One of my dear friends who also happens to be a brilliant theologian recently shared the following
article. In this piece the author describes the theological weakness they have encountered among the Christians with their social group. It opens with a story of a coffee shop barista, who is a professing Christian and attends a Christian university, being approached by an atheist customer who proceeds to ask several questions about how a university can possible incorporate Christianity into classes such as scientist. The barista is quickly overwhelmed and flounders. The author suggests this indicates that she was to as studied in her belief as was her questioner. Based on the details given of this third hand account I am inclined to agree.
I encourage you to read the whole article. The author then discusses how often many modern churches have stopped incorporated the rich, complicated, intellectual study in favour of emotionalism. There are many parts of it I could easily respond to, rebut and debate, but I want to focus on the opening story and an issue that the author steps around. It is utterly unacceptable that a student at Christian university was this unprepared to have her world view questioned.
Before I direct this further, I want to quickly state that it does sound like she was likely ambushed by someone looking to bully her for her beliefs. It does not appear that this young man was seeking an intensive conversation where world views could be compared and deeply understood. Now as I am reading about this, I could mistaken. However, if you are of a Christian belief and find yourself in such a situation where you are being corned by someone who is only looking to fluster you instead of engage you, I would recumbent
Tactics by Greg Koukl. This will give you several techniques to either extract yourself or to turn the conversation into something more productive.
The Christian University Classroom
In an ideal Christian learning environment, a student should be provided with the opportunity to engage in deeper learning as spirituality can be a part of the discourse. For Christian students who attend it take a chance for them to understand the their faith more deeply and to be challenged by the difficult questions involved in Christianity. For a secular student who chooses to attend a Christian school, they should leave with a nuanced understanding of a theistic worldview and philosophy. Further the subject teachers should be well versed in the issues and intersections their perspective discipline has with matters of faith.
In order to do this well, faculty must do more that what was described by the young lady in the story. It is more than praying before class. It is more that simply agreeing that almost everyone in the room is a Christian and then moving forward. Doing this means impelling assignments within the classroom that guide students through critical thought of what it means to have a Christian worldview within this field. As a someone who has taught physics within a Christian context, this means engaging the students on issues like understanding the difference between the scientific method (a tool for understanding data) and scientism (a philosophical worldview).
A well studied atheist will have asked the difficult questions and have wrestled with challenging answers. (Moral relativism, for example, has some pretty uncomfortable consequences which has been tackled intensively by several promenade atheists.) Students at Christian universities should face the questions that are being asked of them by secularists. I have found that many secularist ask excellent questions which demand thoughtful answers. In my field, these questions including the nature of miracles and other non-physical events describe in the Bible, the age of the Earth and Universe, and believing something which can be tested using the scientific method. In Biology, there is the question of evolution, in psychology, there is bio-psychological determinism, in history, there the historicity of the Bible, just to name a few other fields. The question is, are Christian universities actually addressing these issues in their classrooms?
The evidence I can offer is experiential and antecedal and I am going to focus on the STEM disciplines within these universities. Generally speaking, I have found these conversations missing from science classrooms. This is particularly tragic, as many atheists in popular culture are scientists giving scientific arguments for their belief system. Sometimes this lack of conversations comes from fear. A fear that introducing students to nuanced views of creation, evolution, and the geological timeline will result in angry students, angry parents, and angry board members. While this fear may hold some truth, today culture demands that we must move beyond such conventions. The students within these classes will exposed to these ideas eventually. It would be best to do so in an environment where than be guided through intensive material with focus on developing a critical thinker with a strong worldview. If the Christian worldview is true, then any Christian should be able to study any field in science without fear and with a critical eye. We should not fear the world, but instead we should understand the world.
