Education Cannot Save Us

Greater education will not make our problems go away, but it can enable us to sin with greater sophistication. Today, R.C. Sproul reminds us that sin is much more than ignorance of the facts—it is rebellion against the holy God.

It used to be thought by many people, even into the nineteenth century, which was perhaps the most optimistic age in Western civilization, that man's real problem was a lack of education. And with the radical change and the knowledge explosion that came with the industrial revolution and the breakthrough into the modern world, there were scholars upon scholars in the nineteenth century who really believed that evil could be banished from this world as man evolved to a higher plane of virtue by means of education, that all we need to do for man to end wars, to end suffering, to end the evil, is to educate them. Even Socrates believed that sin, in the final analysis, was simply a matter of ignorance, of wrong knowledge. And hence this spirit of unbridled optimism, even when World War I came, it was called what, the war to end all wars. But now man is coming of age and is learning how to deal with his environment so that he won't destroy himself. That spirit of optimism has crashed to the ground. Because what we've discovered is that the more we educate people, all we're doing is producing more sophisticated sinners.