Intellectual Schizophrenia is the title of a book by Rousas J. Rushdoony, originally published in 1961, and currently available in a reprint on Amazon.com. The book was prophetic; what Rushdoony claimed would be the outcome of the change in public education from Christian to Humanistic foundations, is our present experience.
The purpose of this essay is to point out one particular arena where this schizophrenia is most obvious: the church. As an example, I was teaching a Sunday school class for college students and we were studying the book of Genesis. As we discussed the creation story, one student asked me how old the earth is. I told him that we can’t be sure, but based on Bishop Ussher’s genealogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussher_chronology), there have been about six thousand years from the time of Adam until today, so I would conjecture, based on the Bible, that the whole universe was not much older than that.
Then he asked me, “But how old is it, really?” I asked him what he meant. He said, “They didn’t teach that in science class.” Trying to be gentle, I pointed out that he was at a state university and that he was being indoctrinated by humanists to believe that the Bible’s evidence was not real evidence because they believe it is not scientific.
So I told him, “If there is a God, and if the Bible is God’s revelation, and if God tells the truth, then the earth is really thousands (not millions or billions) of years old.” Really.
“How can that be?” he asked. “How can it not be?” I replied. “What about science?” he queried. “Science, true science, rightly understood, will never contradict the Bible, rightly understood. If there appears to be a contradiction, then we do not understand the science, or we do not understand the Bible, or both. Truth is truth, no matter where it is found, and truth will not contradict truth.”
Christians in humanist schools hold to two different truths, religious truths, which are true in the religious dimension, and scientific truths, which are true in the scientific domain. They are thus intellectually schizophrenic, trying to hold to two opposing ideas at the same time.
