Is Baer Right?: Christian Authorities on Secularism Respond

The editors ofCHRISTIANITY TODAYbelieve Richard Baer’s article is of such importance that several evangelical authors who have written books on the subject of secularism were asked to respond. In addition, they asked People for the American Way (an organization formed by Norman Lear to counter the positions of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority) for an evaluation of Dr. Baer’s thesis that the religion of secularism is being taught in the public schools. An effort was made to include a response from Carl Sagan, who also teaches at Cornell University. The responses are as interesting as they are diverse.

The central point of Baer’s article is right on target. The religion of secularism is being taught in our public schools. Often this is done under the guise of science, and Sagan’s “Cosmos” is a notable example. In our report on the Arkansas creation-evolution trial (see The Creator in the Courtroom, chaps. 2 and 8 [Mott Media, 1982]), we go even further than Baer by showing how the courts have in effect established the religion of secularism in public schools. For example, the Arkansas decision (McLean v. Arkansas, 1982) disallows all views in science classes except those compatible with purely naturalistic religions, thus giving preference to these religions.

Many secularists unashamedly state their religious intentions regarding public school. The Humanist (Jan.–Feb. 1983) published a prize-winning essay by John Dunphy that declared:

I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith.… For they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach.”

Other secularists are more subtle. They teach religion under the guise of science. This is particularly true of Sagan. It is certainly refreshing to find that one of his colleagues at Cornell sees through his attempt to teach his religion of the cosmos under the guise of science.

The only serious flaw in Baer’s article is his unfortunate assertion that evolution can be taught as science but creation science cannot. Here he inadvertently supports the very naturalism he so ably opposes. Why should we allow only naturalistic causes?

First, it is methodologically unwarranted to assume all scientific events have only natural causes. This is a form of naturalism that eliminates supernatural intervention by the very choice of method.

Second, it is historically uninformed. Knowledgeable scholars (Whitehead, M. B. Foster, Gilkey) recognize that belief in a supernatural Creator was the very foundation of modern science.

Third, it is educationally unsound to allow only evolution to be taught when even many evolutionists admit supernatural creation may be true. It amounts to the incredible claim that only naturalistic explanations can be taught—even if they are wrong.

Fourth, it is scientifically unfruitful to insist on only natural causes. It is as futile as demanding that a geology class continue to study Mount Rushmore until it can find some natural process of erosion to explain the granite faces there.

Finally, it is definitely equivocal to claim creation views are not scientific. That confuses two different senses of the word “science.” It claims that creation science views are not science in the normal sense of being measurable by some observed, repeated events in nature (science of operations). Yet at the very same time it posits that evolution is science in the special sense of speculating about causes of unobserved, unrepeated events of the past (science of origins). Both evolution and creation science are science in the same sense and are subject to the same principles.

Using two different standards when dealing with origins is not uncommon. Sagan engages in a classic bit of this kind of thinking when he claims that even a single message from outer space would prove the existence of an intelligent communicator. By contrast he believes the human brain is “a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans,” containing some 20 million volumes of genetic information. Yet he insists this incredibly large store of information does not point to the existence of an intelligent Creator.

Using Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” as a springboard, Richard Baer makes a subtle leap to an unfounded conclusion: that the public schools—through the teaching of evolution—are indoctrinating students in the “religion” of “secular humanism.”

As a Baptist minister, a parent, and one who has worked to uphold our tradition of a free public education for every child and our constitutionally protected guarantee of the separation of church and state, I find Baer’s conclusion unsettling.

I agree with Baer that scientific creationism has “no legitimate place in the public school curriculum.” Scientific creationism is certainly not science and constitutes only one narrow interpretation of Scripture. Like most Americans and most public school teachers, I believe that God created the world. However, as a Baptist Christian, I find no conflict between the biblical account of Creation and the teaching of modern evolution. I see no reason the two should be considered mutually exclusive. With millions of other people of faith, I believe truth can be found in biblical revelation and arrived at by faith. But clearly, truth also can be found through the scientific method and arrived at through analysis, critical evaluation, and reason.

A look at the facts shows clearly, contrary to Baer’s assertions, that the creationists are winning the battle against evolution in the public schools: leading textbook publishers have decreased coverage of the topic of evolution by from 30 to 80 percent. One publisher, Laidlaw (a division of Doubleday), has deleted the word “evolution” from its only high school biology text.

At a recent Texas conference on evolution and textbooks, Austin science department chairperson Mary Long told the audience that many teachers today “simply eliminate evolution” from the biology curriculum “because of fear.” A number of other teachers privately explained that their attendance at the conference—if discovered by their administrators—would place their jobs in jeopardy.

These examples and scores of others make dubious Baer’s claim that evolution is being taught as “the cornerstone of a religious-philosophical world view.” In fact, because of pressures from the creationists, evolution is being taught less today than it was ten years ago.

I agree that there is no such thing as value-free education. But values—such as honesty, civic responsibility, respect for others, courage to express one’s opinions, and tolerance for the opinions of others—that the public schools teach can be imparted without trespassing into religious doctrine. To suggest that these are exclusively Judeo-Christian values or that they are infringed upon by the teaching of evolution is an attack on the concept of public education.

