Our Country’s finest inaugural universities (known today collectively as the Ivy League) were founded to glorify God through their intellectual pursuit. God wasn’t just a religious hypothesis to the founders – He was real, and was revered in the public sphere as the Creator. Today there is hardly a university in the Country, not explicitly Christian, where God is even considered a working hypothesis let alone the Creator. Sure there is lip service paid to God in innocuous ways, but today the “priesthood” belongs to, not ministers of the Gospel, but to scientists of the secular. To these priests the foundational theories in most all academic disciplines center on “evolution” of some type.

You watch a recent national political convention and watch in amazement the idea of God influencing the public square being booed! And you remember the founding document of our Country — the Declaration of Independence — that at one time God was not only esteemed as the Creator of nature, but that He was celebrated for creating us in His image. That it was God who gave us unalienable rights to pursue life, liberty and happiness. Nature wasn’t the source of all things — it was God the Creator of nature who did.

You look at your kid’s textbooks and see the pale of the evolutionary imprint on all their subjects — economics, history, government, health, environment, and sociology. And you wonder: How will our children be able to reconcile this Godless indoctrination at school with the God-filled instruction they are being taught at home and in their Sunday Schools. How did this craziness happen? How did God get eradicated?

In the early to mid-20th century Darwinian assumptions dominated politics (Marxism) and psychology (Freud). These assumptions worked their way into our public education system through secular humanists like John Dewey. Nature (with a capital N) replaced God in the educational curriculum. Academia was no longer balanced by science, theology, ethics, and aesthetics working together. Instead science became untethered and unchallenged and grew to dominate academia to become scientism. And scientism was driven by the philosophical assumption of evolution.

Science is wonderful, but scientism is a perversion. Science is not the only path of knowledge for understanding the world. When properly practiced, science leads to rational thinking and experimentation that gives clarity and repeatability in any study of the natural world. It is an evidential and logical path to pursue truth. But many closed their eyes to balancing truths from theology, ethics, and aesthetics. Instead, they set out to see the world through the lens of “science only” and this hardened into the philosophy of scientism that has set itself up as the arbiter of truth.

Until 1859 most scientists wouldn’t question God’s existence. How else was everything created? It was evident that there had to be an Intelligent Designer behind creation. It was self-evident that mankind was uniquely different from the animals. Even though God couldn’t be proven scientifically, neither could He be disproven. So whatever you wanted to believe about God, you ended up having faith in one or the other; both options were on the table and could be openly debated. To most it took more faith to believe that something could come out of nothing than to believe that there was an Intelligent Designer who created nature. Hence the Judeo-Christian worldview prevailed. But when Darwin published his Origin of the Species in 1859 he attributed “design” and the “origin of mankind” to natural forces and chance. The secular intellectual community seized upon Darwinian evolution as truth and systematically began eliminating God from intellectual consideration. If Nature could do the “miraculous” then there was no need for God. Today this is the worldview that dominates our academic institutions.

This is no conspiracy among scientists. In fact, many have religious faith. But those in charge of our elitist institutions had been looking for a way to eliminate the need for a Creator. Darwin’s theory became the avenue that made it possible. Evolution was the first scientifically defensible mechanism that could explain away God and His role in creating mankind.

And if the Creator was no longer needed, then one could pursue life without a Lawgiver and without a Judge. One can make-up their own moral code, which of course would be forever forgiving. One didn’t need to pursue any religious belief that would make them accountable to a Creator. Life indeed could be libertarian!

By some I will be branded “anti-science” by making such a statement. On the contrary, to me science is one of the wonders of the world. I love science and have advanced degrees in it. I have been involved with technology all my working life, and am as amazed as everyone else at the progress it continues to make for mankind. But science goes awry when its philosophical ramifications go beyond the empirical evidence and it becomes scientism. Then it is necessary for me as a Christian to speak out. I am not against science, but I am against scientism!

I would like to offer a better perspective — science is good and God is real. Science should not be given the authority to forbid God from giving evidence for Himself. Science should follow the pursuit of truth wherever the path may lead. But God has been eliminated from scientific consideration by the academic elitists. To them God might as well be dead. There have always been those in power who want to dismiss God as either non-existent or irrelevant. One such powerful figure was King Nebuchanezzar – King of Babylon circa 600 BC (Daniel 3-4).

The king set up a golden idol and commanded that all in his kingdom must worship it. Whoever did not would be thrown into a furnace of blazing fire. You remember the story: Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego refused to worship and were cast into the blaze. They had the faith and courage to stand up to the king: “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire.” “He will deliver us out of your hand, O king.

But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods, or worship the golden image you have set up.” God honored their great faith and saved them from the inferno. When the king saw their resolve and how God delivered them, he reversed himself. The king even prospered the three believers and declared to his nation that he now accepted the “Most High God”.

Twenty-six centuries later we are called upon to challenge the golden idol of scientism and oppose with courage its anti-God worldview. Today Christians need to be men and women of faith to stand up for God and not just go along with the scientific consensus of Evolution. Some forms of limited forms of evolution are obviously true (e.g. adaptation, micro-evolution). We readily acknowledge that. But the origination of new species (macro-evolution), such as mankind evolving from ape-like creatures, is not supported by the evidence and is not supported by the Bible. It must be challenged. Scientism must not be permitted to suppress evidence for the God of creation – our Intelligent Designer (John 1:1).

The purpose of this Study is to give you the intellectual tools to make your stand in the public square for the real King – the Creator God of the Bible. As we go through this Study I am hoping we will be able to encourage and enrich one another with our thoughts and comments. Please put them online – even if just a sentence or two so the rest of us can feed upon it. Just click on “Comments.” Even a few words can be effective when applied to our hearts and minds by the Holy Spirit.