Teaching Creation in Kansas

I grew up in Kansas, on the edge of the plains outside Kansas City, where I attended public schools. Although I ended up pursuing a very different field of study, Hebrew Bible scholarship, I have fond memories of my high school science classes, especially the weird science experiments we performed. Recently, I learned to my embarrassment, Kansas has deleted the teaching of evolution—the modern scientific understanding of the origins of life—from in the public school curriculum. The Bible thumpers in Kansas have decided, in their wisdom, that if the courts won’t let you teach the Bible in science class, then you can’t teach science either.

I would like to perform another weird science experiment—a thought experiment (this was Albert Einstein’s favorite kind of science). Let us imagine that the biblical account of the origins of life was taught in a high school science class. What would such a lesson be like? Let us further imagine that the biblical account of the origins of life was not taught by a fundamentalist minister, but by a modern biblical scholar. Let’s listen in on the class: