I am currently guest-lecturing for a university course on worldviews. The main thrust of the course is to give students an understanding that their view of the world will guide and direct their actions in this life. It is also to give them an awareness of what the various worldviews teach and to test those worldviews against reality: empirical facts, experiences, practical results, coherency, etc. However, this course is at a Christian university and so the final theme is the implication of the Christian worldview. One major concern we are addressing in this course is the current compartmentalization of the Christian faith from a Christian’s daily life. So I have been thinking about whether or not Christian universities are promoting and teaching Christianity as a philosophy (based in a real relationship with God) that informs, guides, and transforms lives or as merely a set of religious doctrines based on a text. If you are a student, or parent of a student, looking for a Christian university to attend, you may want to ask this question of the department in charge of teaching Christian doctrine (School of Theology, Religious Studies). How do your professors go about teaching Christian doctrines? Will my student learn the real life implications of these doctrines of the faith? Perhaps you will not use this concern as a determining factor for where you’d like to attend, but at least you will have a heads up on how the university approaches the teaching of the Christian faith. Now having said this, I want to be clear that I highly value an education that allows for questioning the reason behind belief in God. Students should feel free to investigate the validity of the Christian faith, even at the Christian university. Yet, there should be some balance in the university between skepticism and belief. To simply ask questions about the text and doctrines without any conclusions is not a more informed or thoughtful position than asking questions and coming to conclusions based in evidence and reason. As USC professor of philosophy, Dallas Willard, says, “One can be as dumb as a cabbage and still ask ‘why’.” If you want to be responsible for your beliefs or for your skepticism, you should take the burden of proof on yourself for your position. At the university level, we should also feel some responsibility towards aiding development of critical reasoning skills that can assess worldviews and provide students with resources and workable solutions to the reality of life that they will encounter; such as the very real problem of evil. We should not just be training them to specialize in a certain ‘job.’ We should make a concerted effort in the development of reasoning citizens who are responsible for their beliefs. Even of late, we have seen mistakes in philosophical reasoning by some of the greatest minds in certain specialized fields. Stephen Hawking, a brilliant theoretical physicist and cosmologist, made the statement on the first page of his new book, The Grand Design, “Philosophy is dead…scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” Not only does he create a false dichotomy—attempting to separate the practice of science from the philosophy of science—but he has also made a self-refuting statement. He cannot use scientific methodology to discover if philosophy is dead or if scientists are the bearers of the torch of discovery. These are philosophical statements. So his statement of truth cannot stand up to its own standard of finding truth through science.* Though my example here is not meant to belittle or demean a great mind, it is meant to show that we can all make mistakes in our reasoning, which is why it is so important to develop and train reasoning abilities. In a day when many talk as though truth cannot be known (postmodernism), but live as though truth is known (pre-modernism and modernism), it is a critical time in our history to hold people accountable for beliefs and remind them that a view of the world that is viable must be livable. We are all living beings that interact with and impact one another with our worldviews. So what are we doing to help develop reasoning abilities and to stress the importance and impact of having a worldview? In this article, I have discussed the university’s responsibility, but in reality, it is each individual’s responsibility to develop the rational mind they have been given as the Imago Dei. See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. Col. 2:8MJ*Note: Hawking did not use the term, “truth,” in his statement. I believe this was purposeful. I think he specifically avoided the term in this statement so as not to imply any definition of truth such as “that which corresponds with reality.” So he chose “knowledge” instead. Knowledge doesn’t have to be true, it can also be false or partly true. I can only go this far with his statements, though, because I have yet to read the entire work.