Russia: Creationism Finds Support Among Young

Radio Free Europe ^ | 03/13/2006 | Claire Bigg

[SirLinksalot]

Russia: Creationism Finds Support Among Young

By Claire Bigg

A 15-year-old Russian schoolgirl has filed a court action to demand that creationism feature in the school biology curriculum, alongside Darwin's evolutionary theory of the origins of life. The idea of introducing creationist views into the classroom seems to find sympathy among a number of Russians, particularly young people. Religious zeal, scientific ignorance, or simple bravado -- what makes young people reject the long-enshrined theory of evolution?

MOSCOW, March 10, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Maria, a schoolgirl from St. Petersburg, is demanding that the Russian Education Ministry rewrite biology textbooks to include the view of creationism -- the belief that God created the universe and all living beings as described in the Bible.

Teaching only the theory of evolution, she says, violates freedom of conscience and religious rights, and therefore runs counter to the constitution.

Tired Of A Secular Curriculum

Schraiber is assisted in her lawsuit by her father, Kirill, and by three lawyers representing the Russian Orthodox, Muslim, and Jewish faiths.

Like in Western countries, the curriculum taught in state schools in Russia is strictly secular. A number of young Russians, however, are not opposed to seeing that change.

Aleksandr, a 19-year-old Moscow student, fully backs Schraiber's initiative. "It seems like a very good thing to me," he said. "Inner spiritual development should definitely have its place in education. I think notions such as ethics should also be included [in the school curriculum]. These are very useful things."

Sergei, a 22-year-old working for a construction firm, does not believe in evolution theories. He says schools should teach children more about religion, without however falling into proselytizing. "I think that God exists," Sergei said. "It is 100 percent clear that we do not descend from the ape, according to Darwin's theory. I am in favor of teaching topics in school that would enable people to choose themselves what religion they will adhere to, without leaning towards one religion in particular."

And Anastasiya, a 17-year-old student, agrees that the theory of divine creation should be added to the theory of evolution in the school program. "Yes, so that children can have a choice, so that they have the possibility of deciding what is closer to them, so that they make this choice themselves," she told RFE/RL.

Not all young people agreed, however. Some thought that creationism had no place in schools.

Darwin In Decline?

At Moscow's imposing Darwin Museum, creationist theories are not an option.

Schoolchildren come here to learn about how species evolved and adapted to their natural environment. On weekends and holidays, the museum, which has three floors teeming with stuffed animals and skeletons, receives about 3,000 visitors a day.

Richard Dawkins, an eminent British ethnologist, famously said that one had to be either "ignorant, stupid, or insane" to deny the theory of evolution.

The director of the Darwin Museum, Anna Klukina, is more diplomatic. But she agrees that those rejecting Darwinism do so out of gross ignorance. It seems like a very good thing to me. Inner spiritual development should definitely have its place in education -- Aleksandr, 19.

"The masses understand neither the theory of evolution nor Darwinism itself. I witness this on a regular basis. The theory of evolution is based on three postulates that cannot be called into question," she says. "The first postulate is the existence of mutability. The second postulate is the existence of the fight for survival. The third is natural selection. But for the masses, Darwinism equates to man descending from apes, and that's all. Darwin, however, never said this, that's the whole tragedy."

Contrary to the common belief that Charles Darwin's theories boil down to the descent of man from the ape, his theory of evolution stipulates that all life forms are related and have descended from a common ancestor.

Darwinism Vs. God

Klukina also firmly rejects the claim that Darwinism precludes the existence of God.

She argues that the late Pope John Paul II publicly recognized evolutionist theories, and that Darwin himself, who studied theology at Cambridge University, was a deeply religious man.

Soviet Legacy

Sociologists, however, say scientific ignorance is not the only factor behind the rejection of evolution theories in Russia.

Some say the spiritual vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its atheist ideology is at the root of this trend.

I think that God exists. It is 100 percent clear that we do not descend from the ape, according to Darwin's theory -- Sergei, 22.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels admired Darwin's theory of evolution, which they thought supported their own theory of social evolution. A simplified and somewhat "Sovietized" version of Darwinism therefore occupied pride of place in the biology curriculum of Soviet schools.

