Who Fits Who Into What Now?

I did some kids' homework for them today. One of my co-workers has two children, a daughter who is 11 and a son who is 12, who go to a Lutheran school. Recently I have been entertained/troubled by some of her school stories. Especially one, that is so ironic it's ridiculous, about her son being accused of plagiarizing a poem he wrote on trust. Her disapproving letter to the teacher and principal that soon followed has led to some serious tension. Then, today, she informed me that her students had to finish a major science project by writing a conclusion that explains "how God fits into their findings." I offered my political pastoral skills, telling her that I could smooth things over for her, even the plagiarism issue, if she would let me do her kids assignment, squeezing God into their project somehow. The following is what I gave her. She says she's going to turn it in.

Of course God has something to do with all of this. God is the Creator of all things right? The phenomena I have observed in my experiments would not have happened if God had not established and sustained the created order. The very elements themselves would cease to even exist if God stopped graciously granting them existence. Be they a block of wood or a grain of salt, they only are because God allows them to be. Furthermore, I believe, no, correction, I know it to be true that neither I, nor you, nor any scientist with multiple doctorate degrees, is capable of properly interpreting these observations I have noted if they do not understand everything involved not as autonomous entities, but as created realities. They (not even the afore mentioned grain of salt) do not exist in and of themselves as a part of some independent secular realm evacuated by God. They only truly exist as they participate in their Creator.

What we really have here is a question of ontology. And I believe that a faulty ontology is the groundwork for the requiring of these paragraphs as a part of this assignment. An ontology that finds its roots in Scotus and Descartes, not in God. In the human mind alone, not in the true Faith that illuminates the human mind.

This ontology has caused you to fear the very science you love. You are afraid that science, if it continues unchecked in the apostate direction it has been heading, will succeed in pushing the God you love into a sphere of primitive susperstition. And this assignment is the best you can come up with to keep the younger generations from sacrificing the Faith on the altar of science.

You probably do not know where this is coming from. You might find these accusations unfounded. Well, here is my foundation: Your underlying ontology is betrayed in your instructions. You said, "Then, in a few short paragraphs, explain how God fits into your findings," instead of saying, "Then, in a few short paragraphs, explain how your findings fit into God." Who can compress God and fit the Creator of the universe into anything? If this is my assignment, I admit defeat.

Reason and faith are not mutually exclusive. Therefore I do not buy into the system, so prevalent even within "conservative" Protestant circles, that allows science as pursued as a secular endeavor to dictate what is real and true and then attempts to corroborate faith with science's findings. This inevitably leads to fundamental shifts that morph true Christianity into a sad (though all too convincing) parody. Of course God has something to do with my science experiment. God has everything to do with it. God has everything to do with everything. My question for you, and I am sure there is a good answer somewhere, is: "What does my science project have to do with God?"

She's checking out a pretty decent charter school.