How about God having made the mechanism for which our universe constantly changes and evolves. There is truly a huge difference in authorship and content between the old and new testament. The new testament is eyewitness accounts of events the were written down within a generation of the actual events where the authors still had live eyewitnesses to confiirm the events. The old testament, mostly written by Moses, recounts events from a remote past in some cases. Interestngly enough, the Genesis story is completely unique in content and format from all other religions that have a genesis tale. It must be taken in the context of the times. The usual source of misinterpretation is our own perspective. Dr Hugh Ross, a PhD in Astronomy from Toronto examined the genesis tale and compared the basic events to what our paleogeologists have told us about earth's formation. Moses actually got the sequence of events correct. Hard to describe here, but scan through "The Genesis Question" by Ross for a better understanding of what I'm trying to relay.
Nature’s Little Scientists
On the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, an argument for teaching evolution to younger children.
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Charles Darwin was famously reluctant to publish On the Origin of Species, which he did 150 years ago this week. Fearing it would degrade people's religious convictions, he stalled on the manuscript for two decades. But he didn't shield his own children from the science he thought would harm adults. Instead, he enlisted them in his experiments. When they were babies, he scrutinized their faces like an anthropologist for his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; later, he assigned them to "sprinkle bumblebees with flour and chase after the bugs" for a study of cross-pollination, harnessing the children's curiosity as a means of teaching them about nature while also discovering some things about it himself.
What Darwin knew about kids should be obvious to anyone who has one: They make good amateur scientists. "At age 3, 4, 5, 6, all they ask is, 'What's that and where did it come from?' " says Colin Purrington, an evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore College and a father of two. So why, like Darwin the theorist, holding back his book—and unlike Darwin the dad, letting his kids loose in the lab that is the world—are so many parents and teachers loath to give kids straight, scientific answers about natural selection?
"What's that?" It's a bird. "And where did it come from?" The correct, and interesting, answer is "from a dinosaur that was well-adapted to changing conditions millions of years ago." But in a lot of schools, kids are just as likely to hear "from the sky." "I think a lot of people believe that if we can get evolution taught well in high school, we should just be happy with that, because teaching it in middle school will bring angry parents out of the woodwork," says Purrington. "As for elementary school, that's a line almost no one wants to cross."
Even parents and teachers who have no religious objection to evolution often balk at sharing the concept with young kids. Some of them say it's too complex, to explain to kids who are still learning the basics. "I think there's a perception by teachers that evolution is horribly hard to teach," says Purrington. "There's a fear that if they don't have an advanced degree in biology, they'll get something wrong."
And yet, all science is complicated. Untangling the thicket for children is what teachers are supposed to do. If anything, that's a harder task if teachers don't allow themselves to talk about the founding principle of life science, the theory that explains and underlies nearly everything about the field.
Perhaps a bigger issue is that evolution is more than just complicated. It's brutal. "It's not a nice cuddly theory," says Paul Horwitz, senior scientist at the Concord Consortium, an educational think tank. "It's a theory where an awful lot of organisms have to die for things to work." Like Darwin fretting over the delicate minds of his readers, a lot of parents worry that "survival of the fittest" is, well, unfit for young ears.
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