. It joins many other secular articles—increasingly appearing over the past few months—that have caricatured the creationist viewpoint.

While the article “Hunting for God” was not stridently anti-creationist, it nevertheless contained some errors. First, it implied that creationists believe that all the fossils we find in the ground today are the result of Noah’s Flood—most of them were, but certainly fossilization has occurred since the worldwide, catastrophic Flood.

Also, evolution has not been omitted from the curriculum standards in the public schools of Kansas. The concept of evolution (both biological and cosmological) is still in the standards.

Also, the magazine misrepresented the 1987 US Supreme Court decision on teaching creation in public schools, saying that “creationism was banned.” Actually, the court ruled that a state could not mandate that biblical creation be taught, but that all views of origins could be presented if they contained no specific religious doctrine. Therefore, textbooks on “intelligent design” (e.g., Of Pandas and People) can be lawfully introduced in public schools.

The US News and World Report article profiled the work of the Creation Science Association for Mid-America, which runs popular educational programs, including “safaris,” primarily in Missouri and Kansas.

Even with its errors, the US News and World Report article was more balanced about creation vs. evolution than the “hit” pieces that have been written recently against Answers in Genesis in two major British newspapers The Independent and the London Times. And in the United States, a New York Times feature article on December 1 was heavily mocking in its tone (e.g., calling AiG’s Ken Ham “Captain Creation” and making fun of his Australian way of saying things).

By the way, Time magazine twice has misreported what happened in Kansas last August (Time has declared that evolution was “eliminated” from the science curriculum), and has been requested on three occasions by AiG to print a retraction (but none has been forthcoming). It chooses to be alarmist over what was really a simple de-emphasizing of evolution in Kansas public schools.

The secular press has been increasingly agenda-driven in promoting evolution and attacking and caricaturing the growing creationist movement.