Baer argues that tuition credits or vouchers are needed to give parents the option of abandoning the public schools. Ours is the only country in the world that strives, consistent with the First Amendment, to offer all of its children a free quality education. We do so not to make “secular humanists” of them but responsible, intelligent citizens who are capable of functioning in an increasingly complex world. To weaken an education system that, despite its problems, has served our people well would endanger our pluralistic, democratic future.

If we are to have excellence in education and if we are to meet the security and economic challenges of the future, our children must learn how to think, to make judgments, to question, to inquire. Our children should be taught both religious faith and scientific doubt. The places for the former are the church and home. The latter should be taught in science classrooms where scientific investigation is free from religious dogma and doesn’t interfere with our children’s diverse religious faiths.

My leader, Jesus of Nazareth, said, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” We who are Christians have nothing to fear from the pursuit of truth.

Professor Baer’s analysis is essentially correct. He concentrates on views of science and cosmology commonly taught (and even imposed) in the public schools. But there are many different ways in which an official secularism manifests itself. Certain kinds of sex education are an obvious example.

Yet much of the blame lies with religious believers, the majority of whom seem to be oblivious to the problem. Many of those who are aware of it seem to believe there is nothing they can or should do about it.

The division within the churches is relevant. Liberals in all denominations actively cooperate with these secularist trends, both because they are in sympathy with many of them and because they actually welcome the weakening of traditional religious influences.

Too many religious conservatives, however, seem to have bought the secularist interpretation of the American political and educational systems. Either they do not realize how recent (post-1947) the extreme notion of “wall of separation” really is. Or they believe that the judicial revolution that has brought this about is irreversible.

Yet this revolution has occurred in large measure because of the boldness of the secularists, who do not mind being abrasive and combative, and whose tactics have won for them more than they could have realistically hoped for 35 years ago. They continue their strategy of keeping religious believers always on the defensive and of intimidating public school officials, who will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid charges of church-state conflict. (Recently the St. Louis public schools removed a series of readers from classroom use merely because they contained some Bible stories.)

By contrast, few religious believers are willing to lobby before school boards or themselves to seek office. (If they do attain office, they are likely to put their religion in their pocket for the duration!) Few are willing to risk notoriety by making a public stand. Many run for cover when their more aggressive coreligionists are pilloried in the news media as dangerous fanatics.

Religious believers do not seem to understand the rules of American pluralist democracy or, if they do understand them, are unwilling to take the personal risks necessary to reverse the secularist trend.

During the late fifties I was invited to address the senior class of an English department in a city high school. When I arrived at the school, I introduced myself to the assistant headmaster, whose office was at the entrance. He guided me to the appropriate lecture hall.

Twenty years later I was invited to the same school for the same purpose. I presented myself to the same office, but it was no longer the habitat of an educator. It was the command post of a police inspector. Corridors and classrooms were monitored by police officers who reported regularly to the inspector. The reasons for the change were obvious: violence, assault, rape, drug-induced madness.

I interpret this scene as evidence of the end times of a civilization that had once benefited from the Christian world view, one that exalted creation and people, and provided the ideals essential for an authentic education. I recognize that civilization does not create Christians. However, the community of faith created and still creates the civility that is evidence of civilization.

That demoralized school is the tragic consequence of a society’s rejection of the biblical world view that provided the intellectual dynamic of Western education. What is education but an expression of the prevailing culture?

I realize there is no such thing as Christian mathematics, physics, chemistry, or astronomy. But I also realize that there is a particular world view that enables us to perceive the cosmos as capable of scientific analysis because it has been created by God in an orderly fashion. This is not a self-evident truth. Science is not a culture in itself. It is an expression of culture. It is one way of knowing about one aspect of reality (see William Temple’s Gifford lectures, Nature, Man, and God, AMS Press, reprinted 1979).

The only point at which I have ever agreed with the mystical atheism of Eric Fromm is his statement, made in one of his later books, that the intellectuals abolished God in the eighteenth century and man in the nineteenth.

Secular education is an invention of the nineteenth century. It is based upon the unexamined belief in the negation of the former culture, the infinity of matter, and the necessity of atheism. The secondary premise is that the state is sovereign over the people with the authority to initiate and sponsor this world view. Deviations from it, in terms of Christian affirmations, are regarded as heresy, and therefore a violation of the First Amendment.

The greater tragedy is that the mainline denominations have all too readily exchanged the Christian world views for the secular one in their enthusiasm for the equality of public education.

The Christian community is obligated to encourage the best form of public education. After all, the first act of universal education was initiated by Jan Hus, and the second by John Knox.

It is refreshing to find a professional educator like Baer in a secular humanist university who aggressively addresses the number-one problem in public education today—the religious takeover of schoolrooms by those who do not represent the majority of the American people. Many of the estimated 300,000 Christians teaching in secular education today have been so brainwashed by atheistic humanism that they don’t recognize the evangelistic nature of this subtle religion. Many others have been intimidated into “neutrality,” so the only ones who use “academic freedom” are the secular humanists in the system.

