One of the resources I use for our AiCESE articles is a site called Old Earth Ministries. Their tagline is “It’s An Old World After All!” They’re definitely not secular: go to their site, and you’ll see it peppered with Christian apologetics and pleas for you to become a Christian. They represent a variety of old earth creationist viewpoints, and so it’s a bit of a hodgepodge. They describe themselves as mainly “Progressive Creationists,” which will make the biologists scream in frustration:
This view accepts that God created each species of plant and animal as a unique creation, without the use of evolution, and the days of creation refer to a long periods [sic] of time.
Yeah, some folks just can’t stomach evolution. I find it sad that their interpretation of faith allows them to accept most of modern science, but when it comes to evolutionary biology, they fall at the fence. Their God can apparently use allegory for lotsa stuff, but heaven forfend there weren’t a literal Adam and Eve. Unpossible!
Despite that nonsense, I vastly prefer this type of literalist to young earth creationists. At least they get some science (mostly) right. There are definite blind spots and misinterpretations caused by their determination to make Genesis a science book, but they do a great job exploding young earth creationist crap, and they do it as fervent Christians, which means they can reach an audience I can’t. I believe science should be strictly secular, and absolutely must be taught without religious claptrap in public schools. But I don’t want Christians of the more Biblical literalist bent rejecting science wholesale because they think Jesus won’t love them if they accept the actual age of the earth. I’d rather they accept as much real science as they can. And if sites like this can provide a stepping stone out of the young earth creationist swamp, I’m happy to point them out.
Of course, I have no compunctions about pointing out where they fuck up science, either.
This brings me to the OEM Online Geology Curriculum. The founder of OEM, Greg Neyman, has a geology degree. He and his wife also homeschool. Being a Christian but also a man who accepts actual geology, he wanted a curriculum for his kids that would be Christian-based but not YEC. Alas, the YECs have something of a stranglehold on Christian earth sciences textbooks. So Greg wrote his own curriculum, complete with quizzes and tests, and made it available for free online.
I’m intrigued. So we’re going to go through the thing here and see how science fares. I’m hoping he does a decent job, with a minimum of biblical bullshit, so that I can recommend this course to Christian parents who cannot abide using an icky secular science curriculum, but will accept an old earth. I’d rather students get at least some exposure to solid science, even if it’s not exactly correct. It definitely beats having young earth creationist crap like A Beka or BJU thrust upon them. And let’s face it, just about anything is better than ACE.
So, let us explore the world of old earth creationism as presented to homeschoolers, and see where we end up, shall we?
I hope you mention how (if??) they deal with Eve being a transgendered clone of Adam.
Of course once you accept that god is active and involved in the world making interventions in it then it is easy to have god create beings at the appropriate time. It is the supernatural feature that makes it work, and of course undermines the baisic idea of the process we see today having been those in the past (to the appropriate time constant, definitely more than a human lifetime)
Xianity requires an actual Adam and Eve, because without their Original Sin™, the whole rest of their theology falls apart.
Perhaps they were riding an Eohippus.