The Supreme Court and Creation Science in the Schools

Creation Science, Secular Humanism, and the Supreme Court Decision

James White along with me today, Rich Pierce, as we take a break in between series here and discuss the subject of creationism and the whole subject of secular humanism today. On the dividing line, we do invite your phone calls today at 278 -55 -55.

That's 278 -55 -55. It is July 4th, Red, White and Blue Day. I've already had my hot dogs, no apple pie, and I drive a Volkswagen, so I guess I'm really out of the spirit today, I guess, but you drive a Chevrolet, don't you?

I drive a blue one. A blue one, okay. Well, that means, did you have your hot dogs and apple pie yet? No. Oh, okay. Well, you still got a chance. I'm not buying a Chevrolet. The fireworks are tonight.

Okay, all right, I get it. Anyhow, I wanted to take the opportunity today, we've just finished up a series on Jehovah's Witnesses beginning next week. We are going to start an entire series on the subject of atheism and that will be running for at least five weeks.

I have scheduled five weeks right now. I suppose if there was a popular demand, we could take it longer, but over the next couple of weeks, we'll be discussing atheism and the atheistic worldview and how we as a Christian can deal with that.

I will be talking with two gentlemen representing the Christian viewpoint on the 25th this month, Dr. Robert Morey, author of Death and the Afterlife, The New Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom, books such as How to Answer Jehovah's Witness, How to Answer a Mormon.

A well-published gentleman will be our guest on the 25th. On the 8th of August, my professor from Fuller Theological Seminary for Christian Apologetics, Dr. Lynn Bullock, will be our guest. Those will be our two Christian apologists.

Then we will be talking beginning next week to sort of start off and introduce the subject of atheism with Mr. Jim Lippard. Mr. Lippard is a local gentleman. He's written a pamphlet, a book entitled Fundamentalism is Nonsense.

He will be with us next week to explain his viewpoint and how he's arrived at his conclusions. The week after that will prove to be an extremely interesting week when we discuss the subject of the Bible with Mr. Dennis McKenzie.

He is the editor of a publication called Biblical Errancy. It is published once a month and it basically attacks the Bible, supposedly shows contradictions and things like this within Scripture. We will be talking with him on the 18th of this month.

Then when we push all the way back to August 1st, we will be speaking with Mr. Dan Barker, who is with the Freedom from Religion Foundation. He is a former minister, a former Christian as he calls himself.

He is now with the FFRF and we will be talking to him long distance as well. So we will have three folks coming from the atheistic viewpoint and two folks, aside from myself obviously, coming from the Christian viewpoint.

We hope that you will be listening and you will be taking note of the things that are happening over the next couple of weeks. I decided to take today to discuss the subject of creationism and the recent Supreme Court decision on that subject.

We'd like to hear about your viewpoints on it at 278 -5555. Let me just mention very quickly that this program is brought to you in part by Dr. Martin Galuz of the Black Canyon Chiropractic Center. We thank him for his participation, as well as by WT Consulting.

We'll be talking about some end-of-the-month clearance sales that they're having later on in the hour and also by Shof Steel. So we appreciate those people who make this radio program possible. A couple weeks ago, I wasn't here on the program because Kelly and I managed to get away for two days up a little cabin in the woods.

We woke up on a Saturday morning and there was a newspaper on our front porch, the little cabin we were at. The front headline of the Arizona Republic read, Creationism Classes Crushed. Court Bars Mandated Teachings.

This was about the decision the day before, the Friday before that, concerning the striking down of the Louisiana state law that mandated the teaching of creation science along with the teaching of the theory of evolution.

Whenever the theory of evolution was presented, according to Louisiana state law, the theory of creation had to be presented as well. The bill, the law, lost 7 -2 in the Supreme Court. Basically, the article mentioned that the two justices who opposed the ruling were Justice Scalia and the Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist, were the two that voted for the Louisiana state law.

