Naturalism for Toddlers

                                                                                                                                                   Vol. XX, No. 3, March 2007

In every human being is a deep, ongoing search for meaning and transcendence-part of the image of God in our very nature. Even if we flee God, the religious imprint remains. Everyone worships some kind of god. Everyone believes in some kind of deity – even if that deity is an impersonal substance such as matter, energy, or nature. That's why the Bible preaches against idolatry, not atheism. Naturalism may parade as science, marshaling facts and figures, but it is a religion.

This religion is being taught everywhere in the public square today – even in the books your child reads in school or checks out of the public library. Not long ago, Nancy picked up a Berenstain Bears book for her young son. In the book, the Bear family invites the young reader to join them for a nature walk. We start out on a sunny morning, and after running into a few spider webs, we read in capital letters sprawled across a sunrise, glazed with light rays, those familiar words: Nature is "all that IS, or WAS, or EVER WILL BE!"

Sound familiar? Of course. It is Sagan's famous opening line, now framed in cute images of little bears and bugs and birds, the philosophy of naturalism peddled for toddlers. And to drive the point home, the authors have drawn a bear pointing directly at the reader, your impressionable young child, and saying, "Nature is you! Nature is me!" Human beings, too, are nothing more than parts of nature.

     Chuck Colson & Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live, (Tyndale House, 1999) p. 54