Creation vs evolution in England state school

Fundamentalist Christians who do not believe in evolution have taken control of a state-funded secondary school in England.

In a development which will astonish many British parents, creationist teachers at the city technology college in Gateshead are undermining the scientific teaching of biology in favour of persuading pupils of the literal truth of the Bible.

Emmanuel College - set up by the Tories - is designated a beacon school by the Labour government and its backers are sponsoring a city academy to be built in nearby Middlesbrough.

City technology colleges are technically independent schools but charge no fees because they are funded by the government as well as the private sector. City academies are similar although local education authorities have to agree to their creation.

The school is hosting a creationist conference this weekend and senior staff have given a series of lectures at the college urging teachers to promote biblical fundamentalism and giving tips on techniques to make pupils doubt the theory of evolution.

The creationist lobby has become increasingly notorious in the US, but until recently it has been relatively weak in Europe. The Anglican and Catholic hierarchies have accepted evolution as a fact, with the Pope saying it was "more than just a hypothesis."

Under the national curriculum, schools must teach evolution but are not banned from teaching creationism as well. That leaves Emmanuel's teachers free to present evolution merely as a "theory" no different from the idea that the world was made in six days.

Nigel McQuoid, the school's head, told us it was "fascist" to say that schools should not consider creationist theories.

Mr McQuoid and his predecessor John Burn wrote in an article in 1997: "To teach children that they are nothing more than developed mutations who evolved from something akin to a monkey and that death is the end of everything is hardly going to engender within them a sense of purpose, self-worth and self-respect."

Emmanuel is a non-denominational Christian school which achieves consistently outstanding academic results and received a glowing Ofsted report last year.

Sponsorship It was built with £2m of sponsorship from Sir Peter Vardy, the multimillionaire entrepreneur behind the Reg Vardy car dealerships, who remains chairman of the college's board of directors.

Another of Emmanuel's directors is Baroness Cox, the Conservative peer who in 1988 sponsored amendments to the education reform bill stating that religious education in state schools should be "in the main Christian". Sir Peter, an evangelical Christian, has donated a further £2m via his charitable Vardy Foundation to build a city academy in nearby Middlesbrough, due to open in 2003, and has offered to fund five more. Mr McQuoid and Mr Burn, the Vardy Foundation's chief education adviser, are helping to set it up, as no head has yet been appointed.

Mr Burn is one of the founders of the Newcastle-based Christian Institute, set up in 1991 to promote fundamentalist Christian beliefs. It now boasts 12 full-time employees, 10,000 supporters and according to its accounts it earned £500,000 last year, all in donations.

Other founding members of the institute include the Rev David Holloway, vicar at Jesmond parish church in Newcastle and the Rev George Curry, who presides at two churches in the inner city area of Elswick and chairs the council of the Church Society, the leading evangelist body in the Church of England. Both men are traditionalists and outspoken opponents of the ordination of women.

Mr Holloway is also a founder member of Reform, an evangelical pressure group within the Church of England, and in the 1980s proposed that bishops should face a "heresy test".

The Christian Institute has no formal links to the school, but senior members of staff have published papers on education on the organisation's website.

In a lecture co-authored by Mr Burn and Mr McQuoid, they observe: "Clearly schools are required to teach evolutionary theory. We agree that they should teach evolution as a theory and faith position... Clearly also schools should teach the creation theory as literally depicted in Genesis. Ultimately, both creation and evolution are faith positions."

Mr McQuoid stresses that the school teaches alternatives to the Christian faith, discussing other religions and even atheism, and says that he wants his pupils to learn to make up their own minds.

He said: "A group of folk have contacted the press saying it's not legitimate to have a school consider the scientific case for creation. I think that's fascist.

"The evolution/creation debate is all about to what extent the scientific evidence is there to support or undermine the other view... I don't think [evolution] is as proven as the world being round."

But in lectures several of his staff members have urged teachers to "show the superiority" of creationist theories. In a lecture given at the college last year, to an adult audience, the vice-principal, Gary Wiecek, commented: "As Christian teachers it is essential that we are able to counter the anti-creationist position... It must be our duty as Christian teachers to counter these false doctrines with well-founded insights."

In another talk, Paul Yeulett, senior assessment co-ordinator and maths teacher, says that evolutionists have "a faith which is blind and vain by comparison with the faith of the Christian... A Christian teacher of biology will not (or should not) regard the theory of evolution as axiomatic, but will oppose it while teaching it alongside creation."

The star speaker at today's conference at Emmanuel is Ken Ham, president of the Answers in Genesis international ministry, whose lectures include Evolution: The Anti-God Religion of Death.

Mr McQuoid said the school had hired itself to Answers in Genesis as a venue; the conference was not a school event.