The others voted against it. Interestingly enough, the second article, the second paragraph said, on a 7 -2 vote, the justices said, in 1981 Louisiana law mandating creation science instruction is a, quote, sham, unquote, that violates the legal principle of separation of church and state.

This was followed by another quote that said, the Supreme Court has just rescued the nation's public school students from narrow-minded fanatics, Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers declared.

Television evangelist Pat Robertson called the decision and outraged every single American who believes he or she was created by God. The Louisiana law, quote, was clearly to advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created mankind, unquote, the court said.

The Constitution bans laws, quote, respecting an establishment of religion, unquote. Louisiana is the only state with a creation science law in its books, but religious fundamentalists elsewhere have mounted strong campaigns in recent years to get the biblical view of creation taught in public classrooms.

A similar law was passed in Arkansas, but was struck down after a highly publicized trial in 1982, and state officials chose not to appeal it. In Arizona, repeated attempts to have schools teach evolution only as a theory, not fact, have failed.

Representative Gary Giordano, Republican in Phoenix, introduced a bill this year that said teachers must not discuss the origin of humans, quote, in such a way as to foster a belief in a religion or to cause a disbelief in religion, unquote.

The bill died in the House Education Committee. Fundamentalist organizations and the two justices who dissented on the ruling, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia, argued that the ruling would unduly restrict the ideas to which children would be exposed.

Quote, now these children will not be exposed. The academic freedom of being taught a variety of scientific theories and the origin of the earth will have their learning experience limited to the teaching of just one idea, said Beverly LaHaye, President of Concerned Women of America, a fundamentalist lobbying group in Washington.

The article goes on from there. Possibly we can pick up some more of that later on in the afternoon. Basically, it's interesting for me, anyhow, to point out that the Louisiana law did not mention God, it did not mention the Bible, it did not mention Genesis, and yet, of course, those who opposed the law have attempted to make it look like it did, as if it was some sort of narrow-minded biblical law.

It was not. It was just simply a law that said that when the theory of evolution was presented, that there must be other theories presented as well. In other words, that the teaching system had to be balanced.

When I first read this, the first thought that came across my mind was the unfairness of this, for the very simple reason that the Supreme Court hid behind the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

It says that the government will make no law respecting the establishment of religion. They said, well, this law respects the establishment of religion, so it is not constitutional. Interestingly enough, in an article that I've written for our newsletter called The Dividing Line, which should be coming out in a week or so, I titled the article, Supreme Court Establishes Official State Religion.

That sounds rather strong, but I think it's very straightforward, because basically what the court has said is that the only religion that can be presented in our schools, in our science classes, is the religion of secular humanism.

Now I realize that it's not popular to call secular humanism a religion. They try as much as possible to keep out of the area of being a religion. They like to say, well, we don't believe in a god, so we're not a religion.

That's irrelevant. Whether you're religious or not, you can be religious and not believe that there's a god at all. It's simply holding to a worldview that affects your entire outlook, your entire activities, your entire mindset and thinking.

You can be a religious person whether you believe that God is God or that God is a chair. It's irrelevant. You're still religious. It's interesting to me, few Christians have ever read the Humanist Manifestoes 1 and 2.

In the first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, I'd like to read you the first three sections of the manifesto. Listen to what it says. First, religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

Article 2nd, humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as the result of a continuous process. Article 3rd, holding an organic view of life, humanists find the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.

These are the first three articles of the Secular Humanist Manifesto, Humanist Manifesto 1 of 1933. Did you notice something in the very first article? The very first word is, humanists. First phrase, religious humanists.

They are the ones who use the phrase. Not I. I did not put that in there. It says, religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not creating. Second, the first three all deal with what?

The very center of the religion of secular humanism is the belief in evolution, in a non-created being of man, in the lack of a creator, in a completely humanistic and natural viewpoint on the origin of man.

