Should Christians Go to College?

I still remember my first day of college. I’m sure it’s a big step for everyone, but for me, having been homeschooled, it was quite a shock. Not only did I have to go to a different room for every class, I also had a different teacher for every class! For someone who only had to walk downstairs in the morning for the first 12 grades and had only one teacher, all of this was, at first, very daunting. However, I adapted quickly and soon began to enjoy college very much. I still look back on it as one of the most enjoyable, significant, and impactful phases of my life. 

There is a lot of debate over whether going to college is worthwhile or cost-effective in a general sense, and while I do have many thoughts about that, it isn’t the purpose of this post. I would like to address specifically the idea of young Christians attending college. Here and there I have known Christian parents who, having read statistics about how many young people walk away from Christianity during college, understandably fret over the thought of their own children doing so. They have heard stories (often accentuated by Conservative media) of hostile atheistic professors whose goal it is to de-convert all of their religious students and indoctrinate them into their own materialistic worldview. Combine this with other factors such as the high cost of tuition and the many options for making a decent living without a degree, and many Christian parents may conclude that they would prefer their kids avoid college entirely. 

To begin to address this topic I would like to share a little about my own experience in college, though, admittedly, each individual experience will be different and mine doesn’t suggest that others will be necessarily similar. I liked most of my professors and was fortunate that nearly all of them went out of their way to teach students not what to think, but how to think. My Ethics professor, for example, entirely avoided telling us his own opinion on each moral dilemma, prompting us to form (and adequately defend) our own viewpoint. My English Composition professor described himself as the most liberal professor in the department, and yet he never pushed those views on the class and fairly graded papers arguing from a more conservative perspective, based only on the quality of the essay. I’m sure there were some professors with a low opinion of Christianity, but if so, they were still balanced and respectful in the way that they taught. And I even had some Christian professors! 

As I said, I was very fortunate to have the experience I did, and I will readily admit that not everyone is so fortunate. I have no doubt that some professors are much more openly hostile towards Christianity and less fair in their treatment of Christian students. But at the very least my experience serves as reassurance that at least this is not a universal condition. 

Still, even in the case of a much more hostile environment, as Christians we cannot simply hide from such hostility. Often it is overlooked that no matter what, throughout our lives we will find ourselves in environments (and around people) that are hostile to our beliefs (unless we hid in a cabin in the woods for the rest of our lives). Anyone who avoids college will not succeed in avoiding hostility to Christianity. As we enter the workforce, make friends, become involved in hobbies, or travel, we will encounter harmful influences. Whether or not we go to college will not change this. The advantage of college is that in many cases it is an environment in which we are already focused on learning how to form solid viewpoints and defend them, so it is an excellent opportunity to turn this focus towards our own Christian beliefs. In fact, it was primarily in college that I developed the critical thinking and research skills that helped me become fully persuaded of the truth of Christianity. And, if handled correctly, the exposure to alternative worldviews is an indispensable opportunity for Christians to gain a better understanding of the unsaved and reach them far more effectively. 

     Ultimately, the key is to be prepared. If our kids are considering college, we should not be dissuading them from going into a potentially hostile environment, but preparing them for that environment, knowing that they will encounter such hostility at some point whether they go to college or not. In many cases, when young people walk away from God after attending college, it’s not because of the environment, but because they lacked a firm foundation for their beliefs before they ever set foot on campus. They were brought up believing what they were told about God and the Bible, but the evidence for the truth of Christianity may never have been shared with them, and perhaps they were never even made familiar with other worldviews and beliefs. Often, when they had tough questions about Christianity, they were given ineffective answers (or none at all!) and told to simply believe. In such cases it is little wonder that they then become so confused when they suddenly encounter many clashing worldviews and are ill-equipped to process them and defend their own beliefs. 

Another argument against Christians avoiding college as a rule is the fact that the result ultimately would be a lack of Christians in all of the fields that require a degree. I’m sure we would all agree that it would be a problem not to have Christian doctors, lawyers, financial professionals, professors, or other professionals. This would accomplish nothing except to further cut off people in these fields from Christian influence, and perpetuate the problem that caused some Christians to question attending college in the first place! 

