6th Grade Education

Recently I sat, captive in a room filled with elementary age kids, and heard an incredibly illogical position described as logical and a logical position as illogical. The positions were respectively, the creation of the world by the Divine and the creation of the world by the Big Bang.  The former bolstered by the first creation account in Genesis and the later mischaracterized as just a theory.  

I need to be clear. I was in the room because I believe in many of the same things as the speaker; The inerrancy of the Bible, the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the freedom from sin He offers us all if we will only believe and accept it, and the importance of teaching our kids those same truths.

I also need to be clear that as I sat in that room my blood boiled, I bit my tongue and feared for every impressionable young mind that sat in the room with me.

Faith, by definition, is at least in part, illogical. Science, by definition, is logical.

It is possible to effectively convince a group of kids that the illogical is logical and the logical is illogical. You can condition your audiences response with your tone and phrasing  "... can you believe some people think the world began with a bang?... Like a firecracker…?" and mischaracterizations "…this is what is called a theory…which is just an idea…"

However this type of indoctrination falls apart in the face of actual facts and logic.

When these same kids are in high school or college, faced with a mountain of logic and evidence in favor of scientific explanations of the natural world, their world will seem to be presenting a choice. And what choice are they more likely to make?

They may think it through like this.

When I was 10 years old my Bible teacher said I shouldn't believe in science, instead I should believe in God. But now my science professors have shown me, and I've even seen for myself, that science ideas are not just ideas, but ideas built on evidence and reason. These ideas have been held to the highest levels of scrutiny and have stood up.

 The science makes sense.

But my Bible teacher said I should be skeptical of science…

But science says even science should be skeptical of itself…and only hold as true what holds up to the best evidence.

Who should I believe? Who is in a more believable position?

If my Bible teacher was wrong about science…maybe she was wrong about God too…

This might sound extreme but I know it can happen because it happened to me. I'm fortunate to have seen this crisis of indoctrination, logic and faith all play out in my adult life. Being a late comer to faith I was fortunate to have the maturity to consider and think and be patient and pray and read and learn and grow and pray and find peace. Peace with science, peace with my faith and peace with the knowledge that we have been made by a Creator God who doesn't ask us to reject logic, but emboldens us to pursue truth, because if it is true it is from Him.

The Essentials: Let’s Do This Thing

The topic of science can invoke fear in the hearts of the young and old because it has a reputation for being hard to understand, boring or both.  Evolution can raise trepidation and dread in the hearts of many, especially some Christians because it has a reputation for being a threat to God and the Bible and is perceived to question our relationship with both. This alarm has many sources and one is a misunderstanding of what evolution is and what the theory claims to be.

Many have been tempted to say that evolution is “just a theory” and therefore something that can be easily dismissed.  At best saying evolution is “just a theory” reveals that the person making the claim simply doesn’t understand what a scientific theory is or at worst shows that the person is being sneaky to advance their point of view. 

It is easy to see why there is some confusion about the term theory.  Often when someone says they have a theory they don’t have a lot of evidence to back it up. For example we were having problems with a wireless device at work. Someone had a theory that the sensors for the automatic lights were interfering with the wireless signal.  This was a pretty good explanation so we created a little test to see if the theory was true. 

To test the theory we covered up the light sensors then tried out the wireless device.  It turned out that we experienced the same problem with the device even when the light sensors were covered.  The theory was a reasonable explanation but it was also easy to dismiss once we checked it out.  These guesses and checks go on all of the time and are actually an important part of science but not a theory in a scientific sense.  In science we would call the guess a hypothesis and the check an experiment. 

There are other words that can be understood differently depending on how they are used.  If I said, “I used to be a hockey player” you would probably know what I mean.  If I said, “Wayne Gretzky used to be a hockey player” you would also know what I mean, but you wouldn’t assume that I meant the same thing.  Wayne Gretzky has a 20 year career in the NHL with a mountain of records as evidence for what kind of hockey player he was.  I have a bag of equipment in the rafters of my garage as evidence for what kind of hockey player I was.  A scientific theory is like the Wayne Gretzky of explanations.