By Ron Carlson and Jason Carlson
The 21st century is witnessing a real cultural divide in America often defined as Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Pro-Life vs. Pro-Abortion, Traditional Marriage vs. Gay-Marriage, Individual responsibility vs. Big Government control. But these are all merely symptoms of what is at the heart of the real cultural divide in America.
Underlying the debate in America is a much deeper worldview issue that divides and determines how people think and live. A worldview is your philosophy of life; it is how you perceive reality. Everyone has a worldview. Your worldview will ultimately determine your value for life, your basis of morality, your meaning and purpose, your ultimate destiny, and even how you vote.
What is this foundational issue that lies at the core of America’s cultural divide? In philosophy, there are three great questions that everyone must answer. They are the questions of Origins, Meaning and Purpose, and Ultimate Destiny after death. Today, the basic issue dividing America is over the question of Origins. Is man an accident, evolved from impersonal “pond scum” as taught in most public schools and universities or is man the unique creation of a personal and loving Creator? How you answer this question will determine everything else in life.
The Bible says, “In the beginning God created”. This was the philosophy that brought about modern science. The founders of modern science held a Biblical worldview and believed that there was an intelligent Designer who created an intelligent, logical world that we could observe and experiment with to get logical and rational answers. They believed that a “frog turning into a prince” was a nursery fairytale.
At the end of the Nineteenth Century, a theory became popular known as Darwinian Evolution. Secular Humanists, who declared that “God was dead” or God did not exist, found in Darwin what they believed was a scientific rationale for rejecting the Biblical Creator and thus the teachings of God’s Word, the Bible. This worldview today is taught in our major universities as the philosophy of Naturalism. Naturalism dominates most schools today and says that there is no God, there is no supernatural, and that everything can be explained merely in terms of a finite three-dimensional box of time and space. Today evolutionary Humanists in our universities now teach and believe that “a frog turning into a prince” is Science!
In studying 19th and 20th Century philosophy, it is interesting that Secular Humanists never once disproved the existence of God. What they did was simply define God out of existence by creating a definition of reality (Naturalism) that was so small that God did not fit. They said, “If I cannot put God in a test tube or an algebraic formula, then God does not exist.” They never disproved God; they simply defined God out of existence by limiting themselves a priori to a finite, naturalistic, materialistic worldview. Thus, a “frog turning into a prince” became out of necessity, no longer a nursery fairytale, but logical and rational to the evolutionary Humanist.
Once you declare, as the basis of truth, that a “frog turning into a prince” is science, you are then free to throw out all logical and rational thought. Consequently, truth and morality are pushed aside into the realm of the subjective and relative, since “accidents evolved from pond scum” have no absolutes. Today this Naturalistic worldview is being reflected in our schools, courts, political ideology, and contemporary culture.
The real cultural divide in America comes down to this: is man an animal evolved from “pond scum” or is man a unique Creation of God? How you answer this question will determine all of the other questions and issues of life!