4 academy. In short, all academic institutions — including the author’s ivy league school — enforce a particular dogma or creed. For instance, the prevailing worldview of higher learning can best be summed up by the late Carl Sagan who, at the beginning of his PBS-broadcast of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (in 1980) pontificated, “The Cosmos [Nature] is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be.” The unquestioned assumption in the secular academy is that there is nothing beyond the physical universe of any importance to the scholar. Revealed religion can make no truth claims in academe because the sole criterion of knowledge is natural reason and empirical science. This is not to say that religion cannot be seriously discussed there, but it would only be appropriate to do so when it is the subject of one’s scholarly research (such as a sociological analysis or cultural study) — not as the controlling paradigm of a rational investigation. Admittedly, there are still those in the public university who cling to their Bible and their personal faith commitments, yet in their professional capacity publicly compartmentalize their intellect from their privately held religious beliefs. For many others, however, religion and moral values are mere social constructions, for nothing exists beyond the natural world undergoing evolutionary change. There are no objectively real ethical precepts that transcend space and time — excepting, of course, certain assumed “universal” values that left-leaning professors and students arbitrarily champion in spite of their moral relativism: “social justice,” environmentalism, human rights, nuclear disarmament, and world peace. Unaware of the logical need to reconcile their deeply held moral commitments as to how one ought to live with their companion set of scientific beliefs regarding the evolutionary origin of the universe — the transient nature of the human animal and the loss of objective and moral meaning to life — the modern scholar lives out the contradiction lying at the heart of his or her worldview: an intellectual system of thought that is neither comprehensive nor internally consistent. For the Christian, on the other hand, there is a unifying principle informing our understanding of what is the right way to live and to learn. Cedarville University transmits an objective body of truth predicated on Him who transcends all cultural communities; we do not follow the teaching of the world, glamorizing “perspectival diversity” nor encouraging our students to construct their own realities, because there is only one reality revealed to humankind in God’s revelation. Instead, we provide students with foundational principles (presuppositions) rooted in Scripture that will
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