In 1999, as the nation was still coming to grips with the tragedy at Columbine High School, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) took to the floor to identify what he saw as the real culprit: science classes. “Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup,” DeLay said. Young people learn modern biology, DeLay said, which in turn makes them feel insignificant, which in turn leads to violence.
This was, of course, one of the more loathsome comments made by one of Congress's more despicable people, but after yesterday’s shootings at Virginia Tech, it was only a matter of time before someone who shares DeLay’s worldview stepped up to assess yesterday’s tragedy the same way.
Enter Ken Ham, a leading creationist activist, who leads an outfit called Answers in Genesis.
“We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals — and humans — arose by natural processes. Naturalism (in essence, atheism) has become the religion of the day and has become the foundation of the education system (and Western culture as a whole). The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking. In fact, the more a culture allows the killing of the unborn, the more we will see people treating life in general as ‘cheap.’”
Ham, it’s worth noting, wrote this yesterday. He couldn’t even wait 24 hours before connecting the massacre and biology classes.
