By Gina Simpson
When we hear the phrase independent thinker, does it carry with it a positive or negative connotation? I think we’ve let the world give it a negative connotation, but I think it is something we as mothers need to be sure to instill in our children. The ability to think and reason for themselves regardless of what is popular, or what their peers, or what the media is telling them will be invaluable. I think some “independent thinking” is exactly what we need in our classrooms, colleges, and world today.
I have often wondered how people could buy into the theory of evolution as a plausible explanation for how we exist. I can remember a time in my life when I wasn’t sure that God existed. If He did, perhaps He just got the ball rolling and let evolution do the rest. Life would be meaningless without God, but my teachers introduced Charles Darwin and his theories. My textbooks showed phylogenetic trees, and museums showed pictures of how I came from an ape. I went to a few churches and heard several preachers tell me about God, but many insisted I couldn’t understand the Bible on my own, so I was left in quite a quagmire.
I went off to college and it just so happened on the second day that I met this wonderful young man who happened to be a Christian. He began to study with me and things clicked into place. I was a logical, thinking human being who could read the Bible and do what it said. I could do that, but no one had ever pointed any of this out to me before. After reading Acts chapter two I was convicted and convinced there was something I had to do to obey God’s commandments. I was baptized that Saturday and so began my Christian walk. Oh, just in case you’re wondering, I never did let that Christian go. I married him three years later.
All that back-story brings me to my point. Why don’t most people see the simplicity of the Gospel? Not that the Bible is entirely simple, but people can read and understand it all by themselves. I think one of the main reasons is that we aren’t taught by society to be independent thinkers. For the most part we go along with what we’ve always been taught. In public school we’re introduced to Darwin’s theory replete with pictures and diagrams, and God’s creation is never mentioned. College is even worse. I got my degree in chemistry, and how any chemist cannot be a creationist still boggles my mind. After sitting in hours and hours of classes and seeing how complicated it is to synthesize a single protein, after studying activation energies and increasing entropy, after memorizing amino acid after amino acid, I asked myself how can anyone believe that these things just happened? Of course I had to take a few biology classes, which further convinced me that there must be a Creator. After studying the Krebs cycle, the intricacies of a cell membrane, and seeing how complex embryonic development, how can anyone not marvel at the Creator’s handiwork?
My conclusion is that these scientists are not truly independent thinkers. They are mired in the doctrine they have been taught and have placed their faith in man rather than God. 1 Corinthians 3:19-20 says, “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their own craftiness;’ and again, ‘The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.’” In 1 Corinthians 1:20 we have pointed out to us, “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” The scientists of the world truly are fickle, ignoring their own laws and statutes just to make a false doctrine plausible in their own minds because they have already discounted the True Source as impossible despite the evidence to the contrary.
Mothers, let’s teach our children to be independent thinkers. Teach them that it is okay to ask questions and to seek out answers. Let them ask questions about the Bible while they are in our household and use that opportunity to show them the infallibility and the true cohesiveness of the Word of God. Don’t let science scare you, for the science of today has truly become smoke and mirrors to uphold humanism and discount God, but it cannot hold up to the scrutiny of a truly independent investigation.