According to Lev Gudkov, a sociologist who heads the department of social and political studies at the Yuri Levada Center, creationism signals a desire to reject anything associated with Soviet times: "It is definitely a post-Soviet, exaggerated, insistence on pre-Soviet traditional views. This is observed mostly among young people and among the elderly. We discern an overall tendency towards imitational traditionalism that emerged as a reaction to the vacuum of ideas and beliefs that followed the disintegration of Soviet ideology."

A poll conducted by the Yuri Levada Center last September showed that only 26 percent of those surveyed supported the theory of evolution, while 49 percent of respondents said they believed man was created by God.

Gudkov, however, warns against taking initiatives such as Maria Schraiber's too seriously.

Since the most fervent advocates of creationism in schools seem to be teenagers and young adults, Gudkov says that efforts to publicly reject the theory of evolution is likely to be partly driven by a desire to challenge the established order.

[GarySpFc]

I've asked some who don't accept ID and/or a Creationist position but who DO profess to believe in God and/or be Christians. They say that they believe God set it up to be purposeless, and that He just knew that it would end up this way ... i.e., with humans. I find that in total contradiction to the principles (not to mention the letter) of Scripture. It also makes His Son's incarnation the result of purposeless evolutionary processes. Otherwise, God could have been just as easily incarnate in Spider flesh ... and I don't think "Jesus, Fully God and Fully Tarantula," is a particularly Biblical (nor appealing) concept.

[DoctorMichael]

Go here!!!!!!!!!!!!!...............

http://www.echoesofenoch.com/hollowearth.htm

The Earth is hollow!!!!!!!!!!! I read it on the Internet therefore it must be true!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Bible says so too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!..........

Isa 40:22 "It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in."

.......and we all know that the Bible is the literal Word of God!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lets all get together and get this into our Godless Public School System as a viable alternative!!!!!!!!

Who's with me?

[mlc9852]

I love sports but have never understood how torching a car is showing support for my favorite team! LOL

I have never even thrown beer at an opposing team! Maybe I'm just not that much of a sports fan after all! LOL

[orionblamblam]

> They say that they believe God set it up to be purposeless, and that He just knew that it would end up this way ... i.e., with humans.

That's not what I've heard. The way I've heard it is that God either nudged things along... a mutation here, an asteroid there; *or* that he didn;t really care what physical form developed, so long as it was capable of holding a soul. Teh whole thing of man being in God's image *physically* is, I believe, utter nonsnese. Why would an infinite God have a nose, feet and nipples? But a far better case can be made for the "image" being the soul.

Were I to believe such things, I'd hazard that God finally started ensouling humans around 70,000 years ago, when the Toba supervolcanic explosion nearly wiped us out, dropping the planetary population down to a few thousand. Evidence suggests that prior to that, were were really smart primates... but *after* that, we were suddenly far more creative artistically.

The scientific explanation could be that conditions were so bad, only the smart and clever ones survived and propogated; but a religious take is obviously possible as well. *Perhaps* Adam and Eve were "ensouled" (or whatever it's called) in the months/years prior to Toba, they were living the good life in some African paradise, they pissed off God somehow, and he poked his finger into the volcano making it go "blam." Makes as much sense as anything else in religion, I suppose.


Hmm. Maybe I should expand on this. Get myself a nice suit and a hair-helmet, a vapid blond with big hair and too much makeup, and get me a TV show. Seems to be big money available there...

[Bingo Jerry]

So you still believe against reality that keeping ID and other religious ideas out of science class is actually an atheistic plot to keep religion out of our kids' lives so that they can fill in with bigger government?

[orionblamblam]

> I love sports but have never understood how torching a car is showing support for my favorite team!

I've never cared for sports, never even got into the whole "Who's better: Kirk or Picard?" pissing matches. All seemed terribly odd to me.

[dread78645]

The scientific explanation could be that conditions were so bad, only the smart and clever ones survived and propogated; but a religious take is obviously possible as well. *Perhaps* Adam and Eve were "ensouled" (or whatever it's called) in the months/years prior to Toba, they were living the good life in some African paradise, they pissed off God somehow, and he poked his finger into the volcano making it go "blam." Makes as much sense as anything else in religion, I suppose.

Hmm. Maybe I should expand on this. Get myself a nice suit and a hair-helmet, a vapid blond with big hair and too much makeup, and get me a TV show. Seems to be big money available there...

And get a lawyer.
That's too close to the Scientology shtick. You'll be sued for copyright infringement.

[mlc9852]

Well, Kirk - of course!

But I bet you like arguing whose scientist is better than the other! LOL

[orionblamblam]

> That's too close to the Scientology shtick.

