In the last issue of the St. Timothy Tidings I wrote about the fact that Christians are often called to be counter-cultural because the culture in which we live is in many ways hostile to the Christian faith. If we are counter-cultural, how are we really different?
If you listen to the propaganda of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, you would think that Christians are on the side of superstition against science and rationality. Dawkins declares that traditional religious belief is “dangerously irrational.” Maher goes so far as to produce an anti-religious documentary in which he tells viewers, “The plain fact is religion must die for man to live.”
The facts are opposite. We have long understood that giants of science like Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Mendel, and Pasteur were not only Christians, but that the view of the universe that made modern science possible was firmly rooted in their faith in an orderly Creator. The principle still holds: According to a recent study by the Gallup Organization, directed by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, it is clear that the irreligious and those from more liberal churches tend to be much more superstitious. On the other hand, it is Christians who accept the Bible as inspired and inerrant who are more resistant to belief in everything from palm readers to astrology.
Bill Maher himself is no exception, but is a fervent and irrational advocate of pseudoscience. On the air he has condemned aspirin as lethal and declared the germ theory of disease flawed. As G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown said, “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are.”
Christians are counter-cultural when they believe in the existence of truth in a culture that doesn’t, when they see the world as it is revealed to be in God’s word, and as they value their reason, fallen though it is, and subject it to God’s word.
I am indebted to Mollie Ziegler Hemingway for this information. You can read her whole article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178219865054585.html.