Now, basically what the Supreme Court has said is, that's alright. We call that science. Now, I also noticed something very interesting. The article directly said that the court called the creation science instruction a sham.

S-H-A-M, in quotation marks. I hold here in my hand a book called The Secular Humanist Declaration, drafted by Paul Kurtz, the king of secular humanists. Listen to what he says under evolution. It sounds like it could have come directly from the Supreme Court decision.

Today, the theory of evolution is again under heavy attack by religious fundamentalists. Although the theory of evolution cannot be said to have reached its final formulation, or to be an infallible principle of science, it is nonetheless supported impressively by the findings of many sciences.

There may be some significant differences among scientists concerning the mechanics of evolution, yet the evolution of the species is supported so strongly by the weight of evidence that it is difficult to reject it.

Accordingly, we deplore the efforts by fundamentalists, especially in the United States, to invade the science classrooms, requiring that creationist theory be taught to students and requiring that it be included in biology textbooks.

This is a serious threat both to academic freedom and to the integrity of the educational process. We believe that creationists surely should have the freedom to express their viewpoint in society. Moreover, we do not deny the value of examining theories of creation in educational courses on religion and the history of ideas.

But it is a sham to mask an article of religious faith as a scientific truth and to inflict that doctrine on the scientific curriculum. If successful, creationists may seriously undermine the credibility of science itself.

Now notice that the exact same terminology is used by Paul Kurt, the secular humanist, in a secular humanist declaration, as the Supreme Court used in its decision on the subject of creationism in the Louisiana state law.

That's somewhat scary to me because basically what the court has done is it has violated what it said it would not do, and that is the Establishment Clause of the Constitution regarding the establishment of religion.

They have established a religion. It's called secular humanism. It is a religion. They've said that it's fine. You can teach that in school, but you cannot teach anything else. Now, the problem is, of course, that the mindset of people is, well, if you're going to teach creationism, you have to tell them about God and you have to tell them about the Bible.

No, wait a minute. Time out. I am a person who has studied biology. I majored in biology at Grand Canyon College. I was Department Fellow of Anatomy and Physiology there. I know the field fairly well.

I don't have a PhD or anything like that, but I have studied it. I am a semi-scientific person because of that. Now, at the same time, I'm a religious person, and I see absolutely no conflict between the two.

You can present the model of creationism right alongside the model of evolution, and you can deal with that on a very unbiased basis, far less biased than the presentation of evolution is made right now.

I have never seen a textbook in any school I've attended, whether secular or Christian, that was not based on evolution. Very rarely have any of the science teachers I've known through my career presented evolution as anything but fact.

Now, some, I know of at least one, who clearly said it was theory, but no other theories were brought forward to explain anything other than that. When your textbook is based upon the very underlying presuppositions, the very underlying documentation, and everything is on evolution, then you're probably going to come out of that textbook having a fairly good idea of evolution, but you're not going to be able to view facts and figures and data in any other way other than that.

That is truly a shame. When I come back from this short break, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about creationism. We'd like to get your phone calls on this subject at 278 -55 -55. I'm not interested in the monologue today.

278 -55 -55 is the number that you can call and get involved in the program today. I'd like to mention something's going on right now over at WT Consulting. I just got some end of the month clearance here.

Now you say, wait a minute, it's the 4th of July. The end of the month is a long ways from now. I think this is June, but it's going on still. We can just stretch out the end of the month here a ways.

There are a number of things here that if you're a computer person at all, you will want to get involved in. For example, and if you're also thinking of getting involved with computers at all, you might want to take advantage of this as well.

One thing you cannot do without are cables. WTC right now has 10-inch shielded IBM parallel cables, which is what I use for my computer to go to my printer. They normally run $35 and they're on sale for $15.

$15 for 10-foot, did I say 10-inch? That's an awful wide one, 10-foot shielded IBM parallel cables, $15. That is cheap. Six-foot shielded IBM AT serial cables, normally $30 on sale for $12. That's a steal.

