top of page

Subscribe Form

Thanks for submitting!

Search

CREATION MYTHS

A few years ago, when I was visiting friends in Colorado, my host suggested going for a walk in the foothills of the Rockies. I readily agreed. We were accompanied by a friend of my host, a university-educated woman in her forties.


As we walked, I looked at the towering mountains around us, with their rock strata clearly visible, and said “Isn’t it extraordinary to reflect that what we are looking at took literally many millions of years to be formed?”


“Or it might have happened very quickly”, said my host’s friend, “because of pressure”.


“What do you mean ‘pressure’?”, I asked.


“The strata might have been created very quickly, by the pressure of God’s hand,” she replied.


I was stunned. I knew that there were still people alive, even in a modern society like the US, where people believe that the universe was created a few thousand years ago, but I did not expect to meet such a person, aged in their forties, with a university education, at the end of the 20th century.


But then I came across a survey of opinion conducted in the US in 2008. People were asked which of the following statements came closest to their views on the origin and development of human beings:


• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.

• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the process.

• God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.


Astonishingly, 44% of respondents in the survey chose the third option, indicating that they believed humans had been created by God in “pretty much their present form” within the last 10,000 years.


I consoled myself that New Zealanders would be much better informed.


But recently my attention was drawn to what appear to be officially approved notes for primary school teachers teaching science. After explaining the orthodox view of the “water cycle” driven by the sun – with water evaporating, rising into the air, condensing in the atmosphere’s cooler temperatures, and eventually falling as rain – the notes explain that


in a Maori world view, life began with the separation of Ranginui (sky father) and Papatuanuku (earth mother). From them emerged the various atua (gods).


Aspects of the water cycle are beautifully represented in the story of Ranginui and Papatuanuku. Rain is represented as tears while mist is explained as the sighs of Papatuanuku. The waterways are created by the tears of Ranginui and Papatuanuku….


Tanemahuta and Tangaroa are the children of Ranginui and Papatuanuku. Tanemahuta is the atua of the forest. He created the plants and animals that inhabit the forest (including humans)…


In a Maori world view, all things in the natural world (eg. streams, rivers, mountains, plants and animals) have their own mauri (life force).


I don’t know of course how many New Zealand school children will get stuck with the myth that Tanemahuta “created the plants and animals that inhabit the forest (including humans)”. Most grow out of the myth that Father Christmas travels the world on Christmas Eve distributing presents to reward good behaviour, so perhaps I shouldn’t worry too much.


But it’s depressing that we teach myths like that in a school system which in principle is supposed to be entirely secular. There would rightly be an uproar if we found teachers telling our children that the world was created by God within the last 10,000 years, even if we hoped they would grow out of that myth as they grew older.


Is it any wonder that New Zealand’s performance in international assessments of Year 9 children in Maths and Science has fallen in recent years, and is now below the mid-point of the international results in both subjects?


 
 
 

95 comentarios


tjalling.jonker
tjalling.jonker
06 jul 2021

..... on the upside, all kiwi kids will be well versed with the collected works of marx and engels to name but two prominent communists. who needs maths, adopting utopian philosophies on economics, financial management? 🤣😂

Me gusta

Al Man
Al Man
06 jul 2021

Isn't it extremely interesting how education guidance has restricted Christian education in schools, given the Judeo-Christian culture helped form about all of our culture and legal systems.


And then we get Maori religion made compulsory on it children.


Interesting to consider the double standards in play.


Yet more segregation and cancel culture underway.

Me gusta
davidwharwood176
davidwharwood176
08 jul 2021
Contestando a

In the fifties maori were taught all the whitemans ways [who came from somewhere else] Now the whitemans grand kids are learning the maori ways who also came from somewhere else..Seems about even stevens to me

Me gusta

brendan
brendan
05 jul 2021

Don


Creation stories to one side, in order to be fully human we need both faith and reason, both Athens and Jerusalem. We discovered in the 20th century that reason alone ends in the Gulags.


Solzhenitsyn said in his 1983 Templeton Address:


More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.


Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of…


Me gusta
KT
KT
07 jul 2021
Contestando a

Brendan, thank you so much for your thoughtful contribution ... I could not agree more. When we suppress the knowledge of God, we reap the consequences. This is the real story playing out in history. We will worship something, the true God or a myriad of customized counterfeits. The goal of all revolutions is ultimately to bury the knowledge of God and proposed hate speech laws have one target ultimately, to prevent Christians from expounding truths from scripture as these truths are inconvenient to the unregenerate heart. The French revolution has the same lessons, when Bibles were burnt and Christians murdered, the Goddess of reason was enthroned in notre dame and France was plunged into an orgy of mur…


Me gusta

rouppe
05 jul 2021

I believe that all of these are stories to help simple people come to grips with "unknowable" concepts.


I was brought up Catholic and heard all the stories about how God created Adam and Eve and on from there.


While I was at (ironically a Catholic) school I also heard some of the Maori fables. Hinemoa and Tutanekai. Maui. The fight between the brothers Taranaki, Ruapehu, Ngaruahoe...


I was, however, a thinking person and came to the conclusion that these were all stories. I no longer concern myself with whether or world was created or evolved. I have my life, I have my values and standards. That's all that matters. I have no need to convince others of anything.


Make…

Me gusta

zespritz
zespritz
05 jul 2021

Darwinism is a very simplistic view dreamed up by a low rate academic looking for a way to explain a bunch of circumstance that the jesuit/catholic dogma clearly failed to explain adequately. However it is reported that this lame theory was not widely known until it was picked up and propagandized to the masses by Huxley, reputedly as part of the then new marxist dogma. which embraced eugenics.

Interestingly part of Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest is a mathematically huge number of variations that are or become failures. Darwin never adequately explained what happened to these mutated and deformed mechanisms. Obviously some must have survived for some period. Local theory has it that these mutants survive to this…

Me gusta

©2021 by Bassett, Brash & Hide. Proudly created with Wix.com

bottom of page