| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Michael Gray" |
| Date: |
25 Nov 2006 03:17:44 AM |
| Object: |
News: Pinker asks for more reson, less faith in Unis. |
Opinion
Less Faith, More Reason
Published On 10/27/2006 4:36:48 AM
By STEVEN PINKER
None
"There is much to praise in the new Report of the Committee on General
Education. It is original, thoughtful, and well-written, and reflects
considerable work on the part of our colleagues on the Task Force on
General Education. The entire Harvard community should be grateful for
the progress they have made and the issues they have asked us to
address.
I have two reservations, however. The final report will attract wide
attention in academia and in the press, where it will be read not for
its specific recommendations, but as a once-in-a-generation statement
on the nature of higher education from the world’s most prominent
university. As such, we should be mindful of the way the report frames
the goals of general education, and not just its suggested menu of
courses. This means affirming the goal of the university as the
institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and reason. (There
is certainly no shortage of forces in the world pushing toward
ignorance and irrationality.)
My first reservation pertains to the framing of the “Science and
Technology” requirement, which aims too low. I think the problem lurks
in some of the other sections, but I will leave it to my colleagues in
other departments to comment on those.
The report introduces scientific knowledge as follows: “Science and
technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive
and negative: they have led to life-saving medicines, the internet,
more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they also
have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic
eavesdropping, and damage to the environment.”
Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced
both museums and gas chambers, that opera has both uplifted audiences
and inspired the Nazis, and so on. It makes it sound as if the choice
between science and technology on the one hand, and superstition and
ignorance on the other, is a moral toss-up! Of course students should
know about both the bad and good effects of technology. But this
hardly seems like the best way for a great university to justify the
teaching of science.
The report goes on to emphasize the relevance of science to current
concerns like global warming and stem-cell research. It even mandates
that courses which fulfill the Science and Technology requirement
“frame this material in the context of social issues” (a stipulation
that is absent from other requirements). But surely there is more to
being knowledgeable in science than being able to follow the news. And
surely our general science courses should aim to be more than
semester-long versions of “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Missing from the report is a sensitivity to the ennobling nature of
knowledge: to the inherent value, with consequences too far-reaching
to enumerate, of understanding how the world works. For one thing, it
is a remarkable fact that we have come to understand as much as we do
about the natural world: the history of the universe and our planet,
the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of
living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental
life.
I believe we have a responsibility to nurture and perpetuate this
knowledge for the same reason that we have a responsibility to
perpetuate an appreciation of great accomplishments in the arts. A
failure to do so would be a display of disrespect for our ancestors
and heirs, and a philistine indifference to the magnificent
achievements that the human mind is capable of.
Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from
scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s
understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have
cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and
the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an
undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the
hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without
loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history
of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity
of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are
methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions
which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very
large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when
subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.
I believe that a person for whom this understanding is not
second-nature cannot be said to be educated. And I think that some
acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge should
be a goal of the general education requirement and a stated value of a
university.
My second major reservation concerns the “Reason and Faith”
requirement.
First, the word “faith” in this and many other contexts, is a
euphemism for “religion.” An egregious example is the current
administration’s “faith-based initiatives,” so-named because it is
more palatable than “religion-based initiatives.” A university should
not try to hide what it is studying in warm-and-fuzzy code words.
Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith”
and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have
to help students navigate between them. But universities are about
reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good
reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution,
and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a
requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology” or “Psychology and
Parapsychology.” It may be true that more people are knowledgeable
about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that
astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological
phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with
astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.
Third, if this is meant to educate students about the role of religion
in history and current affairs, why isn’t it just a part of the “U.S.
and the World” requirement? Religion is an important force, to be
sure, but so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism,
class, and globalization. Why single religion out among all the major
forces in history?
There is also considerable disagreement over whether religion really
is the driving force behind the conflicts that are commonly attributed
to it. Many people in Ireland insist that the Ulster conflict is about
British rule versus Irish unification, not about Protestantism versus
Catholicism. And among the Islam-aligned forces with which our country
is currently entangled, Saddam Hussein’s Baathism is more secular and
nationalist than it is religious. Whether or not religion is a major
force is a question best left to our colleagues in history,
government, and area studies, in the context of the broadest possible
study of world affairs. This empirical issue should not be prejudged
in the categories of a general education requirement.
Fourth, if the requirement is supposed to be about the clash in the
history of ideas between religion and reason in Western thought, here
again it seems far too arbitrary and specific a choice for a general
education requirement. Why not rationalism and empiricism, or idealism
and materialism, or the subjective and the objective?
Finally, if the requirement is meant to be the union of all or any of
these (some students concentrate on Islamic jihad, others on the
Reformation, still others on the argument from design or the
ontological argument for God’s existence, still others on biblical
history), it just doesn’t hang together as a coherent requirement.
Again, we have to keep in mind that the requirement will attract
attention from far and wide, and for a long time. For us to magnify
the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of
science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs,
is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism,
I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it.
These reservations should not be seen as a dismissal of the report,
which has many excellent analyses and recommendations, but as a
contribution to the discussion of where to go from here.
Steven Pinker is Johnstone professor of psychology. He served on the
Harvard College Curricular Review Committee on General Education that
produced a previous general education report. This op-ed is adapted
from remarks shared with the Task Force on General Education at a
meeting with faculty.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=515314
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