When Knowledge Challenges Faith

Knowledge is dangerous to Christianity!

We do not need to accept everything proffered by faith OR science as truth – as both have many times advocated something as truth that turned out to be distinctly untrue.

Perhaps you have experienced from your pastor, congregation, or even talk radio about how the secular education system is ruining our youth. They’ve taken the pledge of allegiance out of schools because they don’t want people to remember that we are “One nation under God”! They teach crap science “theories” but ignore the biblically based theory of creationism. Blah Blah Blah inserts fear based generalized statement.

In all seriousness though, growing up in the modern evangelical church, kids who went to public schools or non-christian universities where taught to “guard their hearts” from the lies that where being taught to them by their manipulative teachers. We were encouraged to make social statements against the secular education by bringing our Bibles with us.  We were taught the only good school is a school that teaches while looking through a biblical lens.

Knowledge Hierarchy

Without exact knowing the origin of the Knowledge Hierarchy,  this structure is important to help visualize how we as humans consume information to build our worldviews. Use the visual guides with the below points to help build an understanding. Please know this hierarchy we built for the Information profession and isn’t based out of philosophy and isn’t related to epistemology.

• Data: Typically broken up into three categories, but I will focus on the two most important.
• • Facts: These are basic unrelated facts.
  • Signals: These are sensations, things that we experience with our senses. A common example given is that the sound you hear is data. The meaning of which is at a higher level.
• Information: The next step is all about linking data to create a bigger picture. Commonly information is used to answer the What question.
• • Example: The noise you hear is a car horn honking outside.
• Knowledge: Building further, knowledge seeks to link information together. It is a key step as knowledge is built by bringing information into our current framework of understanding.
• • Example: Adding the car horn honking information to the angry face the driver and someone running from a house to the car leads me to the knowledge that the driver is picking up someone and is in a hurry.
• Wisdom: This piece is your action item, what do you do with it your knowledge?

What are you afraid of?

Its no secret that most students who go to both Christian and secular universities have a reduction of Church attendance during and after University. The main issue is not the Data portion that is being taught. You can go to most Christian universities and still take a Biology class where evolution is still taught. The concern that the church had is the way in which the data was linking into information and then into knowledge. See, the Evangelical church’s hard-line literal interpretation of scripture, sometimes referred to as Bibliolatry, has caused for some historically new views of the world and the Bible. This view seeks to turn the Bible into a book of knowledge, an instruction manual, a dictionary, and sometimes even a textbook.

When kids are raised with such a worldview, and with the information, they are exposed to, something is going to have to give. Either they will:

1. Reject what they are being taught and typically will return back to the community and worldview they came from.
2. Accept what they are being taught and turn away from their faith, see the two in opposition.
3. Try to find a balance but end up just straddling the proverbial fence, which gets really uncomfortable after a long time.

This fence is where I found myself for several years. Knowing I couldn’t throw out the knowledge I had gained but also not willing to reconcile it the knowledge given to me by my faith. I ended up with two completely independent knowledge trees because I wasn’t able to reconcile them.

Something is not right here!

So how do we move into a healthy place? A place where Christian kids aren’t worried about losing their faith and can have a healthy understanding of knowledge without having to wear their rose-tinted Jesus glasses all the time?

Well I propose we as Christians stop using phrases like “I know” when we talk about God and Jesus and the Bible. Why do I say that? The things that we claim to know need to be based on data that and not just based on bumper sticker theology. If our leaders took the time to distinguish between faith and knowledge, our kids wouldn’t have a fence to sit on.