Time to Get More Transparent

Some AiG supporters have asked us to comment on the current edition of the weekly international newsmagazine, TIME (January 31, 2005), and its article about efforts across the US to expose public school students to the grave scientific problems with molecules-to-man evolution. (Its main magazine rival, Newsweek, features a similar article this week as well.)

A few thoughts on this TIME article:

• Finally TIME is admitting that the Kansas board of education never did eliminate evolution from its science curriculum. Although (to our knowledge) TIME has never retracted this false claim (see our previous article It’s Time for TIME to Get it Right!) made in 1999 (even though AiG and others contacted the magazine to correct its misreporting), this current article in TIME is finally acknowledging that evolution was not removed from that state’s schools.

• The title of the article “Stealth attack on evolution” is misleading. Most of the efforts around the US to encourage public school instructors to teach the massive problems and uncertainties with evolution theory have been going on in the public eye for years. In fact, the school boards across America that have been debating the issue of how origins should be taught in their schools do hold public meetings on this topic, with public comment solicited. Their policy decisions could never be made in secret.

  In addition, groups like AiG, ICR and the Discovery Institute (a pro-“intelligent design” organization, whose leaders do not appear to accept Genesis in the face-value way that AiG and ICR do1) have been openly engaging in refuting naturalistic evolution and in arguing that the unguided processes of evolution could not have been responsible for the design of complex structures in animals.2

• TIME meanwhile has, in its current issue, attempted to counter the design argument. For example, regarding the classic creationist argument about the eye’s complexity, TIME’s reporters come up with the lame claim that “a primitive, light-sensing patch of skin—a forerunner of the retina—could help animals detect the shadows of predators.” However, there is a huge jump from a patch of skin to the highly complex retina. In fact, the retina is an immensely complex organ, comparable (if not exceeding) in complexity to the most sophisticated super-computer man has ever built; and imagine all of the brain power required to design and build such a computer. And to talk of a “primitive” patch of skin that detects light neatly evades the issue of the immensely complex biological/chemical programming needed to turn light energy into programmed signals within a nervous system, let alone the programming to respond to such a signal appropriately. This is mere handwaving and storytelling, with no basis in science.

• The TIME article concludes with a comment from a professed Christian who believes in evolution, and is quoted as saying: “I also believe that God is ultimately responsible for the process [of evolution].” But why would a Christian ever believe that an all-powerful God would have used such a cruel and wasteful process of “survival of the fittest”(animals killing each other) over millions of years? This concept goes completely against God’s loving nature, and also has no basis in Scripture whatsoever. (See footnote 1 for an explanation of why a loving, omnipotent God allows suffering and death.)

So who is really being stealthy? We would submit that, if anything, it is the mainstream Western media which have been attempting to hide an anti-Christian, anti-Bible agenda for years, but which is increasingly coming to light (e.g., TIME’s recent attack on the Virginal Conception, or sometimes more commonly known as the Virgin Birth).

It is such a bias that has affected their reporting (e.g., TIME’s inaccuracies back in 1999) and shows how the secular editors at TIME blindly accept the evolution belief system.

Actually, TIME’s anti-Christian agenda is not so hidden anymore. Even in spite of itself, it is becoming more transparent about its biases as it reports on biblical Christianity.