OCPAC Archives: The Impossible Ideas Secularity Brings to the Classroom

Published Monday, October 23, 2023

A note from

OCPAC FOUNDATION PRESIDENT

BOB LINN

The Impossible Ideas of the

Secularist Classroom

The ideas we must not teach

The skyrocketing suicide rates among America’s school-aged children is a call to nourish the mental health of our young people.

See US News & World Report

See PEW Charitable Trusts

What we teach about life’s origins determine whether or not a child has a sense of purpose. We currently teach a set of ideas (evolution) molded primarily by philosophy but sold as science.

Evolution teaches the child that his life is a fluke that began as a result of a series of meaningless accidents in a godless universe composed only of materials driven by the impersonal and mysteriously generated laws of physics and chemistry.

Evolution's religious & philosophical implications cast a shadow over the mental health of our children. This alone is sufficient for Oklahoma to terminate the practice.

For those children unaffected by the philosophical implications, there remains another profound issue. That is evolution's commitment to atheism above the science of research. That commitment has blinded its ideologues to the clear indications that we are a designed universe.

In January of this year, I called Dr. John Baumgardner, an old friend I met when we were both on the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ. He long ago earned his Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics.

I called John last January to discuss the practice by some in the church of conceding the word “science” to the ideologues of secular materialism. Even “church folks” have departed from the roots of the forefathers of science and use the term "science" in its secular sense with no allowance to its innate transcendent realities.

The pioneers of modern science from Newton to Einstein considered it common knowledge that the universe was divinely created. And their rigorous investigation and thought attested to that idea.

John drew my attention to an article he wrote for the Journal of the Evangelical Theology Society (JETS). The article added to history's attestations of previous centuries regarding our divine origins.

His article illustrates that beyond men like Newton, Kepler, and Einstein, modern science affirms the incompatibility of a secular mindset with known science.

The article fascinated me because of its successful demonstration of the inability of the material world to function without the intelligence of the non-material realm. Dr. Baumgardner illustrates that without the transcendent realm of language, the material world would be non-functional.

Language is non-material and includes speech (words), mathematics (symbols and equations), computer coding, and musical scores. It is the (non-material) meaning assigned to symbols which would otherwise be meaningless.

It also includes the DNA which makes life possible. Dr. Baumgardner speaks of language as the “message-bearing sequences of nucleotides in DNA and RNA observed at the molecular level in the biological domain.”

Even Einstein spoke of “the gulf—logically unbridgeable—which separates the world of sensory experiences from the world of concepts and propositions.” (Known as the “Einstein gulf.”)

The scientific discoveries of our Christian forefathers in the 16th and 17th centuries were discoveries in the realm of ideas. They revolutionized science by working out ideas ... the mathematical equations, the operational intelligence, which accurately describe the way the material world is directed by the latent intelligence divinely provided.

The equations which describe material behavior also include the “computer coding” (DNA) which drives cellular functions and bring life and form to our bodies. DNA language, like computer code, is non-material.

Without this biological “language,” the earth, like the remainder of the cosmos would contain no life.

As Dr. Baumgardner puts it:

Apart from this linguistic component, there would be nothing but lifeless chemistry and physics on the face of our planet.

Baumgardner states further that:

The linguistic signature we observe in the realm of biology extends to matter itself, because the very laws of nature are linguistic entities. The conclusion is close to inescapable that the whole of reality testifies to God’s existence.

This logic led Antony Flew, the renowned British philosopher and arguably the best-known atheist in the English-speaking world during the final half of the 20th century, to abandon his atheism and in 2004 to announce an earnest belief in God.

Flew stated:

I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source.

Mathematician, Dr. John Lennox, takes it a bit further. He states that neither DNA nor the cell’s protein could exist and function without the other. This multiplies the complexity of life exponentially and necessitates (as if DNA alone would not) that a higher intelligence is involved. Life is a top-down model and cannot be made to fit with the evolutionist’s “simple to complex” ideas.

Watch an hour-long interview here.

Paul Davies of Arizona State University puts the issue this way:

We need to explain the origin of both the hardware and software of life.

Ignoring this is like pointing to silicone and copper as an explanation for what is going on inside a computer.

It is not a question of matter.

It is a question of information.

Information is not material.

It is carried on in material.

The whole of the philosophy of materialism is doomed because of the discovery of the presence of information and its role in biology.

Again emphasizing that added to the complex intelligence of the DNA is the even more complex symbiotic relationship between DNA, Protein, and the cell. Dr. Lennox states:

DNA does not contain a blueprint for building the entire cell but instead contains only a part of a much larger biological algorithm that may roughly be described as the epigenetic components of an organism.

Imagine the human genome with its 30,000 genes to be a huge pipe organ with 30,000 pipes.

It takes the organist, and it

takes the composer of the music.

To think the genome completely determines the organism is to think the pipe organ plays Bach’s toccata and fugue on its own with no Bach and no organist. The pipes are his passive instruments.

The idea that life began as small, simple, and inanimate particles,

and developed into complex, functioning life is impossible.

All of this in biology confirms

that this is a word-based world.

When Moses wrote the first chapter of the book of Genesis, he stated that the cosmos was created by the Word of God. He could not have known that he had just penned the most academically advanced content of divine revelation ever to be revealed to mankind.

Now, a few thousand years later, we have discovered that language enables every bit of matter in the cosmos to function.

Confirming God's revelation to Moses, the New Testament writer, under the same divine inspiration, states:

In the beginning was the Word

All things were made through him.

~John 1:1-3

Unlike the days of our nation’s beginnings, to employ the Bible as the rudder of the nation’s classrooms, is controversial in 21st century America. For the sake of our future, this must change.

Pastors must step forward and employ

their energy & influence to address

educational standards, the most

profound needs of their

communities!

Biblical literacy was academic bedrock for the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th century.

Similarly, Scripture adorns the works of the world’s great authors. Men like Chaucer, Melville, Shakespeare, Clemens, Bunyan, Dickens, Melville, Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and many, many more.

Perhaps the greatest novel ever written, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, opens with this Biblical text from Jesus Christ on its Title Page:

“Verily, Verily, I say unto you, unless

a grain of wheat falls into

the ground and die,

it abideth alone:

But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

~John 12:24

Bereft of the nation’s historic Christian substructure, our children’s future is forfeited to the troubling waters of superstition, cultural recession and for some, suicide.

We must return to spiritual and

academic sanity in Oklahoma!

Your involvement with us is making a difference.

Join me this Thursday morning at the

Oklahoma Department of Education meeting.

God bless.

CONTENTS

STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION

Meeting this week (Thursday)

NOVEMBER MEETINGS

Senators Conduct Informal Hearing November 1

Turning Point USA November 8

Xi Van Fleet November 15

LAST WEEK AT OCPAC FOUNDATION

Dr. James Lindsay

JOIN BOB & JANE LINN at

STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

THIS THURSDAY

October 26, 2023

Meeting 9:30am

Arrival time: 8:30am

THE FOURTEEN YEAR SAGA OF

TULSA PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE NEWS

Watch here

The far left seeks to combat the work being done by Ryan Walters and the State Board of Education to remove pornography from our schools, to remove racist ideology, and to re-focus on academics.

They show up each month and were it not for the many of you who also show up, the news media would have a field day. Actually, they do anyway.

However, Ryan Walters and the board need your presence to balance the room.

Jane & I will show up at 8 AM in order to have a place in line. We encourage you all to show up by 8:30. It is for the future of our children.