That is a giveaway. WTC is where you can get those. You can get the leading edge word processor. It normally runs for $99 on sale for $75. You can get the leading edge word processor with merge, print, and spelling correction.

There's something. There's something I wish I had had when I was in school. Spelling correction. Boy, that would have been nice, you know, taking home right through the spelling corrector. Anyways, it normally runs $125, but it's on sale for $100, and for a word processor, that is very reasonable.

You can get other things at WTC like the nutshell information manager. If you're always losing your day timer and you can't lose your computer because it's a little hard to lose in your day timer, this information manager might be for you.

It's regularly $99 on sale for $75. You say, how do I get hold of them? You can get hold of WTConsulting at 279 -9014. 279 -9014. There are a couple of other things on sale that I'll be talking about in a couple of minutes.

Right here on the dividing line, we thank them for being a part of the program, even though I'm not sure exactly which direction our friend over there would go on this. We've had some discussions. Yes, indeed.

He's a science person too, and I'm a science person, but he's a computer science person. I'm a biology person. They don't get together very well at all. It's really strange. But anyways, we had a discussion of time once, and it really got to be crazy once we started getting into how computers use time.

Anyhow, I think that unfortunately most Christians today are in a defensive status on the subject of creation. I think we automatically become defensive about it instead of offensive. I'd like to know why that is.

278 -5555 is a phone number. We'd like to get your feedback today at 278 -5555. What do you think about the Supreme Court's decision? Was it right? Was it wrong? Do you care one way or the other? You may not have children in school.

Your children may not be out of school. It may not be a concern to you one way or the other anymore, unless the future of this nation and this country is important to you, and then it might be important to you.

278 -5555. I frequently tie into what are called computer bulletin boards. I never did understand how people could spend much time doing that. We call it BBSing because it's a bulletin board system. So when you get involved with that, you're BBSing.

It takes up a lot of time, unfortunately, if you really start getting into it because you're getting on all these bulletin boards. We've been discussing evolution and creationism on the number of the boards, on about three of them, actually.

One is a board that is predominantly run, has the most number of people calling it that we're coming from a humanistic viewpoint. And then there are two Christian boards, and there are some that call in there that are interested in the subject as well.

One thing that I've discovered in talking to these folks is that we have the idea from the media, I believe it's from the media, that evolution is scientific and creationism is not. I mean, evolution has lots of evidence and creationism has nothing.

That's how the media presents this subject. I remember the Sunday after the Supreme Court decision, I tuned to NBC, as I recall, and they had a talk program on. There was a commentator sitting there, and he said, evolution is not a theory.

Evolution is fact. He says there is no denying it. There's no getting around it. Everybody knows it. Evolution is a fact. He was just adamant about it. Well, it's just the viewpoint is brought out. They say, hey, we know these things.

There are scientific facts beyond any shadow of a doubt. I say, wait a minute, time out. Let's think about this just a little bit. First of all, evidence, facts, and data is not pro-evolution or pro-creation.

Evidence is evidence. Evidence is completely and totally neutral. Evidence doesn't lean toward any one side. Science is supposed to be concerned with and interested in nothing other than just simply gathering evidence and formulating theories to explain the evidence.

Evidence is evidence. Now, much of the quote-unquote evidence, evolution, can be fit just as well into the model. What you need to do is you need to step back and say, okay, here are two models. Creationism says this universe was put into motion by a creator, that he established certain guidelines, mechanisms by which those things he created could exist and could live and could adapt to their environment.

Evolution says that life is from non-life, that life simply happened by chance, that by complete, non-directed genetic mutation and natural selection working on those mutations, a variety of life has come about, and truly, it's accidental.

There is nothing teleological about it, no action to what we see around us today. Now, what we do is we take the evidence and apply it to these two models to see which explains it better. Now, evolutionists will say, well, what is natural selection?

