poligion: Evolution and creationism in public schools

where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Evolution and creationism in public schools

Hi Neil

I hope you are well.

Your column about evolution and creationism in our public schools needs at least one more response. I am sure you have had many. I am sorry I couldn’t do it in 25 words or less.

I am a Christian creationist. I am not concerned (yet) about teaching Genesis in our public schools, but I do wish scientists would be a little more honest about what they are expecting people to accept by all this evolution talk. It’s like they are selling a house but not telling the prospective buyers that the house is built on a swamp.

There are three basic options for explaining life and the world as we know it.

a) God created the world. He designed it and all the human and animal life. Whether He did it quickly or over a long period of time is important theologically but not important for this discussion.

b) The world and life as we know it are the result of entirely natural circumstances. Accidents of nature. If it were not accidental, we would still be seeing new life being formed constantly today.

c) Aliens from another planet came to earth a long time ago and put everything necessary in place. For the sake of time, I will only focus on the first two options.

Evolution is commonly thought of as showing (‘proving’) that human beings came from apes. But that is not the real issue. The real issue is explaining how all this began in the first place. Everything stands or falls on that.

To say that God created the world sounds to some like mixing religion with science, so scientists insist that the world can be entirely explained by natural causes and means. This is not a scientific conclusion, but a philosophical presupposition. They used to say that positing God as a cause would stifle scientific curiosity, causing scientists to shorten their investigations by playing the God card. But now it is their standing premise, which has led them to some outlandish conclusions.

Imagine that astronauts were to travel to Mars. While exploring the planet, they find a computer on the ground. Their first thought would be: “Someone has been here.” Why? They know that a computer could not be assembled without intelligence, someone designing it and then putting it together in a precise manner. You could put all the required components next to each other for billions of years, and they would not make any progress toward making a computer.

If they found only a table and chair, they would conclude the same thing. If they found the words ‘Mary loves John’ scrawled in the ground, they would conclude that some intelligent life preceded them.

Nothing is more complicated in the world than a living thing, particularly human life. The proteins that form our DNA are joined in ways that do not occur naturally and actually constitute a language considerably more complex than ‘Mary loves John.’

But consider the time before there was life. What could have happened to start it? Let’s say it was caused by lightning striking the ground under the right atmospheric conditions. Poof! Living dirt. A miracle.

But we need some more miracles right away now. This living dirt must have some way to create energy, otherwise it will soon die. Another lightning strike would kill it, so maybe a lightning strike close by creates a system for this living dirt to metabolize other dirt for energy. This living dirt can now exist for more than a few moments.

But now for all this to have any significance, it needs another miracle. If this living dirt doesn’t reproduce itself, it will soon be gone forever. So lightning strikes close by again, and now this living dirt is given the ability to reproduce itself.

So now we have had three totally unlikely, impossible (?) miracles, and living dirt is starting to spread over the earth. Wait. Locomotion. We need another miracle for this thing to be able to move out of its location; otherwise, we will just have a mound of living dirt. So lightning has to strike again, close by, and somehow this creates the ability of locomotion in this living dirt.

Now at this point, we are faced with another miracle that makes all the previous ones seem ordinary by comparison.

We have a world filling with living dirt. This living dirt would be changing through random mutations, but now some of these need to be randomly developing complementary reproductive systems, strictly by chance, of course. And amazingly enough, when at least two of these living dirt things have finally reached completed complementary reproductive systems, these two living dirt things need to be close enough to each other to actually reproduce together.

And science wants us to believe that all this happened by itself, with no intelligence guiding it, no outside power doing anything. And they call faith blind?

To say that the world and life was created by intelligence is or rather should be a logical conclusion of science. When all natural explanations of the world and life rely on events totally contrary to experience and experimentation, then the God hypothesis is only fair.

I can’t speak for all creationists, but I believe this is what most are asking for when they challenge the idea that evolution should not be challenged. It is an absurd theory that is only put forward by people who don’t want to acknowledge God.

As long as I am here, let me go a step further. I wrote a letter to the editor at the Times and posted it on Facebook. Maybe you saw it.

It was about all the killings in Chicago. I noted that killing is a moral issue. Essentially by scientific standards, all of life is just a cosmic accident, and life really has no meaning apart from what you make of it, if you choose to make it at all. If the survival of the fittest is the basic law of life, things like loving your neighbor as a rule of life are only wishful thinking. Fine, if you choose to do it, but you have no reason to expect your neighbor to reciprocate.

If we teach our children that they are nothing more than improved apes, we shouldn’t be surprised that they regard life so lightly.

I find it interesting that the two largest countries that were (are) officially atheistic (USSR and Cbina) were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of their own citizens all for the sake of the common good, their social contract.

I know you are busy, so I will end this.

Take care. I wish you well.

Larry Craig