What You Need to Know!

The Weekly Topic: The Bible and Education.
This is a parents' guide to the how the Bible relates to our Children's' public school education.

Kids seem to consistently dichotomize all of their spirituality training from the rest of their “real” everyday lives. A major reason for this is that their science education convinces them that religious truth is not really objectively and physically true, but just subjectively true (“true for you, true for me”). “The real, factual, objective world is described by science. Spirituality is just a psychological game humans play to help them cope. Factual truth is evolution science. The brain secretes the mind the way the liver secretes bile. Reality is ultimately physical. Science is sufficient to study the physical.”

The church’s response to this problem has always been to just hit them harder over the head with the Bible, and to give more altar calls. We don’t seem to get it. We have got to give these kids the scientific ammunition they need to counter the faulty science they are being taught in science class. But no, that kind of technical training isn’t spiritual! It has no place in the church.

Our kids certainly won’t get the needed truth at home. Most parents know little about DNA, and don’t have a clue how to deal with evolution “science.” More often than not, Christian parent's faith is similarly compromised. They live strung-out between two worlds, honestly wanting to believe in the Bible as Truth, yet always confused by and living in fear of what they think science has proven.

Then we wonder why all of our years of spiritual labor with the young people go down the drain when they graduate from high school. The kids’ Christian experience was all too often just a compartment in their lives. It was like a novel. It was real as long as they were playing a role within the ongoing story in youth group at church, but it wasn’t integrated with the whole of their lives. It was just enjoyable fiction. “The real world is physical and evolutionary, as proven by science. The Bible, therefore, is really just a fairy tale that just makes us feel better.”

We lost the young people because we didn’t provide them with an adequate basis for rational faith. We only gave them what they considered to be a psychological, emotional, and “spiritual” experience. The myth “worked for them” while they were kids in the youth group. When they leave home and the church, they no longer need that crutch.

God never intended our spiritual faith to be divorced from our scientific understanding of the physical world. All truth is God’s truth, including scientific truth. Christian faith is the most rational, the most plausible faith on earth. This is true from a purely scientific perspective. God wants our faith to be “faith in fact,” not “faith in faith.”

As a matter of pure science, nature and life could not have come into existence through a random explosion. Genetic instructions could not have been written by random molecular motion. The mathematical laws of nature are abstract, conceptual, algorithmic, and nonphysical. The math of physics is the ultimate expression of rationality, not chaos. The self-ordering described by chaos theory cannot explain “organization.” Organization, unlike self-ordering, is always algorithmic. Algorithms are sequences of decision-node choice commitments made with intent. As any true believer in “Nature-Only” will tell you (atheists and agnostics alike), inanimate nature has no intent. A chaotic environment, therefore, could not have written the genetic algorithms upon which all life depends. Algorithms can only be written with “choice with intent” at successive decision nodes.

The fact that mathematics works so well to describe the physical reality in which we find ourselves is strong scientific evidence that reality is fundamentally rational. Do your kids understand this fact? If they don’t, their faith won’t last very long. They will come to view their spiritual experience as no more than an existential, emotional, and psychological experience of their youth. They must know that their faith is in fact. The resurrection, for example, must be viewed as documented literal historic fact, and defended in great detail apologetically.

Scientific study is one of God’s most precious gifts to his creation. Science allows us to “think God’s thoughts after Him.” Our appreciation of God, our praise, worship, and thanksgiving, are all increased through our growing scientific knowledge of the details God’s exquisite design. This is especially true in the field of molecular biology.

We will be bringing you more information as soon as possible, to help you talk to your teenages about this topic.