Why restrict science teaching to one side of issue?
by YOUR VIEW -- LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Published: Friday, March 4, 2011
In response to the Rev. Deborah Meinke (Your Views, Feb. 26): Education isn't about some authority deciding what is or what is not truth. Education is about presenting all sides of an issue and allowing students to think critically about the issue and decide what they believe. As a college student with minimum firsthand knowledge of the Bible, I sat in a science class and listened to the Big Bang Theory. In order to pass the course, I regurgitated this theory back to the instructor and got the needed credit for the class. It didn't hurt me, but it also didn't make sense to me. I observed my own respiratory and circulatory systems and decided Big Bang could explain neither of those magnificent systems.
Forty-five years after becoming a daily reader of the Bible and seeing its truth all around me, I'm glad to be aware of both sides of the argument over evolution vs. creationism. Why do adherents of the “evolutionary process” (who lack intermediary fossil evidence of it) want to restrict a student to one side of this issue? Is not true education the presentation of all sides of an issue? As a retired classroom teacher, restricting the argument to one side isn't the kind of critical thinking I wanted for my students.
Jean Kemp, Ardmore, Oklahoma
"Darwin was the first to use data from nature to convince people that evolution is true, and his idea of natural selection was truly novel. It testifies to his genius that the concept of natural theology, accepted by most educated Westerners before 1859, was vanquished within only a few years by a single five-hundred-page book. On the Origin of Species turned the mysteries of life's diversity from mythology into genuine science." -- Jerry Coyne
Thursday, August 1, 2019
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