So, to conclude: should Christians go to college? I believe this is not the right question at all. The decision to pursue a college degree should not be made based on the fact that we are Christians, but simply on whether the career we are aiming for would require or benefit from a degree. But we should not hide in fear. And no matter where we go and what choices we make in life, we must always expect and be prepared to encounter and engage with opposing viewpoints, and to defend our own beliefs. 

Who Created God?

When my brother and I were young and would play together, often one of us would be more “in control” of what we were doing. By this I mean that we would each control our various toys, but one of us would direct the overall storyline of whatever it was our toys were doing, while the other would, in a sense, simply be along for the ride. Generally, there would be some sort of problem to which our toys must find a solution. But only one of us knew the solution, and would direct events to move toward that solution, while the other would be in the dark and trying to solve the problem as if watching a movie or playing a video game.

I remember one such time when I was “in control” of the storyline. There was amongst our toys an imposter, an alien who appeared exactly like the toy it was impersonating. The problem was that the toys needed to discover which one was the alien. My brother cleverly came up with the idea of his toys asking each other toy questions that only the true individual would know, in order to weed out the imposter. The only problem was that this was not the solution I had in mind. So in order to preserve my desired storyline, I bent the rules by granting this alien the ability to read minds and discover the answer to any question it might be asked. Needless to say, this was frustrating to my brother. Without any fixed rules, I could change whatever I needed to in order to lead to the conclusion I wanted.

If God created the universe, who created God? This is a question asked by young children as well as highly intelligent skeptics. And similar to my story above, it may be frustrating if we simply assert that God must exist because everything else that exists must have a cause. If asked what caused or created God, we will answer by saying that God Himself is eternal and uncreated and so does not need a cause. But didn’t we just say that everything must have a cause? It’s easy to see why we appear to be bending the rules in our favor, just like in my example above, reasoning in a circle in order to support the conclusion we had decided on in the first place.

So how do we justify exempting God from the need for a creator? To get a better idea of the problem, let’s analyze the above statement in syllogistic form:

Premise 1: Everything that exists must have a cause.

Premise 2: The universe exists.

Conclusion: Therefore, the universe must have a cause.

The problem with this syllogism is the first premise. If it’s true, then God Himself must also have a cause; there could be nothing that did not have a cause. If everything had a cause, in order to avoid an infinite series or previous causes, something at some point had to have been its own cause before causing everything else (which is clearly impossible, as it would have to exist to cause itself but at the same time not yet exist in order to be caused!).

Therefore, because there are things that exist, the first premise cannot be true. It can be fixed, however, by a slight adjustment:

Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist must have a cause.

This slight change is no longer internally contradictory, and also allows for God’s exemption from the need for a cause. But we must be clear about why God can be exempt. We are not starting with the idea of God, declaring that He has no need for a cause and then working backwards to find a way to justify this belief. Rather, we can reason from the bottom up, beginning with the simple observation that there are things that do exist. In order for that to be the case, at least one of them must not have had a cause. We call this necessary cause “God.” Of course, this proves nothing more than the Prime Mover postulated by Aristotle; this line of reasoning is not sufficient to establish the existence of a God who hears our prayers, is morally perfect, loves us, or has any of the other qualities of the Christian God. But, of course, these points are beyond the intent of this argument.

At this point we are moving in the right direction, but we have not yet made a convincing case. All we have done thus far is show that logically, there must be something that has existed eternally and had no beginning or cause. Why is it necessary that this be God? Why not the universe itself? Indeed, this is what many philosophers and scientists throughout history have assumed.

But there are two problems with this idea. The first is that more recent scientific evidence points very strongly to a beginning to the universe, roughly 13.7 billion years ago, out of a single point of infinite density and energy. It is for this reason that it is primarily Atheists who have resisted the Big Bang hypothesis and attempted to show that the universe did not have a beginning after all. The second problem is more logical in nature: it is impossible for there to have been an infinite series of moments in the past. If there were, we would never have reached the present moment. The fact that we are here, now, indicates that however many moments have occured before now, the amount must be finite.

Therefore, since the universe itself could not be the entity that has existed eternally, it must be something other than (and outside of) the universe. As I said, we still have a long way to go before supporting any of the other attributes of God, but that is not the present purpose. For now, I hope I have shown that it is not “bending the rules” to suggest that God is uncaused and had no beginning. And we must strive to make this point clear whenever discussing the matter with skeptics, so that it never appears that we are arguing in circles and contradicting ourselves merely in order to conveniently support our own presuppositions.