Does Christianity feed off ignorance? Nicknamed "The
Great Agnostic," Robert G. Ingersoll (1833 –1899) was a lawyer, a Civil
War veteran, and politician. He had written:
·
As people become more intelligent they care less
for preachers and more for teachers.
Today, many find this stance believable. After all, our
universities are now populated by agnostics and atheists, suggesting that
education is opposed to the Christian faith.
Well, it depends upon the nature of the “education.” Today’s
Western Universities are committed to Darwinism, secular humanism, moral
relativism, naturalism, materialism, free sex, multiculturalism, Marxism and
other worldviews or religions that vehemently oppose Christianity. However,
Western education wasn’t always this way.
Alexis de Tocqueville, French statesman, historian and
social philosopher, wrote “Democracy in America” (1835). It has been described
as "the most comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the relationship
between character and society in America that has ever been written."
Tocqueville notes that the philosophers both of his day and of the 18th
century also believed that the most enlightened will become the least
religious. However, he argued that the facts did not support their glib
assessment:
·
Unfortunately, the facts are by no means in
accordance with their theory. There are certain populations in Europe whose
unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and their debasement, while in
America one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfils all
the outward duties of religion with fervor…In America I found that they
(freedom and the Christian faith) intimately united, and that they reigned in
common over the same country. (202)
Tocqueville concluded that religion and education go
together:
·
In the Eastern States the instruction and
practical education of the people have been most perfected, and religion has
been most thoroughly amalgamated with liberty. (212)
This agreement between education and Christianity should not
take us by surprise. Although secularism has been able to remove the crosses
and Bibles from public places, it has not yet been able to remove hospital
names of the likes of “St. Mary’s” or “Methodist Hospital” or “Presbyterian
Medical Center” -- a remaining testimony to the fact that Christianity and
education are married. Perhaps the only reason that our Ivy League schools such
as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, and Brown still retain their
names, is because their names do not reveal their Christian origin. All were
started as Bible schools to train pastors and testify to the integral role that
education plays in Christianity.
Ironically, today’s universities have washed their hands of
their parents and pretend that they were the sired by secularism. They
scornfully proclaim that the West progressed in technology and science because
it succeeded in shedding its religious mantle. However, historian Rodney Stark
offers a very different assessment:
·
“Rather, the West is said to have surged ahead
precisely as it overcame religious barriers…Nonsense, The success of the West,
including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and
the people who brought it about were devout Christians.” (“The Victory of
Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success,” xi)
Nevertheless, many of the new atheists proclaim that
Christianity can’t do anything right. While they charge that Christians can’t
do science, since our minds are already made up, the facts protest against this
indictment. British scientist Robert Clark sums up the evidence this way:
·
“However we may interpret the fact, scientific
development has only occurred in Christian culture. The ancients had brains as
good as ours. In all civilizations—Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, India, Rome,
Persia, China and so on—science developed to a certain point and then stopped.
It is easy to argue speculatively that, perhaps, science might have been able
to develop in the absence of Christianity, but in fact, it never did. And no
wonder. For the non-Christian world believed that there was something ethically
wrong about science. In Greece, this conviction was enshrined in the legend of
Prometheus, the fire-bearer and prototype scientist who stole fire from heaven,
thus incurring the wrath of the gods.” (“Christian Belief and Science,” quoted
by Henry F. Schaefer, 14)
Likewise, secularism likes to boast that it is the author of
equality and justice. However, the renowned secular philosopher, Jurgen
Habermas, reminded us that:
·
“Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate
foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks
of Western civilization. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source.”
The belief that Christianity feeds off ignorance is a relatively
new belief in the West. However, it is being promoted with evangelistic zeal and driven with the hammer of Marx, Lenin,
Stalin, and Mao.
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