Natural selection is evolution. I go, well, why is it proven natural selection? Why is it proven evolution? Well, they go, well, beings change, they adapt. I agree, they do. In fact, I don't think there's any disagreement at all.

Natural selection is a fact. We see it happening. If a certain animal creates more and helps bring in another animal, then there are going to be more animals around than anything else. That's pretty logical.

That's a very basic way of addressing it. Natural selection is a fact. I don't know whether I believe it or not. It's a fact. The point is, natural selection, I believe, fits much more clearly in the creation model than in the evolution model.

Why? Because natural selection, 99 .9 of the time, will favor keeping a life form at the position it's in right now. No change. If the environment doesn't change, then natural selection will keep the animal from changing.

Mutations that they talk about, I'll see here, mutations, and all the mutations change that, 99 .99 of the time are weeded out, and they are not favorable. And if there's nothing in the environment to act upon that mutation, it's not going to have any advantage over anybody else.

So, in other words, natural selection works as a maintenance device. Now, is not that what you'd expect to find in the creation model, a maintenance device? Well, of course you would, and that's exactly what you've got.

Now, that means that 99 .99 of natural selection fits in my creation model, and 0 .001 fits in the evolution model, and yet they think that supports evolution. It doesn't make any sense at all. None at all.

So, when people start saying, well, there's so much evidence for evolution, what are you talking about? What do you mean, evidence for? Here's the evidence. Now, let's discuss the evidence in the light of these two models.

But people are not willing to do that. You're not going to hear that happening on a secular radio station. You're not going to hear that happening on secular television. It's just not going to happen.

And the thing that scares me the most about this Supreme Court decision is the fact that they are, in essence, saying that my son, when he goes to school, is going to be only allowed to see how the evidence fits in one model.

Not numerous models, one model. He is not allowed to see how this could possibly fit just perfectly into a creation model. That is the establishment of a religion. In fact, there's a new book coming out.

I haven't gotten to see it yet. I'm not sure if I brought my discussion over here or not. I was talking about the evolutionary scheme, the task. He's not coming out as a biblical fundamentalist or creationist or something like that.

But he is just simply pointing out, hey folks, this stuff is garbage. What we see in the scientific community today is, if you open your mouth and say that, you can find numerous professors who have stood up and said, no way.

I refuse to teach this. I'm going to let my students know all the weaknesses here. They lose tenure. They lose their positions. They're out in the cold. Now that is not science. What it looks like to me is science has decided, this is our God.

This is our viewpoint. This is our treasured belief. And don't you dare question it. If you question it, then we're going to make you look like you're a nut. We're going to make it look like you're not a scientist like we're scientists.

And then you start looking at the Secular Humanist Manifesto and things like this and you start going, whoa, wait a minute. That belief in evolution is part and parcel of secular humanism. Now it's interesting, if I attempted to present something in a science class that was based on the first three articles of the Westminster Confession, it would be pretty obvious that I was presenting and pushing Protestantism.

And yet, they present the first three articles of the Humanist Manifesto in science class. Is that science? No, that's religion. Because when you really talk about it, the whole discussion of origin is a religious question.

It is not a scientific question. Science deals with that which can be repeated and verified. You can't repeat and verify spontaneous generation, which is what science says. That's how life started. Life started by the chance association of certain molecules that formed into amino acids and formed into proteins and enzymes and DNA and mRNA and tRNA and ribosomal mRNA and all the rest of this stuff.

It all managed to somehow come together and work. Well, I'll tell you something. I think it takes much more faith for a person to say that life came from non-life than it does for me to say that life came from life.

That life was created by a creator. It is not science to believe in spontaneous generation. You can't make it happen again. Oh, you can take laboratory conditions and mix chemicals together and fire lightning bolts at it and all the rest of the stuff and get chance amino acids to form, but you ain't going to get DNA.

