U.S. Air Force Academy Invites Atheists on Campus

By David A. Noebel
http://www.summit.org

          Most readers of this column know that I see six worldviews vying for the hearts and minds of the whole world.  At least six are “evangelistic” and seeking converts—Christianity, Islam, Secular Humanism, Marxist Humanism, Cosmic Humanism and Postmodernism.

            While Islam generates great interest in some parts of the world the one worldview that is giving Christians fits is Secular Humanism.  I would say that more Christians have their faith challenged or destroyed by SH than all others combined.  Ruth Tucker, professor at Calvin Seminary,  puts it like this:  “Despite all the eulogies to Secular Humanism and scientific naturalism, modernism is not dead and postmodernism has not taken its place.  Humanism is alive and well.  And this philosophical creed continues to be, I would argue, the underlying reason for walking away from [the Christian] faith.”

            Her usage of the term “philosophical creed” is only partly correct, however.  Secular Humanism is far more than a philosophy.  Paul Kurtz himself referred to it as “a philosophical, religious, and moral point of view.”

            The reason Secular Humanism has made mince meat of Christians is simply because it is a competing religious worldview, not just a philosophy or cultural phenomenon. 

            In Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton’s important book, The Soul of Science, they note that back in 1893 Thomas Huxley along with a group of scientists and scholars set out to destroy “the cultural dominance of Christianity.”  They fully understood that they were replacing the Christian worldview with the Secular Humanist worldview.  Says Pearcey and Thaxton, “They understood very well that they were replacing one religion by another for they described their goal as the establishment of the ‘church scientific.’  Huxley even referred to his scientific lectures as ‘lay sermons.’”

            From the time of Thomas Huxley (his nickname was “Darwin’s Bulldog”) to the present his lay sermons have been preached in our halls of academia and funded by the taxpayers of America.  As far as I can tell there is no significant difference between Humanist Sermons and the curriculum of the public schools.

            What brought this whole issue to the fore was Ann Coulter’s great book Godless:  The Church of Liberalism and the Free Thinkers of Colorado.

            Coulter leads off her book with, “Liberals [her name for Secular Humanists] love to boast that they are not ‘religious,’ which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion.  Of course liberalism is a religion.  It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe.  In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as ‘religion.’” 

            The Free Thinkers of Colorado have petitioned the U. S. Air Force Academy to allow them to present their Secular Humanist worldview in the Academy’s “extra-curricular ‘faith’ programs” called “Special Programs in Religious Education” or the Spires program.  The Air Force Academy, as of September 2006, has agreed to allow the Free Thinkers to participate in their “faith” programs!

            According to the local press accounts the Free Thinkers released the following statement:  “The United States Air Force Academy is to be congratulated for recognizing the need to expand mentoring services to cadets by including the secular as well as the religious, Jeff Lucas, a Free Thinker volunteer said.”  (The Colorado Springs Gazette, Sept. 4, 2006, p. M4)

            What Mr. Lucas fails to mention is his humanistic worldview is as religious as Christianity.  Didn’t he publicly join the Academy’s “Religious Education” portion of its academic offerings?  Certainly he must have had some inkling of what he was doing. And when he comes on campus one can bet that his car will be marked with his “religious” symbol—the fish with Darwin’s name inscribed with little feet signifying man’s evolution from the muck or “foamy, blue-green algae pond scum.”

            The Air Force cadets are in for an interesting semester as they “share ideas” with leading “authors and academics.”  One world-famous author missing, however, will be Antony Flew, a former Secular Humanist, who has forsaken his atheism because of “reason and science.”  He just could not convince himself that the human cell was an accident of nature.  Come to think about it that is difficult to believe.  We’ll see how The Free Thinkers of Colorado handle that hot potato in their weekly discussion meetings!

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By David Noebel Email: Noebel@Summit.org Click here for bio and archived articles