Is Separation of Church and State Important?
As a part of my YouTube ministry, I respond to various dialogue as well as questions that are posed to me. This week, I have decided to post a question that I've recently answered. Please feel free to leave your comments, thoughts and ideas that you have on the subject as well.
I will put out the disclaimer that this subject/issue is one that I'm still learning about. Given that I'm not an authority by any means on the subject matter at hand, I may stand to correction on some of my points, etc.
Here are two questions posed to me and my responses;
"Well my first question is do you think that a separation between church and state is important?"
Yes, I think Separation between Church and State is important.
Originally, this term - "Seperation of Church & State" originated in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists assuring them that the government would not interfere with the church. Over time, unfortunately, this term/phrase has been corrupted and twisted around so that a lot of people actually believe that it is a part of the Constitution. Along with this perversion of the term, a new meaning has arisen. Instead of separating the government from the church, concerns are now focused on separating the church from the schools. As a part of re-writing American Civics, a phrase that was never in the Constitution is now thought to be the legality that is in place that keeps schools from allowing religious practice, etc. In reality, the term "Separation of Church & State" was supposed to encourage religious freedom, not stifle it.
The Constitution is not equal to scripture. It is, however, not only ethical but a legal binding document that operates as the infrastructure of our Government as well as Governmental laws that our society operates asunder. The Constitution is a brilliant document and I feel that we are very fortunate and blessed to have it as the cornerstone of our government makeup.
Our Founding Fathers were not perfect but they did live through religious persecution as exercised through a monarchy. It was their intent to construct a country that would be rid of religious persecution. This means that freedom to practice religion of your choosing should be honored and upheld. The Constitution upholds this right as well as ensuring us that the Government will not coerce us into practicing a religion of the government's choosing but of our own. The Constitution gives us a government that is pro-religion, not anti-religion.
"If so wouldn't it be more important not to show any sort of religious bias by teaching an idea like creation in schools?"
I think this question contains the presupposition that creation is intrinsically linked to religion.
You could teach creation directly from the Bible. If you were to do so, there are different angles you could employ with this approach. You could teach from the presupposition that this is the inerrant word of God. By doing this, you don't question the data/text but employ methods to extract meaning from the text to get a true understanding of what the text is proclaiming. This would be a religious teaching and is not permissible as the law stands today.
You could teach Creation from the Bible but instead of going from under the presupposition that it's the inerrant word of God, it is a philosophical approach from history that some hold to today.
Yet, another way to teach creation from the Bible is to teach it as a modern-day philosophical approach and report the modern-day science that is blended in with this ideology.
Before I continue, I will take a brief pause to say, some people will insist that it is illegal to teach anything out of the Bible and that it is un-Constitutional. In reality, the Supreme Court has never ruled against teaching the Bible in schools. The Bible may be taught in a public school as a way of illustrating a historical and or literary context, a'la the "1963 US Supreme Court ruling that said schools could teach about religion in a secular way" (1). It would be completely legal for your English teacher, for example, to teach the entire book of Psalms in a public school so long as he/she is teaching it as literature.
Now do I think we should be teaching hardcore doctrine in schools? No, I don't. The schools, to be frankly honest about it, are not equipped to teach appropriate doctrine; this is the role of the church, the pastor, the theologian, the exegete, not the schools.
Now at the same time, do I think the schools should avoid mention of the Bible at all cost? No, I don't. I don't think there is a thing in the world that is wrong with saying something like, "The Bible says this..." or "The Bible says that..." or even, "Christians believe this..." or "Christians believe that...".
Another presupposition that your question has is that to teach creation is to teach bias and to teach other things, like Evolution, for example, is to teach something that is lacking in bias. The truth of the matter is that people have bias and they can find ways to implement this bias regardless of the discipline.
How are theories formed?
A scientist observes nature and from his observations, he ponders and logically concludes, that he suspects that the world operates in a certain way.
Our scientist now has to test his idea to see if it holds true.
Through the employment of the scientific method, our scientist has an experiment and a control in place and waits to see what kind of results he will get that will suggest validation or invalidation of his theory.
Now on the very basis of this illustration, there doesn't appear to be any bias built into the theory, etc. This is not, however, where the problem arises. The problem comes in the interpretation of data. We are never given a full written report that summarizes the results of our experiment. Our data will require not only an interpretation but an interpretation that is guided by our worldview.
If our data yields, GODISNOWHERE.
One person can concluded that the data says that God Is No Where.
Another person, however, can come along and say that the data says, God Is Now Here.
Our worldview intrinsically has bias built into it and to say that religion is full of bias but science lacks bias is not intellectually honest.
I haven't even talked about all of the other external factors that affect science. Just the fact that you investigate X and not Y is due to bias given that everything that you could investigate has alternatives accordingly.
Without going into all of it, there's politics and monetary matters that influences science as well.
(1) http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0127/p11s01-legn.html
I left my correspondance at this point but I suspect that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps I'll do a follow up with this piece sometime soon as a way of expanding upon the many things that I did not address here at this writing.
Please feel free to leave your comments in regards to this matter. I'd love to here what you have to say.
May it all be for His glory,
Wade C. Davis
