Kira Seldon (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} kiraseldon) wrote,@ 2007-02-02 15:23:00 |
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"Soaking in religion"?
This entry brought to you by Faith on the Quad, an article in the online magazine Inside Higher Ed, and by several of my ninth-grade students.
One of the Japanese teachers of English with whom I work asked me yesterday, in class, if I believed in God. Being on the atheist side of agnostic, I responded, "No." She was absolutely shocked at this revelation. Now, given that most polls indicate something like 80 percent of Japanese consider themselves athiests, I'm pretty sure that what shocked her was the idea of an American who didn't believe in God.
This made me think. Is it really that unusual to be an American who is not religious? Christianity in America, particularly Protestantism, is the eight hundred pound gorilla of our public discourse. It sits where it wants. It plonks itself down in the speeches of political candidates and officeholders. It waves its arms on the Quad at my college and tells me I'm going to hell. It gives alms to the poor and restricts their access to birth control. And, as a result, I get the feeling that the rest of the world has swallowed the story that the 800-pound gorilla tells about our country: that America is a Christian nation.
The Inside Higher Ed article that I linked up there is a report on a document entitled The Wingspread Declaration on Religion and Public Life: Engaging Higher Education. It is a set of guidelines intended to provide a more spiritual environment on college campuses. The authors suggest that "students must learn the relevance of religion to all disciplines — sciences, humanities, arts, social sciences — and the professions." I have to admit that, at those lines, I choked. I'll agree that religion has a place in some sciences, yes. It's a sociological and psychological phenomenon. In the humanities and the arts, religion has inspired and informed a vast number of creative works. The English major with no knowledge of Christian symbolism and mythology is going to be extremely confused by Milton, just as the English major with no knowledge of late 16th century British culture is going to miss a lot of the meaning in Shakespeare. It's part of the cultural milieu, and should be taught as such in any discipline that engages itself with the cultural milieu.
But all diciplines? What exactly is the relevance that religion has to, for instance, theoretical physics? Do the authors of this declaration expect that science teachers will teach religous perspectives on their subject? Or would it find a place in classes on the history of science? The interaction of religion and science has been almost exclusively adversarial. It may be useful to teach aspiring scientists how to deal with religion-inspired debates regarding their field; but the place for that is in an ethics class, not a science classroom. The speed of light and the mechanism of DNA transcription and translation are the same for a fundamentalist Christian and a radical athiest.
I've always been fond of Stephen Jay Gould's characterization of religion and science as nonoverlapping magisteria. It would be wonderful if it were true. Unfortunately, religion as practiced by quite a lot of American Christians has a tendency to try and assimilate all the other disciplines into itself. And I sincerely believe that, by doing so, the eventual loser is religion. When a religious leader makes firm statements that are scientifically falsifiable, he loses the trust of everyone in his congregation with an interest in evidence and logic. When he attributes those statements to the revealed Word of God, it's God that those parishioners lose faith in. You keep the sheep, but you lose everyone who is insufficiently sheepish.
My faith, if I can call it such, is in the idea that provable truth will inevitably, eventually win over evidence-free polemics. You don't have to teach the relevance of religion to science. Teach the science. The students who want to see religion in the natural world are going to see it there; the students who are interested in the history of science and the ethics of science will get that in seperate classes; religion is not relevant to the methods of science or to the knowledge that we have about the world around us.
This entry brought to you by Faith on the Quad, an article in the online magazine Inside Higher Ed, and by several of my ninth-grade students.
One of the Japanese teachers of English with whom I work asked me yesterday, in class, if I believed in God. Being on the atheist side of agnostic, I responded, "No." She was absolutely shocked at this revelation. Now, given that most polls indicate something like 80 percent of Japanese consider themselves athiests, I'm pretty sure that what shocked her was the idea of an American who didn't believe in God.
This made me think. Is it really that unusual to be an American who is not religious? Christianity in America, particularly Protestantism, is the eight hundred pound gorilla of our public discourse. It sits where it wants. It plonks itself down in the speeches of political candidates and officeholders. It waves its arms on the Quad at my college and tells me I'm going to hell. It gives alms to the poor and restricts their access to birth control. And, as a result, I get the feeling that the rest of the world has swallowed the story that the 800-pound gorilla tells about our country: that America is a Christian nation.
The Inside Higher Ed article that I linked up there is a report on a document entitled The Wingspread Declaration on Religion and Public Life: Engaging Higher Education. It is a set of guidelines intended to provide a more spiritual environment on college campuses. The authors suggest that "students must learn the relevance of religion to all disciplines — sciences, humanities, arts, social sciences — and the professions." I have to admit that, at those lines, I choked. I'll agree that religion has a place in some sciences, yes. It's a sociological and psychological phenomenon. In the humanities and the arts, religion has inspired and informed a vast number of creative works. The English major with no knowledge of Christian symbolism and mythology is going to be extremely confused by Milton, just as the English major with no knowledge of late 16th century British culture is going to miss a lot of the meaning in Shakespeare. It's part of the cultural milieu, and should be taught as such in any discipline that engages itself with the cultural milieu.
But all diciplines? What exactly is the relevance that religion has to, for instance, theoretical physics? Do the authors of this declaration expect that science teachers will teach religous perspectives on their subject? Or would it find a place in classes on the history of science? The interaction of religion and science has been almost exclusively adversarial. It may be useful to teach aspiring scientists how to deal with religion-inspired debates regarding their field; but the place for that is in an ethics class, not a science classroom. The speed of light and the mechanism of DNA transcription and translation are the same for a fundamentalist Christian and a radical athiest.
I've always been fond of Stephen Jay Gould's characterization of religion and science as nonoverlapping magisteria. It would be wonderful if it were true. Unfortunately, religion as practiced by quite a lot of American Christians has a tendency to try and assimilate all the other disciplines into itself. And I sincerely believe that, by doing so, the eventual loser is religion. When a religious leader makes firm statements that are scientifically falsifiable, he loses the trust of everyone in his congregation with an interest in evidence and logic. When he attributes those statements to the revealed Word of God, it's God that those parishioners lose faith in. You keep the sheep, but you lose everyone who is insufficiently sheepish.
My faith, if I can call it such, is in the idea that provable truth will inevitably, eventually win over evidence-free polemics. You don't have to teach the relevance of religion to science. Teach the science. The students who want to see religion in the natural world are going to see it there; the students who are interested in the history of science and the ethics of science will get that in seperate classes; religion is not relevant to the methods of science or to the knowledge that we have about the world around us.