Naw, it's *completely* different. For starters, Tobaism didn't start as a bar bet.

[PetroniusMaximus]

"So you still believe [against reality - Ed. strike this phrase] that keeping ID and other religious ideas out of science class is actually an atheistic plot to keep religion out of our kids' lives so that they can fill in with bigger government?"

Absolutely I do!!!

Have you not seen the evidence of the educational system's hostility to Christianity? Children are suspended from school for bringing Bibles or attempting to pray before their lunch. You would have to be blind to miss the anti Christian bias of American public schools. I have no shortage of examples of this if you care to see them.

I think the Socialist State sees God as their #1 enemy. You will either worship God or worship the State.

[Bingo Jerry]

Have you not seen the evidence of the educational system's hostility to Christianity?

No, I have not. I have seen maybe one or two egregious examples (which do not a trend make) and maybe a dozen more misleading, trumped up stories.

You keep forgetting that the majority of people in the education system are Christians. As are the majority of scientists and people in the judicial system. Don't you think it seems odd that they would work against Christianity?

Or is the unspoken theme here that you have a more restrictive definition of Christianity that wouldn't include most of these self described Christians?

[GarySpFc]

In 1995, the official Position Statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) accurately states the general understanding of major science organizations and educators:

The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.

Or in the words of the famous evolutionist, George Gaylord Simpson, "Man is the result of a purposeless, and natural process that did not have him in mind."

How do they know the process was unsupervised?

How do they know the process was mindless?

How do they know the process was purposeless?

Their statements are problematic in that they are unscientific. It cannot be proven that evolutionary processes are "purposeless" or that humans were "not in mind." Science cannot demonstrate these assumptions either way ... and that's the problem with their position. They become proponents of a religion of atheism; I say religion because their conclusion is NOT science, it is faith ... just as much as OUR conclusion is faith. Clearly, their definition is diametrically opposed to any concept of a personal creator being involved in the evolutionary process.

[Ed Hudgins]

Great stuff! I actually have some old copies of the Flat Earth Society newsletter -- which was written by the late Charles Johnson -- from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s that I copied when I worked at the Library of Congress. Johnson, needless to say, was a good Christian anti-scientist who tried to explain scientifically why the earth was flat.

Here's an article about him:
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm

And here's the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society

Shouldn't we teach this stuff in science classes with creationism as alternatives to those tyrannical, prevailing theories that are repressing these poor folks to whom rational thought gives headaches?

[Coyoteman]

It cannot be proven that evolutionary processes are "purposeless" or that humans were "not in mind." Science cannot demonstrate these assumptions either way ... and that's the problem with their position. They become proponents of a religion of atheism; I say religion because their conclusion is NOT science, it is faith ... just as much as OUR conclusion is faith.

You are attempting to denigrate evolution by saying it is a religion? Do you not see some logical problem with this?

[Coyoteman]

Johnson, needless to say, was a good Christian anti-scientist who tried to explain scientifically why the earth was flat.

Here's an article about him:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm

And here's the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society

Shouldn't we teach this stuff in science classes with creationism as alternatives to those tyrannical, prevailing theories that are repressing these poor folks to whom rational thought gives headaches?

Teach the controversy!

[PetroniusMaximus]

"You keep forgetting that the majority of people in the education system are Christians. As are the majority of scientists and people in the judicial system."

I'd like to see your evidence for those statements.

[Ed Hudgins]

There is NO controversy to teach. We should teach about what sort of intellectual errors, emotional problems, moral failings, self-imposed blindness and abnormal psychology cause people to believe that the earth is flat, that humans were "created" and the like.

[Coyoteman]

There is NO controversy to teach. We should teach about what sort of intellectual errors, emotional problems, moral failings, self-imposed blindness and abnormal psychology cause people to believe that the earth is flat, that humans were "created" and the like.

I think you missed that my post was slightly tongue in cheek.

I am a firm supporter of the scientific method (a science jock? -- no, that would be a pun and I can't believe I would do one that bad).

[orionblamblam]

> I say religion because their conclusion is NOT science, it is faith ...

There's generally a little bit more to religion than just scientifically unproven faith.

[GarySpFc]

You are attempting to denigrate evolution by saying it is a religion? Do you not see some logical problem with this?

I have a doctorate in theology, and do have the expertise to recognize a religion. I am also very familiar with your atheist posts.