A Short History of Nearly Everything vs The Bible

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A thought popped into my head today. Wouldn't kids and society as a whole be better served if their parents gave them a copy of BIll Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything", rather than The Bible. Now I am not pretending to suggest that this would steer kids away from religion, or for that matter, the Bible. At least it would give them a broad base on which to understand the natural world and how we have come to know what we know about it. Reading Bryson might at least save them from the clutches of religious pseudo science.

Several times in the past few months I have asked creationists/religious literalists on this forum to avail themselves of a little scientific historical knowledge, more precisely I have asked them to investigate the discoveries and following inventions which have lead to their ability to type words on a forum such as this. By doing this I hope for them to get a greater understanding of the wonders of actual scientific discovery and an appreciation for the method which they hold in disdain. I think Bryson does a reasonable job of preparing the groundwork for such investigation.

I agree with the likes of Carl Sagan that kids learning about how science works and the people and their discoveries, is at least as important, if not more important, than them blindly applying the formulas and equations of these discoveries. In this manner maybe we can prevent a new group of kids becoming sucked into religious pseudo science nonsense due to a lack of prior knowledge of the real thing.

If someone gave a 478-page book to every person in my high school class, I would say there were about three who would actually read it ...

Well in most western high schools, that's true of the Bible also.

Well if your highly subjective opinion has any voracity to it then that is a very sad state of affairs, and something we should not simply throw our hands in the air saying "it's too hard to address". Personally I hope you are wrong. That you might judge a book by the number of pages is also a concern.

I think religion should only be taught in schools as an unconnected subject by knowledgeable people. A full religious spectrum taught I. Equal measure to all from voodoo to Greek Orthodox.(How cool would that be, voodoo week taught by a good priest bring your own rum and rooster or chicken!)

Having schools with any religious allegiance be it Christian or otherwise is an unhealthy biased education system. There is nothing you can do about childhood familial indoctrination, but politics and education need to be free of it to offer an equal point of view to those people the release back into the wild.

Note I do not say an anti religion government just one not allied with, but understanding them all due to an education system that allows it. People might start making rational decisions that affect communities and countries as a whole by thinking in human terms not "clan" terms or for fear of upsetting a small group that believe something they don't themselves.

This is one of the major problems with a few countries and even continents that could economically dominate if they ever figure out how much power they have together if united behind their wealth of resources. China seem to be well on top of the game though!

/waffle end

But getting back to Bryson.

That book could be used to determine your whole education.

Start reading young, diverge off into subjects, add guns, germs and steel by Jarod Diamond and student could use it to focus on the subjects from that point on.

Like a curriculum almanac!

I disagree that the book gives a broad base from which to understand the natural world. The book presumes that the reader already has this broad base. The book ties together many things which might not be integrated in the mind of a person who has already completed highschool courses in the sciences plus a sociology course. It does a fine job of integrating what might be disconnected subjects in the mind of a young adult (or an old adult- I liked it). But it makes no attempt whatsoever to teach those subjects. It assumes the reader has at least a highschool level familiarity with them. Any young adult (or literate teen) who is able to get anything from Bryson's book is already out of the clutches of religious pseudo science. Such a person would be well served by having the Bible too. They could compare and contrast.

Impressionable children who could go either way wouldn't be helped even slightly by Bryson's book. It teaches nothing but does integrate everything. But for that integration to work you need a foundation and that foundation does come in childhood. What helps impressionable children is giving them a solid introduction to the scientific way of thinking. Good primary school teachers do this with simple experiments and projects that allow children to work their way towards understanding the hypothesis>>>>experiment>>>>result way of acquiring knowledge. These experiments and projects are backed up with introductions to the basic concepts of the natural world. Those basic concepts must be mastered before Bryson's book can do a lick of good.

If a teacher gave a 478-page book to every person in my high school class, I would say there were about three who could actually read it -- myself, the teacher, and the librarian only.

The librarian is 50/50, might be a student volunteer.

