Helphinstine’s PowerPoint Presentations Released
“The father of one student claims that almost all of Helphinstine’s lessons were slanted towards creationism,” I wrote yesterday. “[T]hat heavy of a bias might help explain why it took the district less than two weeks to discover that Helphinstine needed to go.” Now, according to Bend Weekly News, four of his eight days were spent on the infamous PowerPoint presentations. They show, once and for all, just what it was he was up to in his classroom.
Of course, the paper’s put them online in a way which only Internet Explorer understands and renders, so I’ve had to go fire up the last version of IE produced for the Mac (that would be 5.2) in order to view these at all and see just what it was which Helphinstine spent four days teaching.
(If anyone out there in Sisters, or at the Bend Weekly News, would like to email me the actual PowerPoint presentations themselves, I’d greatly appreciate it.)
The first of these isn’t difficult to understand. It’s an unyielding barrage of history and clever juxtaposition constructed to communicate one thing: Darwin and the theory of evolution is inextricably intertwined with, and inherently inseparable from, Nazi eugenics. It draws as straight a line as possible from Darwin to Hitler to Margaret Sanger to Planned Parenthood.
If you support the theory of evolution, it’s meant to be understood, then you support programs of genetic purification the way the Nazis did. If you support Planned Parenthood, it’s meant to be understood, you’re unwittingly supporting a belief in the use of eugenics.
While it’s true, of course, that Darwin’s theories (or perversions of them) were considered by the Nazis, and it’s true that Sanger was a proponent of eugenics, neither of those facts means that the theory of evolution is wrong, or that it’s inherently a problem.
But this presentation isn’t merely pointing out these discrete historical facts. It builds them into a barrage of juxtapositions meant to communicate one thing: The theory of evolution is inherently dangerous, and can’t be anything else.
It’s in the second of the presentations that Helphinstine allegedly was teaching evolution itself. It’s first slide reads in part: “Point Out Some Stregths And Weaknesses Through Evidence”. Yes, the typographical error is present in the original.
I’m especially fond of the slide that reports the degree of genetic similarity between chimpanzees and humans, but then asks students to consider the apparently-contradictory fact that pig heart valves, not chimpanzee heart valves, are used to replace human heart vales. The implication here is that if we really were descended from lower primates, wouldn’t we be using their heart valves instead of those from pigs?
But here’s where we get to the important part. Helphinstine repeatedly claims that he wasn’t teaching creationism. Then why, one might wonder, does his presentation include the contents of Slide 11:
There is confusion on the part of evolutionists because the evidence is fragmentary, subjective, and may be considered contradictory.
Fossil data is not the basis for the belief in evolution of apes to humans. The notion that man evolved from an ape-like ancestor came first, and there is an effort to make the data support that conclusion. Evolutionists are trying to come up with a scenario of how apes evolved into man that takes into account the fossil evidence.
The first alarm should go off when you read the term “evolutionist”, which is the attempt on the part of creationists to deride evolution as just another option amongst many belief choices. But even if you don’t know that, the rest of Slide 11 makes it pretty clear.
The next several slides after Slide 11 are labelled “The Experts Speak”. In the first, Helphinstine quotes D. M. S. Watson as referring to “special creation” (evolution’s alternative) as not credible.
The next two slides are quote from Boyce Rensberger stating that scientists are motivated by “faith” in their own ideas “and a desire for acceptance” by their peers. Rensberger is a favorite target of creationists (including on the Answers in Genesis website, from which Helphinstine took the creationist article about poodles). It’s tough to tell, because the only Google hits for this passage are from creationists, but it seems pretty clear that they remove some important context from this quote.
The next two slides are a quote by Richard Lewontin criticizing “materialism” in science. It ends: “Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
A later slide tells students that the Neanderthal made sewing needles and flutes. Google for this (as any student with further interest in the presentation would have done) and you’ll find almost nothing but creationist websites.
In case, for some peculiar reason, anyone is still wondering, the point is this: Helphinstine, despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, was teaching creationism in his high school science class.