384 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
museums. Because the courts have turned them down every time, they resort to pressure
tactics on school boards and especially on state textbook-adoption boards. Consequently,
most high school biology textbooks are still shamefully weak on the topic of evolution, and
the majority of high school biology teachers and classes still avoid the topic or teach it in a
watered-down version so as not to offend one or two kids who have fundamentalist parents.
Many textbooks are forced to avoid the dreaded “E” word altogether and use euphemisms
like “organic change through time” just to avoid terrible fights with the school boards and
in classrooms.
Lately, the creationists have adopted even more aggressive tactics, including filling
young kids with lies about the fossil record and coaching them to talk back, sass, and disre-
spect their teachers. The foremost example of this is Ken Ham, the head of the huge Answers
in Genesis organization, with 160 employees and an annual budget of over $150 million. He
tours the country indoctrinating young children to believe that biologists, paleontologists,
and geologists are liars, that no transitional fossils exist, that dinosaurs lived with humans,
and that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Even more frightening is the way he coaches
the kids to challenge their teachers and disrupt classroom activities. His song and dance is
chillingly recorded in Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary Friends of God, about the radi-
cal evangelicals who want to take over political power in the United States. An article by
Stephanie Simon in the Los Angeles Times on February 27, 2006, describes it this way:
Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their
faces rapt. With puppets and cartoons, he was showing them how to reject geology,
paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.
If a teacher mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled
Earth, Ham said, “You put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’
Can you remember that?”
The children roared their assent.
“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told
them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his
book about the history of the world.’ ”
He waved his Bible in the air.
“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked. “God!” the boys and
girls shouted.
“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”
“God!”
“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?” The children answered
with a thundering: “God!”
A former high school biology teacher, Ham travels the U.S. training kids as young
as 5 to challenge scientific orthodoxy. He doesn’t engage in the political and legal
fights that have erupted over the teaching of evolution. His strategy is more subtle:
He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to
defend their views—aggressively.
He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take
on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham
does his job well, his acolytes will ask enough questions—and spout enough argu-
ments—to shake the evolution theory of Charles Darwin.