On God And Poodles In Sisters
It turns out that the previously-mentioned Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, has a blog, and he’s written about the Sisters incident. Ham says that Helphinstine told him via telephone that he “removed all references to God and the Bible” from the Answers in Genesis material which he provided to his science class students. One of these articles, Ham says, was something he’d written about poodles. So let’s take a look at that, shall we?
Presumably, this is the article in question. The article — entitled, “Did God create poodles?” — has references to God, the Bible, Genesis, the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, “biblical creationist”, “secular scientists”, “biblical perspective”, “creationists”, “the Flood”, “the Curse”, Adam, “the Fall”, sin, “six thousand years later”, “the secular world”, “Christian children’s books”, “Adam and Eve”, and “evolutionary indoctrination” scattered throughout the entirety of its roughly 1500 words.
Is it really the contention of Ham and Helphinstine that the latter struck every single one of these references — many of them repeated several times — from the article before handing them out to his students? If so, the article would have been nearly impossible to read.
It’s possible that Helphinstine might contend that he really just wanted his students to focus on the few paragraphs which outline the mutational history of dogs, but if that’s the case, why use an article which one would have to heavily redact to remove all creationist remarks?
There’s no reason to use such an article unless the real point, no matter how “subliminal” he might or might not have tried to make it, was to promote creationism in general and/or Answers in Genesis in particular.
Oddly, in his blog Ham links to a Nugget Newspaper article in which the father of one student claims that almost all of Helphinstine’s lessons were slanted towards creationism. On the face of it, I admit an initial skepticism.
But when you think about it, that heavy of a bias might help explain why it took the district less than two weeks to discover that Helphinstine needed to go.
In the words of one of the board members: “[W]hen you completely debunk evolution through your paper work that you’re handing out, I don’t think that at that point it really matters that you (Helphinstine) never said the word God in the classroom.”