Last week I wrote about A 4th grade quiz on dinosaurs that the teacher would have given me an “F” on. A Christian school in South Carolina had used an Answers in Genesis quiz entitled “Dinosaurs, Genesis and the Gospel,” and the atheist and skeptic blogs were abuzz about how goofy this quiz was in their eyes.

I posted my answers to the quiz in last week’s post, and tried to grade it as a young-Earth creationist would have graded it. My grade was an “F.”

Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, wrote about this quiz today, and posted the entire quiz (the copy that was circulating around the internet was missing a few questions).

Ken Ham’s blog — The Science Quiz the Atheists Hate — Let’s Take it Ourselves!

AiG website — Families: Let’s Use the Recent Atheist Attack to Teach More Kids the Truth!

The full quiz — 4th Grade Science Quiz

Here are my answers for #8-10 (I gave my answers to the rest of the questions on the previous post). Again, I have place a red X next to the answers a YEC teacher would mark wrong.

X  Yes — The Bible simply does not say whether or not non-human animals died before Adam sinned. If one looks at the most frequently cited passages which are given in support of “no death before Adam’s sin” position, none of them say anything whatsoever about animal death (See Gen 3, Rom 5, Rom 8, 1 Cor 15). External evidence tells us that animals have been dying for a long time, so their death is not part of the curse given in Genesis 3.

False — Humans are animals, but we are more than “just an animal.” According to Genesis, we are made of dust, that is, the same stuff as the rest of creation, and were created at roughly the same time as the rest of land animals in the Genesis outline of events. But we are special animals, in that we are created in the image of God, bearing his resemblance, rationality, and ability to have relationships. As animals we are embedded in the creation, but God has also placed us in a position of dominion over the creation (and dominion is a very different concept than domination).

1/2 X — No. Scientists sometimes get things wrong. For example, some Christian scientists twist science in order to come up with a “Biblical” interpretation about dinosaurs or ice ages, even though neither are mentioned in the Bible.

——————————————————–

Adding these three answers to my previous total makes my new grade (from a YEC perspective) 6/18 = 33%. That is a bit of an improvement, but still quite solidly an F.

A few additional thoughts:

• My answers for the questions were largely based on the Bible, not on science. I am not reading science into the Bible.
• It is amazing how Answers in Genesis pushes their speculations as absolute truth, when so much of what they say is not found in the Bible.
• It should not be surprising that the atheists and skeptics (many of them are anything but “freethinkers”) are mocking the quiz. It is also not surprising that AiG is painting this as another atheist attack against Christianity. But the YECs have, as a result of a decades-long history of bad science and Scripture stretching, given the skeptics a very easy target. As I have said numerous times, let it be the “foolishness” of the the crucified and risen Jesus that confronts the world, not our own human foolishness.
• Bad apologetics is harmful to our youth, adults, and witness to the world.
• The small Christian school in this controversy was struggling financially and has received numerous donations in the past few weeks. Despite teaching YEC sciences, many of these small Christian schools are doing a fantastic job of providing a Christian education for our youth, and so I am thankful they have received these gifts.

Grace and Peace

——————————————————–

Notes:

I have previously written briefly about Death before the fall — an old-Earth Biblical perspective.

I have also written about supposed references to dinosaurs in the book of Job.