You're not going to get that stuff to come together and replicate itself and create a living cell and mitochondria and everything else. That ain't going to happen. No way. So it is not science to state that I believe in spontaneous generation.

That just doesn't work. And yet the Supreme Court said, well, yes it does. That's acceptable. That scares me. 278 -55 -55. 278 -55 -55 on July 4th talking about the creationism debate and humanism as a religion.

We'd like to hear what you have to say about it. I think this really does involve everyone, especially if you're a Christian American. What has the Supreme Court said about religion in the United States?

Are we being prejudiced against? I believe we are. In favor of another religion, the religion of humanism. I think we're being prejudiced against because we are just simply open in saying we believe there's a God.

Humanists are not open. They believe there's a God too. It's called man, themselves. They are the ultimate and highest authority. That is a religion. That is a religious statement. No matter what, someone has some type of worldview, some type of religious belief.

Whether they reject God or accept God is irrelevant. They have a worldview and we as Christians are being prejudiced against, being discriminated against in.

Our public school. I recall when the decision was handed down by the Supreme Court, immediately the news media went nutso. They just really started covering the story and interviewing everybody and PBS ran an interview, a debate with two gentlemen.

I remember the gentleman who was taking the creationist view stated that the Louisiana law was proposed by a legislator who, number one, himself was not a creationist. What had happened was that his child was in class and the inference that I got from it, we're talking about a young child, was in class and that the child was asked by the teacher what was their view, what did they think about evolution.

The child said that they didn't believe evolution, that they believed in creation and that we were created. The child was ridiculed by not only the teacher but the other classmates as well. The legislator felt that this was wrong, not that necessarily he didn't share that view with his child, but the fact that his child should not have been ridiculed, cut down for professing a belief in this.

There should have been an equal opportunity there and the child should have been allowed to voice his opinion.

Certainly. I agree a thousand percent. All the way through school I was the lone creationist, is sort of how I termed myself. That was very unfortunate but I think it was very good for me because I was able to think through where I was coming from because I had to.

If I didn't think it through, I was going to get ridiculed even more. My name is James White, your host today along with me, Rich Pierce, discussing the subject of creationism as well as secular humanism.

We'd like to hear from you at 278 -55 -55. Let me mention coming up on The Dividing Lines starting next week, a five-week series on the subject of atheism. Next week, Mr. Jim Lippard will be in studio giving you some perspectives on where he's coming from as an atheist.

I think a lot of Christians just simply don't know what atheists believe. Of course, they don't even like that word at times, but what kind of worldview they have, what they believe about us, what they believe about ethics and morality and the supernatural and the Bible and Jesus and things like that.

Mr. Lippard would probably be a good person to give us some viewpoints on that. Then the week after that, Mr. Dennis McKenzie of Biblical Herency will be with me, and that one should prove to be interesting.

Mr. McKenzie and I have debated in his newsletter, and there are a lot of unanswered questions in our debate. In fact, the last letter I wrote to him, he cut out the last part of my letter when he published it without any indication.

We're going to find out why. Yes, indeed. The week after that, Dr. Robert Morey, a Christian apologist, author of Death and the Afterlife, the New Atheism, and the Erosion of Freedom, How to Answer a Mormon, and How to Answer Jehovah's Witness, will be our guest.

The week after that, Dan Barker of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and then August 8th, we'll close up with my professor from Fuller Theological Seminary, Christian Apologetics, Dr. Lynn Bullock from California.

That's what's coming up in the next couple weeks. We're sort of using this program as a transition between discussion of Jehovah's Witnesses, who by the way are creationists. I'm not sure if that makes any difference.

The subject of atheism coming up in the next couple weeks. We'd like to hear from you on the subject at 278 -55 -55. During the break, Rich had been asking the question concerning, what does a Christian do when the subject comes up?

What are some of the best approaches to take? I think that probably the most unusual approach a Christian could take, is simply to be logical and rational on the subject, and say, okay, wait a minute.