Sir Peter, who was knighted last year, left school at 16 with one O-level, but transformed his father's business from a single outlet to a network of 80 dealerships around the country. But he chooses to draw an annual salary of £120,000 and distribute the entire annual dividend from his private shareholding to educational and children's causes via the Vardy Foundation. He said: "All we are saying is that it's up to children to make their own minds up. I haven't had any complaints... The parents are happy, the students and teachers are happy; we have them standing in queues waiting to get in."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "What schools need to do is teach the national curriculum in an impartial way. Personal doctrines should not override anything that should be taught in the curriculum."

A spokesman for Middlesbrough council said: "On the evidence we have, the situation [at Emmanuel] is that evolution is taught there and children are made aware - as we anticipate them being [in Middlesbrough] - of alternative theories

Evolution requires an essentially infinite number of zero-probability events, in which a more complex life form arises from a less complex, and in which new organs, new life plans, and all of the systems integration which the new organs require with OLD organs either arise overnight (a miracle), or develop during a multi-thousand-generational process during which the creature involved is rendered disfunctional for at least a thousand such generations BY the evolutional process itself, and survives during that time on food stamps, AFDC, and other such programs. You'd not think such a belief system could possibly be made more stupid than that, but in actual fact the doctrine calls for natural selection, which the fossil record clearly shows to be a gaurantor of statis rather than change, to be the agency of all all the changes involved.

Consider the "proto-bird" (TM), a favorite amongst evolutionists.

This poor little creature is supposed to have somehow survived a thousand generation process during which it had neither functional arms, nor functional wings, during which it had enough flight feathers to look weird and be laughed at, but not enough to fly, a light enough bone structure to be kicked around on beaches, but not light enough to fly, and was generally an outcast, pariah, ugly duckling, and effortlessly free meal for every predator which ever saw it for 1000+ generations before it ever succeeded and flew.

An idea of how hard it would truly be for "proto-bird" (TM) to make it to flying-bird status can be gotten from the case of the escaped chicken.

Consider that man raises chickens in gigantic abundance, and that on many farms, these are not even caged. Consider the numbers of such chickens which must have escaped in all of recorded history; look in the sky overhead: where are all of their wild-living descendants??

Why are there no wild chickens in the skies above us???

They've got wings, tails, and flight feathers, and the whold nine yards. In their domestic state, they can fly albeit badly; they are entirely similar to what you might expect of an evolutionist's proto-bird, in the final stage of evolving into a flight-worthy condition.

According to evolutionist dogma, at least a few of these should very quickly finish evolving back into something like a normal flying bird, once having escaped, and then the progeny of those few should very quickly fill the skies.

But the sky holds no wild chickens. In real life, against real settings, real predators, real conditions, the imperfect flight features are fatal burdons, and the bad flying capabilities do not suffice to save them.

Thus we see that "proto-bird" (TM) not only couldn't make it the entire journey which he is supposed to have, he couldn't even make it the last yard if we spotted him the thousand miles minus the yard.

Proto-bird (TM) is supposed to have evolved into birdhood via a process which lasted 10,000 generations during which, of course, he had front appendages which were not useful for running, jumping, flying, grasping prey, or anything else since they were in a process of transition while, presumably, living on welfare for 10,000 generations in the days of Alley Oop.

Evolutionists would have you believe that arms are really not all that necessary, and that having arms be disfunctional for ten thousand generations or so is really no big deal.

What about having your BRAIN be 100% disfunctional for a thousand generations or more (granted evolutionists brains are disfunctional, but that doesn't count since we assume they live off charity)?

Rick Lanier notes:

Some of the problems of Whales evolving from Land "urchins":
The cochleal bones of whales are made up of three membranes. This leads to great dexterity in the acoustic deciphering needed for low frequency navigation. The spriral formation of these 'ears' creates acoustic sensory organs much more sophisticated than any land mammal. The US Navy during the 60's - 80's conducted research using pilot whales and dolphins, for among other things, position tracking of torpedos and submarines. The findings were more astounding that seemed possible. The marine mammals could locate torpedos 5 times faster than navy divers using the most advanced acoustics the Navy had.
Why is low frequency important ? Low frequency only makes sense when used over longer distances, which take advantage of a perculiar characteristic of deep water,
Deep Sound Channels. Deep sound channels form because warm water above reflects down, cold water below reflects up. DSC's in between can carry sound great distances by use of these channels. The US Navy has been protecting your country for years by utilizing this fact, along with the triangulation effect of the SOSUS underwater 'hydrophones'. Now to the point, How could whales 'evolve' deep water frequencies while staying in shore? And the paradox, how could they survive in deep water without the echolocation mentioned. The documentary "Deaf Whale, Dead Whale" recently shown on Science Frontiers (Discovery) bring out the point of whale dependance on echolocation for its survival. In this documenatry they discuss how a whale was tracked througout the Atlantic using the SOSUS network. They were surprised to see how this particular whale was using the island of Bermuda as a navigation beacon., from great distances. The use of these frequencies by whales was the main reason that enviromental groups protested the planned use of Acoustic Termo Measurement (Using low frequency sound waves to measure temperature) in the Atlantic. The tests were cancelled.
Some would say that whales just went from shallow to deep water. Yet they have the acoustics for both. The high frequency 'clicks' used for in close sonar, and communication, and the deep water low frequency echolation used for navigation.
Remember, the sperm whale has been seen at depths up to 20,000 feet.
Whales need this echolocation for their survival, how could this have evolved from creatures not possessing the hybrids of these mechanisms, while it was in the water.
The possibility of mammals in the sea without coming from land would cause evolutions to take a powder, they need something that could possibly be an anscestor to be found on land....... Yes, that's it the Herbasaurus, er, Basilosaurus................................

