The Two-Brain Solution
The January/February 2007 issue of Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors, features an article by a college teacher named Alvin Saperstein, of Wayne State University, about how his introductory astronomy and physics courses are attracting many young-earth creationists.
These may be very good students, but they frustrate him because he cannot convince them that the universe and all it contains, including our planet, came into existence in a natural evolutionary process over billions of years, rather than in the six days of creation a few thousand years ago, as creationists calculate from the literal words of Genesis.
No problem arises when the professor explains how the universe works now. It is only when he lectures about cosmology, or evolutionary theory in geology, biology, or anthropology, and asks his students if anything he has said bothers them, that discomfort begins to appear. The class skeptics are not disruptive or rude; they express their contrary opinions only after the professor asks for their reactions to his exposition of orthodox scientific theory.
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Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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