Mark Daniels Christian Blog and Commentary

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Reality vs. Religion?

The University of California recently ruled that certain high-school textbooks from Christian publishers did not meet admission standards. Six students who learned from those texts--used in several new college-prep courses at their high school, and deemed “too religious” to be accepted for college-entrance credit--decided to fight back. The students, their school, and the Association of Christian Schools International sued the university, which has been accused of discriminating against high schools that teach creationism, and other conservative viewpoints. Apparently the Christian perspective on certain historic, governmental, and scientific areas of study is simply unacceptable at UC.

 

But I say the opposite is true. The prevailing belief system that rejects the Christian perspective outright is inadequate for the education of our young people. In fact, Christians shouldn't put up with all the secular fairy tales being shoved down their throats at most American universities. You see, Christians just aren’t willing to suspend all logic and reason, to buy into the evolution myth. We aren't foolish enough to believe that there are absolute natural laws--like gravity and entropy--but there can't also be absolute moral laws, like the right to life and its irreducible complexity. Modern education would have us believe that all matter came from a single blob, maybe the size of a basketball, which exploded and spread across the cosmos. Problem is, science can't--or won't--venture a guess as to where that basketball-sized "blob" of matter came from in the first place. Heck, even Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music realized that "nothing comes from nothing--nothing ever could!"

 

No...what makes Christians--and their beliefs--"inadequate" at the university level is nothing short of snobbery...combined with a certain ignorance...which results in a form of intellectual dishonesty. Rather than concede--or even entertain--that something greater than themselves might actually exist, some scientists and educators have created an alternate theology--humanism--informed by a companion worldview: naturalism. They believe only in what they can see, or that for which they can weave a fanciful tale to explain. But turn back the clock far enough, and you run into The Problem: unobserved history. It's the even playing field on which science and religion do battle. Each man must make a choice about that which no man has seen. Science puts its faith in man's collective musings, and material evidence that is frequently found to be false, or improperly interpreted. The faithful rely upon oral histories, and sacred manuscripts that have never been proven wrong. What science never concedes is that it has never--and can never--prove religion wrong. Naturalism presupposes a dearth of the supernatural. Therefore, the humanist can only develop a competing system of faith...a religion of his own making...with man himself on the throne.

 

But science and intellect need not be at loggerheads with Christian faith. The two perspectives need not be mutually exclusive. Only the stubbornly faithless have created the artificial distinctions that built a wall between faith and reason. In truth, many have understood science for what it truly is--the process of discovering how God's creation works--and their insights have proven most valuable to all of mankind.  Louis Pasteur--the great chemist, known for making milk safer to drink--was a believer, and, a scientist!  As were Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo, Johannes Keplar, Copernicus, Linus Pauling, Enrico Fermi, and a hundred names you might not as easily recognize. Even Charles Darwin, the author of evolution himself, was an Anglican--however nominal. I am sure even Darwin himself wouldn't believe the alternate worldview his simple theory has wrought, over the course of a generation.

 

It is my simple prayer that--someday--the great conversation might resume between science and religion. I hope that thoughtful educators might--once again--encourage mind-opening debate, rather than reject that which they cannot explain, and therefore choose not to ponder or understand. The faithless have nothing to fear from the community of belief.  And truth be told, it's not Christians you’re running from in the first place. Professor Pasteur could have told you what it is that troubles you about Jesus Christ. It's the yawning need to fill that "God-shaped hole"...in your heart.