Doonebury Comic Drips With Twisted Information

Last Sunday’s funnies featured a Doonesbury cartoon designed to shape public opinion with a creative but distorted comic dialogue. Misinformation which can lead people to laugh their way into decisions with disastrous eternal consequences is not funny.

The comic student opens with, “You believe we’re descended from apes?” After a brief digression alluding to Christians who maintain that the unicorns in the Bible were not fantasy animals, the comic biology teacher delivers a series of erroneous and misleading statements. He misrepresents scientific evidence, Louisiana law, biblical history, and the educational preparation needed for college.

The teacher says, “So all the evidence massively supports a theory of evolution that knits together everything we know about biology! However, as high school science students in the state of Louisiana, you are entitled to learn an alternative theory supported by no scientific evidence whatsoever!”

Evidence is interpreted through an observer’s worldview. The ability to weave a nice story from visible evidence does not make that story true. The fairy tale of evolution lacks testable scientific evidence to support its contentions that organisms acquired genetic information to become new kinds of organisms by accumulating information-losing mutations over millions of years. Such an idea makes as much sense as expecting a business which loses money on every sale to profit by making up the loss in volume!

The assertion that the “alternative theory” offered by creationists is “supported by no scientific evidence whatsoever” is false. The biblical account of Creation and the global Flood explains genetics, the fossil record, and the results of sin’s curse on this world. What we see in today’s world is consistent with what we read in God’s Word.

The comic teacher then explains the “alternative theory” saying, “It goes like this. 5,700 years ago, a male deity created the heavens and earth and all life on it in six days. . . . Unfortunately, He didn’t like His own handiwork, so God created genocide and drowned everyone on earth except the family of Noah, a 600-year-old man who was charged with saving animals. . . . So Noah took two of everything including microbes, but forgot the dinosaurs.”

Students are not being required or encouraged to read the book of Genesis, contrary to the strip’s contention that they are “entitled” to.

We’ll spot the cartoonist’s ignorance of biblical chronology for missing a few centuries. Biblical chronology actually gives an age of the earth of about 6000 years. At least he got the “six days” right. However, Louisiana’s law does not condone religious teaching in public schools. What the law allows is an open discussion of the scientific problems with evolutionary ideas. If the evolutionary emperor really has no clothes, this law allows students to see and say so. And if they don’t, that’s okay too. They’re at least learning to evaluate evidence with discernment. And students are not being required or encouraged to read the book of Genesis, contrary to the strip’s contention that they are “entitled” to.

The comic teacher also misrepresents God, sin, judgment, and the cause of suffering. God liked “His own handiwork” just fine. Rebellious human beings wrecked this world. God as Creator was justified in destroying a wicked world, yet He made a way of salvation available to all who would take it. Only Noah’s family did. Today, countless people ignore another kind of salvation—the eternal salvation available in Christ.

The comic teacher also failed to do his homework about the Ark. Noah took air-breathing animals on board, not microbes. Microbes didn’t need Noah’s help to survive the Flood. But dinosaurs were on the Ark.

Neither Noah nor God forgot.

The portrayal of a public school teacher being required to teach “creationist” ideas and doing so sarcastically and incorrectly highlights the reason Answers in Genesis has never been in favor of requiring teachers to teach creationism. Louisiana law allows academic freedom and promotes development of thinking skills by permitting critical discussion of “scientific theories” including evolution.

The comic ends with a student’s plaintive interruption, “Please stop. I’d like to get into a good college.” But teaching evolutionary ideas as indisputable facts is indoctrination. Why should the scientific problems with those ideas be concealed from students? Such sugar-coated teaching of evolutionary ideas does not prepare students to think sharply and critically for college. On the contrary, it only teaches them to accept without question the things they are told.