And if the book was a bible and they could read it, they'd still go to a priest to explain everything to them, instead of learning about the world as revealed through actual experience and observation, and then putting the bible into a context unbiased by centuries of religious dogma.

478! Did they cut 100 pages out of your copies?

I think the book makes a good job of explaining basic facts. Bryson makes it very clear in the introduction that he realised he didn't know the answers to a lot of simple scientific questions, and set out to find them and write a book about them. I would maybe agree with Janissy that it doesn't teach "the scientific method" enough, but I am a bit concerned about hoisting words like "hypothesis" on people. I think most people have a basic understanding of the scientific method, even if they don't realise it and don't apply it consistently.

Rather than giving children Bryson, we should give them up to date books on the areas of science that fascinate them. When I had just learned to read, I received colourful, factual books on dinosaurs and space (and probably other things, I don't remember). These books didn't have gaping holes in their factual content, they wrote about fairly complicated scientific ideas like taxa, potential fates of the universe, and geological ages. A lot of the content was university level stuff, though it did not encourage university-level critical thinking.

So I think a better way than foisting Bryson on children would be to give them accessible "textbooks" that don't patronise them.

You guys had someone to play librarian?

When I was a younger there were about 3 hours of kids programming on TV after you got home from school, and it progressed through preschool age to teens, so there were probably only 2 shows a night that might interest you, unlike the endless repeats on chanels like nickelodeon and cartoon netwerk today. Meanwhile my mum and aunt both read things like Roald Dahl to me and my cousin, so through wanting to read things like that myself, I ended up reading before most other people at school.

Combine that with a primary school that was right opposite the town library, and books were a huge part of my early life. Kids used to be limited to 3 books on their ticket at first, but when they increased it to 12 I'd take that many out per week, and usually all from the adult section of the library.

On top of that my father had a subscription to Readers Digest, which included so many books per year at hugely discounted prices. Because of that the bookshelves at home when I was growing up were full of things like 'How it Works' and 'What to do in an Emergency' (something to read cover to cover on a rainy day).

As a result I was in the highest groups at school for spelling, and was reading books like Lord of the Rings by 7. I actually bought a used copy of The Way Things Work off Amazon a few years ago, because it's that good an introduction to scientific principles, that if I ever had kids, I'd want them to have it.


I went to a Church of England primary school (so daily hymns and prayers, and harvest festival/Easter/Christmas events for the school at the church), my family went to church fairly regularly, and I also went to Sunday school.

However blind faith never stood a chance in the face of the illumination provided by the truly comprehensive and well rounded learning I provided for myself, once I'd got the hang of reading.


I'd have to say that part of the reason that there has been a resurgense of faith, probably has something to do with the widespread levels of illiteracy in the developed world.

Thanks to the idiot box and mobile phones, large parts of the general public have reverted to a reading level not seen since before compulsory education.

And where ignorance reigns, dogma is sure to follow.

Oh yeh, always had stupid standins...

I didn't pull that number out of the air. My hardcover copy has 478 pages of text, and sixty-odd more pages of notes, bibliography, and index. It was a gift from my uncle, who also posts here.

@ Jannisy, after reading your post I revisited the book in question and to a large extent I agree with you, it does assume a lot more knowledge than I remembered, it also uses a lexicon that many adults do not possess. That being said the basic premise of my thought bubble remains intact, we need to find a way to make science and in particular science history accessible to kids. The latest meme seems to be that history teaches us nothing, for if it did we would not keep repeating the same mistakes. I feel this is ridiculous as it ignores the fact that history can be falsified or not taught at all, so that it fits a particular ideology. this is never more apparent than with state sponsored and religious falsification.

Maybe we should take a lead from the religious fraternity and have an edited "short history of nearly everything - young scientist edition" with the historical events and people scaled back and their discoveries simplified, with the overarching message being that of the method by which the discoveries where verified eg peer review, repetition, etc. The fact that I left school with an O level in Physics,yet had no idea about the scientific method, illustrates my point, admittedly that was many years ago but from what I understand the situation is still the same.