I.e., during any period of evolving the mental functions which whales absolutely require for their day-to-day existence, their brains would be disfunctional.

Likewise, any rational person watching insects fly can understand that on the day that the first bat ever snagged the first insect using echo-location, the echo-location had to work perfectly, and that such a capability could not possibly evolve.

Consider what life must have been like for the evolutionists' "proto-bat", attempting to develop echo-location over a multi-thousand- generation span:

This creature's life would almost certainly have been one continual, bad hallucination, from dawn to dusk and then back again, from the day he was born to the day he died.

Picture being stoned out of your mind on every hallucinatory drug at the same time, and then trying to watch and make sense of the very worst television broadcast you've ever seen, you know, the sort of thing you see for about 20 seconds before the "Technical Difficulties" screen comes up. That's all that that poor little evolving bat ever knew of our world.

And yet, evolutionists would have you believe that this fatally afflicted little creature prospered and thrived and survived for thousands of generations, in such a state.

Whenever you see or hear somebody expounding upon evolution, or trying to indoctrinate kids in the "fact" of evolution, think about this poor little dinged-out bat flying around in circles, flying into walls, trees, the ground, his mind trashed either because he met up with Raoul Jose-Domingo Tokovar and they toked down a box of Columbian spliffs, or (effectively the same thing) because he was trying to EVOLVE echo-location, and was only 80% there...

Let's call this little bat Splifford. Some years ago, somebody rescued a little bear from a forest fire, and that little bear became a metaphor for the national effort to preserve our forests from careless acts and the tragedy of large-scale fires.

Similarly, Splifford should become a symbol of the national will to save American culture, American society, and the youth of America from the mind-destroying evil of corrupt ideological doctrines.

 
 
 
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Splifford the bat says: Always remember:

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse, and corrupt ideological
doctrines.

Ever wonder why the evos like to talk about the little freak-show items like the archaeopteryx and platypus the way they do? Basically, it's because so little is known about those things that they can talk about them all day long and not look or sound anywhere near as STUPID as they do when talking about ordinary things like flying birds (which I have explained) or modern man. In the case of modern man, there is not only zero evidence of our evolving, there is provably nothing on the planet we could have conceivably evolved FROM. Neanderthal DNA has been shown to be "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee" thus eliminating him altogether as a plausible ancestor of ours, and all other hominids are much further removed from us THAN the neanderthal. You'd need some other hominid closer to us both in time and morphology, and the works and remains of such a thing would be all over the place if he had ever existed; they aren't, and he didn't.

Logically, you only have to think about it a little bit to realize how stupid it really is.

You are starting out with apes ten million years ago, in a world of fang and claw with 1000+ lb. carnivores running amok all over the place, and trying to evolve your way towards a more refined creature in modern man. Like:

HEY! Ya know, I'll betcha if I put on these lace sleeves and this powdered wig, them dire-wolves an sabertooth cats'll start to show me a little bitta RESPECT!!!"

What's wrong with that?

The problem gets worse when you try to imagine known human behavorial constants interacting with the requirements of having the extremely rare to imaginary beneficial mutation always prevail:

Let's start from about ten million years back and assume we have our ape ancestor, and two platonic ideals towards which this ape ancestor (call him "Oop") can evolve: One is a sort of a composite of Mozart, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, i.e. your archetypal dead white man, and the other platonic ideal, or evolutionary target, is going to be a sort of an "apier" ape, fuzzier, smellier, meaner, bigger Johnson, smaller brain, chews tobacco, drinks, gambles, gets into knife fights...

Further, let's be generous and assume that for every one chance mutation which is beneficial and leads towards the gentleman, you only have 1000 adverse mutations which lead towards the other guy. None of these mutations are going to be instantly fatal or anything like that at all; Darwinism posits change by insensible degree, hence all of these 1000 guys are fully functional.

The assumption which is being made is that these 1000 guys (with the bad mutation) are going to get together and decide something like:

"Hey, you know, the more I look at this thing, we're really messed-up, so what we need to do is to all get on our motorcycles and pack all our ole-ladies over to Dr. Jeckyll over there (the guy with the beneficial mutation), and try to arrange for the next generation of our kids to be in better genetic shape than we are..."

Now, it would be amazing enough if that were ever to happen once; Darwinism, however, requires that this happen EVERY GENERATION from Oop to us. What could possibly be stupider than that?

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