Let's discuss this. Let's lay out what we're saying. Let's point out that facts are facts. That they are evidence. That we need to deal with the evidence. We need to fit the evidence into our theory. If our theory doesn't fit the evidence, then our theory has probably got a problem with it.

Instead of saying that evolution is science, creationism is religion, let's back off from this and say, okay, here are the two models. Let's look at the facts. Let's look at the evidence and see how it fits.

One interesting thing to me has always been that I've enjoyed sitting back and watching evolutionists go at each other. Because you see, if you put a hundred evolutionists in a room from a number of different disciplines, you'll have a hundred different theories of evolution.

The geneticists are into micro-mutational evolution. Subtle changes in the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. They're into how natural selection works on micro-mutations, and the Hardy-Weinberg law, and all the rest of this stuff.

This is how evolution supposedly takes place. Then you get a paleontologist with them. The paleontologist is dealing with fossils. He's dealing with the record of past life. He says, you're nuts. That doesn't work.

You just don't have any evidence for that. So they come up with all sorts of wild stuff. One guy came up with a theory about 15 years ago called leapfrog evolution, where you'd have a lizard lay an egg and a bird would hatch out of it.

Isn't that great? In other words, these massive leaps of 15 ,000 mutations in one shot. Bingo! Because this fit the fossil record. Of course, each one proves that everybody else is totally wrong. So the question that must be asked now that the Supreme Court has said that evolution is science and creation is a fraud is, which theory were they talking about?

I'm not sure whose it was. You go to one school and you have one professor for biology and you go through with that person. You get that and you go to another school, and this person believes that your last professor was a kook.

It's truly amazing, because there is no one theory. That's fine. That's what science should be able to look at as theories and rip it apart. I've got no problem with there being numerous theories. What I've got a problem with is the idea that this overriding theory has been set up as some sort of shrine on an altar that you bow down and sacrifice your students to.

That's what bothers me.

So which theory is it that they're actually teaching in school and presenting as fact?

It depends on which professor you have when you get into the higher levels.

Well, where are the textbooks coming from?

That depends on the textbook writer. If you've got a textbook that was written by a guy who's more into paleontology than a textbook written by a guy who's into genetics, they're coming from different directions.

Most textbooks, obviously, for use in a public school are going to be so basic that the main differences between all these different theories of evolution are not going to be brought out very clearly.

Once you start getting into the college level, then things start changing a great deal. 278 -55 -55 is the phone number. We're going to take a phone caller here in Glendale. This is Ken. Hi, Ken. Hi, Jim.

How are you doing? Okay, buddy. If you're expecting a lot of phone activity on that subject today, I don't think you're going to get it. Everybody that's listening agrees with you. The audience you get, Jim, and there's really not a lot of reasons that we agree with you.

You don't want to vent your spleen at the Supreme Court?

Well, no, because you've already said it all, and I think that any born-again Christian would position.

Well, no, wait a minute. Let me ask you something about that, Ken. That brings up a very interesting point. I know many Christians, many born-again Christians, that don't take my position.

Well, obviously, they're wrong.

Yes, okay, thank you, Ken. No, seriously, let me give you an example. Well, let me give you an example. I went to a Christian college. I went to Grand Canyon College, but there are no science professors there who are creationists.

None. Most of them are Christians, though. They believe in what is called theistic evolution, which means that they believe that God started the process, and some of them believe that God directed it, some of them don't, but eventually what it boils down to is about 25 ,000 years ago, in this viewpoint, God took two highly evolved primates and infused into them spirits, and they were Adam and Eve.

Whether a person believes that that process was directed by God or not, you have to ask the particular individual. But this is called theistic evolution. It provides for God, and yet it does not say that God created in the way that the Bible seems to indicate that he did.

But they would say, well, we're not given the mechanics of creation in the first chapter of Genesis or anything like that. There are a large number of people that come down that direction. Had you ever heard of that?