Bad Ideas Part II “Fighting and Winning the Battle for Academic Freedom”
(Note: Today’s column was originally printed in the Fairfield Bay News on Feb. 2, 2005 and is a follow-up to last week’s column titled “Bad Ideas.” )
We send our kids to school to learn how to think so that they will be equipped to make sound choices for themselves in life. We send them to church to teach them what standards they should live by. Today, however and most unfortunately, our public schools have become indoctrination centers for telling students what to think and believe: political correctness, sex education, diversity, “tolerance,” environmentalism, and atheistic Darwinism permeate the curricula. The value system taught in our schools today is secular humanism. The things of God have been disallowed and ruled out of place.
How did all this happen? It all began several years ago on many different fronts as God-fearing people stood by as one by one the things of God, such as prayer and the Bible, were removed from our schools. And no area of total surrender in our schools exceeded that of allowing godless Darwinism to become the only version of origins and life itself. Subtly but quite deadly, the enthronement of Darwinism has worked to replace the moral standards set by God with the atheistic standards of man (humanism).
The world’s Christian community in the first half of the 20th Century lacked the will and the knowledge to argue against the seductive story of Darwinism. Under pressure from the “intellectuals,” many mainline denominations found ways to accommodate Darwinsim into their doctrines, conceding that the Bible was, after all, not truly a history book much less a science book. As a result, the Genesis account of creation was manipulated to read that God used Darwisnism as His mode of creation. The 24 hour days of Genesis became “Eons” or Ages” to accommodate the humongous amount of time required by the Theory of Evolution. Science as defined by Darwinism was now the ultimate source of truth and the Bible needed to conform to it!
Once one part of the Bible was conceded to need revision, then other parts also came under reassessment. Slowly but surely, much of Christendom abandoned the age old holding of Biblical inerrancy, giving way to liberal and self-serving interpretations. And with this monumental sea change concerning the Bible’s veracity, morality slid away from being absolute to now being relative, with all its hideous implications that we are inundated with today.
Enough already with the indictment! What’s the answer to the erosion of our society’s cultural standards? The answer is that we need to throw off the years of being brainwashed by the elite humanist scientific establishment who control our schools, universities, foundations, museums, the media, and yea, even too many of our churches. God’s truth will set us free. What a thrill it is to learn (once again) that God did create the world and all its magnificent life. How liberating it is to know and appreciate that sunsets, mountains, flowers, lions, birds, and babies are all from a Creator, a Masterful Designer. To know and appreciate that the universe is a Moral Universe, with absolute and beautiful, unchanging truths, and that life does have meaning and purpose – should cause our souls to soar in awe.
There is a mountain of objective evidence that establishes the superiority of an Intelligent Designer and Creator as being the originator of life – vesus the speculative, unproven, and demonstrably false arguments of aetheistic Darwinsinsm. You do not have to be a born-again Christian or even a generic theist to conclude that Darwinsim is bad science. All that is required is an open mind to study the objective evidence for both theories. Some helpful books in this area are: Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson; Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe; Icons of Evolution by Johnathan Wells; Intelligent Design by Willaim Dembski; I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Geisler; and Scientific Creationism by William Morris. In addition, there are several excellent web sites for furthering understanding of creationism.
The battle for academic freedom will be won by informed citizens. At some point in time, the yoke of astheistic Darwinsim and and its spawn – secular humanism – will be thrown off as more and more people become aware of the shoddy, misleading science it purports to be. The real question is: Will you be part of the critical mass that will bring this about?