Unhappy FASTS

FASTS stands for the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, an advocacy group that just alerted the media, “Australia the clever country? One in three believe humans and dinosaurs coexisted: Science literacy falls short of expectations and the future needs of our economy.”1

The Courier Mail story is at least as dismissive of creationist ideas. “Fundamentalist Christians are hijacking religious instruction classes despite education experts saying [c]reationism and attempts to convert children to Christianity have no place in state schools,” write Carly Hennessy and Kathleen Donaghey.

The anecdotal reports about what creationists have taught—in optional religious instruction classes—range from the reasonable to the ridiculous. One parent says his daughter was taught that all humans descend from Adam and Eve (which the Bible clearly teaches). But when his daughter challenged the instructor, claiming that would mean all people would be inbred, the teacher allegedly replied, “DNA wasn’t invented then.” (Read more on this topic in “Cain’s Wife”) Similarly, one teacher supposedly claimed Noah gathered dinosaur eggs for the Ark (rather than bringing full-size dinosaurs on board, presumably to save space), which is akin to our claim that God may have sent juvenile dinosaurs into the Ark. However, the teacher was said to have also said that Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell—which sounds perhaps like a distortion of the claim that all creatures were originally vegetarian.

For many evolutionists, it seems even a single half-hour session of religious education per week is half an hour too much, especially if students are ever taught that the Bible’s history is real. Unfortunately, for some readers, a few anecdotal accounts or even misrepresentations of questionable creationist beliefs is probably more than enough to convince them that students should only hear one side of the story.