So, clearly, we approve. We’re proud of their efforts and
accomplishments, and we trust the learning will put them in a good place for
enjoyable ways to support themselves and their families in the decades to come.
But, while the degrees are good mileposts in their lives, I’m
more concerned with their virtues than their knowledge. Learning is good, when
combined with faithful following of God’s laws. It can make you better able to
serve, and to be a happier person.
So I was attuned to thinking about higher education as I
came across a few things recently.
I read an interview with Dennis Prager, about why the Ten
Commandments are still the best moral code. Since that’s an assertion I make in
the Civilization portion of the Spherical Model, I was interested in what he
said. One of his discoveries, during college years, was that if there is no
God, there is no wisdom. He said,
Without God, there are no moral truths. There are only moral
opinions. There are good atheists, there are bad religious people. Everyone who
has eyes to see and ears to hear knows that. If an atheist has similar opinions
to the Ten Commandments, I breathe a sigh of relief. But that’s irrelevant to
the question of whether there is moral truth if there is no moral God. When I
debated at Oxford, I debated an atheist professor of philosophy on this very
issue. The first thing he said was, “Dennis Prager is right, if there is no
God, ethics are subjective.”
Prager added this comparison:
It is as if a man or a woman who has been trained their whole
life in medicine sees some unbelievably obvious sign of skin cancer and just
says, “This person has this lesion on his skin” and then describes every cancer
symptom but not once mentions cancer. Nor does the oncologist note that the
patient had been a lifeguard for 15 years, standing under the sun with their
skin exposed to the sun all that time. And that’s not even as absurd as this
professor not mentioning the absence of God and religion. It shows you how deep
the rejection of God is in academia that you could see all the symptoms of
absence of God and not mention God.
Prager and the interviewer go through the Ten Commandments
in turn. When dealing with “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” he mentions
education as a substitute for God:
Take education, for example. Education is magnificent. That’s
the reason it’s a false God—because it is so wonderful and so valuable. But
education as an end in and of itself produces well-educated barbarians. I’ll
give you a very dramatic example. In 1941, there was a conference at Wannsee,
outside of Berlin. The Wannsee Conference was where the Nazis decided to
exterminate the Jews of Europe. There were 14 high-ranking Nazis there,
deciding on the genocide of the Jews. Of the 14, seven had Ph.D.’s. That should
be sobering.
Similarly, overwhelmingly the only people in the West who
supported Stalin were intellectuals. The record of intellectuals, secular
intellectuals, is a moral disaster.
That brought to mind the scripture at the top of this post.
Connect learning with counsel from God, and you’re a better servant to God. But
learn while ignoring God’s counsel, and you’re proud but miserably stuck in the savagery zone.
During the past two weeks I’ve been looking over the oral
arguments before the Supreme Court regarding marriage. It puzzles me when very
well educated people miss some basics, such as the importance of a mother and a
father to a child, the importance of family as the basic unit of civilization,
and the difference between a right to marry a person of the opposite sex according
to law and millennia of practice and the “right to marry” anyone one chooses.
Enough of that for today, but I was reminded of a
conversation I had a decade or so ago with Richard Wilkins, a constitutional
law professor who valiantly fought to defend marriage. We were discussing some of the chain of
SCOTUS decisions leading to where we are now, and I, with my mere bachelor’s
degree, said, “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” not because I couldn’t
understand, but because I could see clearly. He said (I’m paraphrasing, because
of inexact memory), “It takes years of advanced education to come to a
conclusion that wrong.”
Another story I came across this week was about a professor
at the University of Warwick, England, who makes the claim that reading bedtime
stories to your children puts unfairly disadvantages children who don’t have
parents who read to them. There’s a simple solution: encourage parents to read
to their children. But that’s not what this PhD elite suggests: the good
parents should withhold reading from their children in their own home, to even
things out—or, at the very least, those good parents ought to feel guilty about
it. And he thinks any kind of alternative to public schooling “cannot be
justified.” He even toyed with the idea that we ought to do away with families,
except that he couldn’t, unfortunately, get around the natural benefits to children
from caring parents.
I would logically conclude this man is an idiot—except for
his obvious ability to read, study, gather information. He simply lacks the
ability to draw reasonable conclusions from obvious information. He lacks
wisdom. Because, “when they are learned they think they are wise…wherefore,
their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not.”
You know the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? The hero of
the story is the young boy who told the truth—thus freeing everyone else to
admit they saw the truth too. We need more of those hero children.
As Gordon B. Hinckley said, “If you don’t stand for
something, you’ll fall for anything.” [This quote is attributed to many people,
possibly earliest to Alexander Hamilton. But I first heard it from President
Hinckley.] Stand with God, and you stand on a firm foundation that will last
through rain wind, and earthquakes. Stand firm no matter what the madding crowd
may say.
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