DOES THE GROWTH OF EDUCATION MEAN THE DECLINE OF CHRISTIANITY?

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 18^th 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.