A promising alternative for science in Christian schools and home schools? — Christian educators generally have had two choices when looking for secondary-level science curricula — young-Earth creationist material or secular curriculum packages. When I was a high school science teacher, I always opted for the secular. It was much easier to integrate biblical principles into the “secular” textbook than to undo all of the really bad science (and some pretty questionable biblical interpretation) found in the YEC materials. I just stumbled across a link to Novare Science and Math. Here’s what they say about the age of the Earth:

Finally, virtually every Christian science textbook publisher is overtly committed to an agenda of rejecting mainstream scientific evidence pertaining to the age of the earth. For both Biblical and scientific reasons, we believe it is time to put this debate behind us. We find the literalistic model of an earth approximately 10,000 years old to be not only not necessitated by the soundest principles of Biblical exegesis, but to be in conflict with the “other book” of God’s revelation: the creation itself. From Psalm 19 and other passages we believe the creation reveals the glory of the Lord. Since scripture and creation both come from the same God, they cannot be in conflict. And when both are rightly understood, they won’t.

Does anyone know anything about Novare?

Icthyosaurs eat YEC arguments for breakfast — Naturalis Historia blog has had a consistent stream of great articles. For example, in When Marine Reptiles Ruled the Sea: Huge Ichthyosaur Fossil Find and the Age of Reptiles, biology professor Joel Duff outlines the serious problems young-Earth creationists have with Mesozoic marine reptiles, such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Marine reptiles had similar ecological niches as do Cenozoic cetaceans (whales and dolphins), but the two are never found together. Cetaceans have never been found in Mesozoic strata, and the large marine reptiles have never been found in Cenozoic strata. If the standard YEC attempts to explain the nature of the fossil record were valid, one would expect some mixing of these organisms to occur in the fossil record. YECs try to explain the order in which fossils occur in the geologic column with a combination of differential mobility and ecological zonation, but these processes completely fail to explain why marine reptiles are always stratigraphically lower than cetaceans, and why the two are never found together. An even greater difficulty is that it is not just individual organisms that must remain sorted during the flood, but entire ecosystems.

The problem with YEC is biblical as well as scientific — Here’s a good 30-minute presentation on why young-Earth creationism is not Biblical:

Did you know where your antipode is? — When I was a child, I was told that if I dug deep enough, I’d reach China. Actually, if I dug straight down, I’d come up in the Indian Ocean near the snow capped Kerguelen Islands (we can ignore the inconvenient problems of digging through Earth’s mantle and core). If you don’t know where your antipode is, this dual map will nail it for you: Antipode Map (AKA Tunnel Map).

Persecution of Christians continues — from CNN: Extremism fuels abuse of Christians in Mideast. The atrocities that make the news–such as the acts of Boko Haram in Nigeria–are just the tip of the world-wide iceberg of religious persecution.