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December 4, 2006
"De-emphasizing" the Evidence as a Creationist Strategy
This issue has raised its head for the second time in the last few months. Several bloggers, including yours truly, reported on it when it first appeared. But yesterday Yahoo brought up The Daily Telegraph of London report that is the same or similar to the one from August of this year,
Leaders of Kenya's Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils de-emphasized.
While this recent article is nearly identical to the one that appeared earlier, it is not as clear on what the Kenyan fundamentalists really want as was the article that appeared in Telegraph back in August. The older article is more explicit.
Leaders of the country's six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard Leakey's ground-breaking finds relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing.
They want one of the most prestigious collections of fossil evidence for human evolution kept in a back room where it will not be easily seen by the general public. What is most interesting about this is what they are not asking for. They are not asking that the evidence be displayed with their "true" interpretation instead of that of the curators. They are not asking that their interpretation be presented along side the scientific interpretation. This is not a "present the controversy" request. They are asking that the evidence be "de-emphasized," "relegated to a back room." Either of these alternatives would be bad enough. These fundamentalists, led by Bishop Bonifes Adoyo of Christ is the Answer Ministries, want the evidence to be hard to see. Perhaps they want it to go away. What are they afraid of? Is it that the average museum attendee will see this evidence, independent of how it is displayed and come to the same conclusion that the scientific community came to long before this evidence was found?
Take a look at what others have said on this subject.
There's another thing that these fundamentalists keep saying that drives me crazy.
"Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory."
Put aside the errors about it being "just one theory" or the recognition that their opinions are based on doctrine, not science, its the "we evolved from apes" that gets me. One of the companies I worked for had a fundamentalist, a very nice guy, who worked for us as a sales person on the East Coast. Once, during some downtime while on a trip to his territory, he remarked that he had heard that I believed that humans evolved from apes. I immediately demanded to know who was disseminating this grievous misrepresentation of my views. He seemed a little confused. So I told him that I didn't believe that we evolved from apes. Rather, I believed that we were apes. I still believe this and I believe it with no disrespect to our fellow apes intended.
Posted by Duane Smith at December 4, 2006 7:19 PM | Read more on Evolution |
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