Big picture history course begins in Australian schools, according to article in The Weekend Australian Magazine 11-12 August 2012.
Historian David Christian has developed a course named “Big History” that starts with the Big Bang and “compresses 13.7 billion years of history into a one year course”. During the course students “encounter space dust before humans, and Homo sapiens before the warring tribes of French, Germans or Australians”. The purpose of the course is “to try to explain the remarkable success, and the looming problems, of the human race”. To do this Christian “zooms in for ‘Goldilocks’ moments when conditions are just right for, say, farmers to edge out hunter gatherers or for the scientific revolution to make things awkward for the Church”.
The course is currently (2012) being tried in two schools in Australia – Narara Valley High School (north of Sydney) and Nossal High School in Melbourne, but there are plans to run it in many more schools across Australia and in other countries. David Christian developed the course because he sees the need for a “grand narrative”. He commented: “I was worried that I was missing the big picture”. He went on to say: “Why is creationism alive and well in the States? Smart students want the big picture, they go to church and someone is offering them the big picture. It is a mistake for people in the sciences and humanities not to look for what unifies modern knowledge”.
David Christian initially developed the course as a series of lectures whilst he was working at Macquarie University. Recordings of the lectures came to the notice of Bill Gates, who is now promoting and supporting the course, and has helped Christian set up “The Big History Project”, which will provide resources for schools all over the world. According to the project’s website: “Big History takes up some of the profound questions that many religions wrestle with – how the universe, Earth and humanity came to be. The course offers explanations for these questions based on scientific evidence, which we consider important for all students to understand independent of their religious views”.
According to the Weekend Australian article, “So far, the project says creationism hasn’t been an obstacle”.
Editorial Comment: This editor is old enough to remember when it was a fact that the universe was 20 billion years old, then 10 billion years, then 15 and now 13.7. Sadly historian David Christian forgets to mention such real history, and barely bothers to cover his anti-Christian agenda. Any educator worth his salt has discovered that a people’s view of themselves, or the laws they abide by, is consciously or unconsciously based on what they accept as history. If the truth stands in opposition to the powers that be, then they must get rid of true history and replace it with any myth that serves their ruling agenda. In this case the takeover is by anti-Christian Humanism disguised as science, which has been repackaged as History. Hitler did it, Stalin did it and now the NSW Education Department in league with Bill Gates et al, are doing the same.
Did you therefore notice the assumption in the statement from the Big History website that their version of history is an independent fact, and “religious views” are optional extras that can be added, or ignored. This gets to the real issue of the creation-evolution debate, i.e. what is the real history of the real world? Science cannot answer this because scientific methods can only be used to study the present. Yet when science is presented as history even by creationists, it’s a fraud.
To know what really happened in the past you need the testimony of a reliable witness who was there. Science can be consistent with that, but it can never replace it. David Christian, Bill Gates and Education Departments were not there. God was, and He has given His testimony in the Bible. Therefore, any course that claims “to explain the remarkable success, and the looming problems, of the human race” is a direct challenge to the words of the Creator God, who reveals that the looming problems of the human race can be traced to the fact we decided to turn away from God. However, the real crunch comes when God’s Word also tells us the solution to our problems will never be found in any human achievement, but only by putting our trust in the Christ who is the Creator and Saviour. Ouch! That’s what Gates, Educators, Politicians and Historians hate. They are not the final authority or solution! The Creator is! Finally, we do encourage parents to object to their children being taught lies and discriminatory anti-Christian propaganda disguised as a history/science course, and to do it with a very big bang – now!
Evidence News 5 September 2012
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