Texas Fundamentalists Pushing Public Schools to Teach That Garden of Eden Is Science
The strategy, as it has been in the past, is to force textbook publishers to teach something that is simply untrue: That there’s significant controversy in the world of science over whether or not humans and other species evolved over millions of years or whether or not a couple of people made from mud ate an apple in a mysterious garden 6,000 years ago.
The Texas Freedom Network, a group that advocates for church-state separation in Texas, obtained notes from the state school board and found that the board members even went so far as to claim that the Garden of Eden myth is “science,” and the equivalent of the theory of evolution. One of the board members, a nutritionist at Texas A&M named Karen Beathard, explained the strategy of smuggling in religious instruction into the science classroom: “Students should have the opportunity to use their critical thinking skills to weigh the evidence between evolution and ‘creation science.’”
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