Baer’s voice is particularly credible because he sees the manner in which secular humanism stalks the corridors of education. We ministers are often ridiculed by humanists (and even some Christian leaders) as unqualified to speak out on these subjects because we are not “educational authorities.” They would have us believe that if education does not begin with a humanistic base of assumptions it is not quality education.

I am perplexed by Baer’s agreement that evolution should be taught “as science,” especially after his superb analysis of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” as pure atheistic religious indoctrination.

Why would a writer who is so obviously Christian concede that evolution is “science”? That it is a “theory,” all would agree. But science is a study of fact, and there is no scientific evidence for this overemphasized theory.

Parents don’t object to atheists and other religious humanists teaching evolution as a theory in our public schools. What they do object to is the teaching of only the theory of evolution. Why cannot both theories of origins be taught in a school system paid for by the taxes of the public, 82 percent of whom believe in some form of creation?

Public education today is not representative of the American people, the parents, or the taxpayers. It represents instead the secular humanist educational bureaucrats who control it and use it as a conduit to indoctrinate the minds of youth with their religious ideology. Few institutions generate more conflict in the home between parents and teens than the public school that teaches secular humanism.

The idea that education is neutral is a myth. Secular humanists are ardently evangelistic in their efforts to teach their values in our public schools. “Neutrality” for them means that Christians must let them, in the name of academic freedom, teach their doctrines to our children. What happened to “community public schools” that were to reflect the values of the community? They disappeared when federal aid was approved. Now only what is approved by secularists in Washington is “neutral.”

Ministers, parents, and taxpayers must now face the fact that our once great American school system has been taken over by a cult whose great high priest is John Dewey. No one has stamped his philosophy on public education more in this century.

The solution is not to call piously for “religious neutrality” or “pluralism.” We must rather become militant and demand the expulsion of secular educators who have imposed their religious doctrines on our youth and violated our First Amendment rights. If we don’t, they will continue to bilk the American taxpayer, defraud our nation’s youth, and ridicule our Lord Jesus Christ. We must not let them continue to indoctrinate our children with an atheistic religion.

How can we do this? In the same way in which secular humanists stole it from us in the first place—through the ballot box. We must get out of our church pews on election day and campaign for school board members who are committed moralists, men and women who will demand academic excellence, teaching accountability, and religious freedom in our public schools.

Secular humanism cannot survive in such an environment.

Several years ago Newsweek reported that secular humanism was the new bogeyman of evangelicalism. According to the report, evangelicals were finding secular humanists behind every bush, much as a previous generation found Communists in every movement. On the other end of the spectrum there were churchmen like Martin E. Marty who denied the influence of secular humanists altogether. Marty looked on evangelical concern over secular humanism to be, as Shakespeare said, “much ado about nothing.”

Richard Baer comes up somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, he sees secular humanism as real. It does exist, it is a religion, a philosophy of life, a trend within our society and within education. On the other hand, he sees it as one of many contending viewpoints in our educational system. It is not, as the statistics show, the most prevalent common view.

The issue, then, is not whether secular humanism exists (it does), or even whether it has a right to exist (in a Western pluralistic society it has as much right to exist as any other point of view). The issue is whether the state in its attempt to be neutral is not in fact casting its vote for a secularistic and materialistic outlook on life. I agree with those who believe the state often inadvertently supports the secular view. The question for Christians is: What do we do about it?

One thing we can do is assume that we are in a state of war with the secularists. We can fight them through litigation, or we can pull away from them by starting secondary Christian schools all over this country. Both of these tactics are now being pursued. I subscribe to neither. Rather, I subscribe to two points implicit within Baer’s article.

First, let’s encourage Christians to enter education. The Christian teacher who does not rest his or her faith in science seems to me to be the best qualified to teach science objectively. Open-minded Christians are willing to explore various scientific theories as theories, recognizing that there is a dimension of uncertainty to all theories. Consequently, one of the best ways to counteract secularism in education (science teaching being a case in point) is for Christians to invade public school education. Teaching in high school as a Christian vocation is no less a calling than to enter ministry or to be an educator in a Christian school. Many are already exercising Christian servanthood in this capacity.

Second, let’s push pluralism. The history of our country is steeped in religion. For this reason I don’t believe it is possible to divorce education from religion. The story of American history and culture cannot be adequately studied apart from religion. Consequently, in a truly pluralistic setting all religions should be treated with equal respect. Both Christian and Jewish holidays and festal occasions should be recognized and studied. The school is a good setting in which an appreciation of religious backgrounds and perspectives can be studied.

In conclusion, this is a secular society, and if historic religious sensibilities are being replaced by materialistic concerns, the way to combat this shift in culture is not to insist that this country is Christian, nor to ask for equal time for a Christian view. Rather, it is to support a genuine pluralism that allows a true freedom to exist within public education. In this context the Christian teacher will be free to teach objectively and to expose students to various viewpoints. The Christian world view may be presented in an indirect and subtle way that is truly legitimate in a free and pluralistic culture. Let’s spend less time fighting and denouncing the system and more time figuring out how we can work within it in a constructive and redeeming way.

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