Improve Science Education by Ditching Darwin
Educational reform is in the air.
A good start would be to eliminate
Darwin’s dangerous idea and
replace it with something better
Editorial
The Darwin Party has had a hundred years to experiment on students by adding Darwinian evolution to the science curriculum. During the Scopes Trial of 1925, the ACLU, H.L. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, the Society for Science & the Public and the scientific community pleaded for freedom to teach evolution in science classrooms. (Actually, they really wanted to teach racism; see Jerry Bergman’s article last year, 6 Dec 2023.) With the media circus putting anti-Darwinists on the defensive, most submitted to the pressure to believe the propaganda that “evolution is science; creation is religion.”
What America got was eugenics, scientific racism and ideas that fed the atrocities of Hitler. And once the Darwinists got into the schools, they kicked out all Darwin skeptics, somewhat like Dino dropping Fred Flintstone out the window, leaving him outside pounding at the door. It’s not clear that the public really wanted evolution in the science classroom. The takeover was a move by elitists in the scientific institutions who were polishing the hero image of Darwin and promoting him in universities and national laboratories. America was racing toward educational and intellectual supremacy, and the Darwin Party pressured politicians to believe that to maintain its lead, American public schools would have to teach the scientific consensus—including Darwinism.
In time, that’s all the public schools got. A generation was growing up under the propaganda that creation was religious but Darwinism was scientific. This accelerated rapidly after Sputnik, when Americans needed to catch up to the Russians. New textbooks came out, some good regarding mathematics and physics. The biology curriculum, however—thanks to elitists at the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS)—was written as 100% pure Darwinism. The title of my BSCS high school textbook—still in my bookcase—was “Biological Science: Molecules to Man.”
My high school biology teacher, an avid Darwinian, shoved evolution down our throats. I was the only one sheepishly trying to offer some of the counter-arguments that I knew about as a 16-year-old. When I brought my textbook home, my Dad, a pastor and youth leader, was aghast and furious. Nowhere in the whole textbook was there any doubt given about the evolution story, all the way from chemical evolution to the entire biosphere. Nowhere was there any mention that anyone believed anything else (read about Dad’s reaction here).
Creationists and Bible believers had lost the intellectual high ground with hardly a fight as the intelligentsia in the academy crowded them out and shamed them into thinking that Darwin had all the answers in biology. He had given them “understanding.” Darwin was the shaman, the idol, of the intellectual world. He remains there to this day.
Creation scientists and other Darwin skeptics, eventually, did not take this lying down. The modern creation movement began in the 1960s, followed by the Intelligent Design movement in the 1980s and 90s. PhD scientists aimed their guns at the foundations and structures of Darwinism, showing that Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law is vacuous. Empirically, they added, our magnificent world and the wonders of biology do not fit the picture of blind unguided chance but instead show magnificent foresight and purpose.
The Darwin skeptics, sadly, had little power in the public schools and universities. The liberal march through the institutions included the courts. After several legal battles supported the Darwin Party, insiders knew to keep their mouths shut at risk of failing their degree programs or careers.
Dr Bergman has published three thick volumes with true stories of how Darwinists systematically censor and ruin the careers of Darwin skeptics.
The Verge of an Education Revolution
So here is what the Darwin Party bequeathed to the public schools by 2024: near complete censorship of all non-Darwinian views, drag queens in school libraries, transgender propaganda and gay pride celebrations, abortion activism, gender fluidity, and exorbitantly powerful teacher’s unions with enormous political power—all of whom hate political conservatives. The US Department of Education sees to it that students get fed 100% Darwinism. Meanwhile, test scores plummet (FRC) and other countries surpass American students in math and engineering.
The election of Donald Trump for a second term has invigorated Americans starving for change. One of the first priorities of Trump and his cabinet appears to be the elimination of the Department of Education in Washington DC. This would return educational policy and curriculum to the States, where many feel it belongs. Jimmy Carter, the second worst president after Biden, had founded that educational monstrosity in 1979. Before that year, students arguably got higher test scores without the educational bureaucracy. America today spends more money per pupil than most countries but American students rate far down many other countries in reading, writing and math. If America is to be “great again,” its schools need major reform.
Time to get biologists back to rigorous work.
Darwin is dead; he has been dead since 1882. He’s history. This has-been that never-should-have-been left evil fruits and wreckage in the wake of his ideas: evolutionary psychology, evolutionary neuroscience, materialism, fatalism, nihilism, and lazy biologists drunk on Darwine content to telling just-so stories on company time. Over and over at CEH, we expose the stupidity of Darwin’s ideas. Think of it! Is “stuff happens” a major achievement of western philosophy? How did that happen? It’s far past time to send the Darwin Party out to pasture. Let Darwin’s Bluff become a footnote to history, a relic of a prior century when a quaint Victorian myth deceived the whole world.
How to Ditch Darwin and Replace Him
Ditching Darwin needs to be accompanied by replacing it with something better. Here’s how to do that without starting religious wars: give the science curriculum a focus on engineering. This is what makes YouTube channels like Mark Rober‘s so popular. A fellow JPL veteran, Rober has a passion is to teach viewers (mostly young) to “think like an engineer.” Though a Darwinian, Rober does not make evolution the centerpiece of his programs. He attracts passionate students with dreams of solving problems and making things that work. And what is engineering but an application of intelligent design?
If students learn to think like engineers, at least two benefits will ensue. First is that Darwinism will shrivel and die. Engineering requires foresight, planning, and the will to succeed. This is opposite of Darwinism that has no foresight beyond the current mutation, and proceeds with no goal or plan at all. Darwin’s “tinkerer” that is supposedly driven by “selection pressure” to succeed is a myth. It’s what the ancients used to call an idol. Natural selection is illogical, tautological, inconsistent, and fruitless. There is no Selector, and even if there were one, it could not select what does not first exist. If students get excited about engineering, they will have no interest or time for Darwinian nonsense.
The second benefit of helping students think like engineers is that they will want to succeed at reading, writing, and math. They will become top scientists, cell biologists and healthcare specialists. They will build marvelous new technologies to solve problems and make life better for Americans and the world, like Elon Musk is already doing. Test scores will rise. Prosperity will rise. And the joy of achievement will drive students to be their best. School will become exciting again.
Not all students will want to be engineers, of course. The world needs artists, poets, novelists, musicians, historians, medical professionals, emergency responders, caregivers and “people persons” (whom we should all imitate and appreciate). But there is hardly a field of study that could not be improved by “thinking like an engineer.” Making things that work and solving problems requires critical thinking. Just-so storytelling won’t cut it; engineered things like bridges and rockets have to work in the real world, right now and in the future. The ability to think critically will help all the non-engineers in their own work. It will also immunize the gullible against falling for the notion that “stuff happens” is a good explanation for how the world came to be.
What this implies is that no “religion” per se is required for the educational revolution. No atheist or non-Bible-believer needs to fear that someone is trying to insert religion into the science classroom. This is most certainly not a “god of the gaps” solution to the science curriculum. Just take the question of origins out of the science textbooks altogether, and leave that to philosophers and theologians. Teaching students to think like engineers will help them understand biology. A bird needs to fly; what are the requirements? A frog needs to hop; what are the design specifications? Let the students try some science projects in biomimetics to realize how difficult it is to get something that flies or hops to work (see this hopping bird robot; it didn’t just happen!). Biology can be fun from this point of view. It’s non-religious, and much better than saying “It evolved because it evolved” millions of unobserved years ago.
A Necessary Foundation
As many have pointed out, though, science education is not amoral. Criminal engineers can devise traps and weapons. Computer engineers can design hacks and scams. Give a young engineer an education without a moral compass, and he can end up designing horrible things that cheat and kill. Up to this point, I have been assuming that students want to learn how to make things for good or just clean fun. What about that moral compass?
The lack of a moral compass in Darwinism is responsible for tremendous evil. Evolutionary theory has no purpose or aim. Whatever happens, happens. Que sera, sera. Some atheists try to argue that a culture will evolve toward a cooperative, altruistic society, but that is not true; their own theory says that cheaters will take advantage of altruists, and no arrangement is stable against change. Darwinism has no pole star. Whatever stuff happens to outlast a competitor is “good” in Darwin’s materialistic universe.
For this reason, an educational revolution in the science classroom must be preceded by a return to Biblical ethics in the culture. The Lord gave ten short commandments that, if kept, produce a stable society. Jesus summed those up in just two: love God (our actual Creator and Designer), and love your neighbor as yourself. If the educational revolution hoped for in the new administration becomes a reality, it will and must be built on that foundation. If students learn to guide on the pole star of Biblical ethics, they can build lives of purpose and value, using their talents to help their fellow man.
Donald Trump usually ended his wildly popular rallies with “We will make America [insert word] again,” repeating the phrase with words like strong, wealthy, proud, safe, and healthy, ending with, “And we will make America great again!” to loud cheers from the crowd. We need to insert a few more words to ensure that these other benefits don’t get used for evil. We must make America wise, faithful, decent, truthful, and good again. The path to those things is a narrow one. Jesus told us where it is: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”