Culture & Religion

HARVARD/ A Difficult Encounter Between Faith and Reason

Lorenzo Albacete

mercoledì 10 marzo 2010

One of the topics discussed this last week has been the content and shape of the “education reform” that everyone agrees is needed in the United States. President Obama has made his proposal and the politicians of course are, already debating it according to their ideological and partisan interests.

The latest issues of The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek dedicated their cover stories to the subject of education reform, but I want to discuss the issue in terms of an earlier article by Lisa Miller, the religion editor of Newsweek, concerning curriculum reform at Harvard University, where so many of the next generation of leaders in the country are being educated (cf. “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith: Can a Secular University Embrace Religion Without Sacrificing its Soul?” in the issue of February 22, 2010).

The story begins in 2006 when a select group of Harvard professors prepared a “curriculum reform” proposal for the University. The project was led by Louis Menand, the Pulitzer Price winning literary critic and professor of English. As part of their proposed reform, the group concluded that undergraduate students should be required to take at least one course in a category called Reason and Faith. The professors argued that any future leader in today’s world needs to know something about religion, since most of the domestic and international conflicts that are shaping the future of this country are religious in nature.

When their conclusions became known, a fierce fight followed between supporters and opponents of the core curriculum reform proposal concerning the teaching of religion. The opposition was led by Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist and widely popular professor. Pinker argued that “the primary role of a Harvard education is the pursuit of truth through rational inquiry, and that religion has no place in that.” A course in Reason and Faith, he insisted, would create the impression that the two are equal paths to truth. Instead, he said, “faith is a phenomenon, reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering.”

Harvard’s motto is indeed Veritas, adopted in 1843, and prior to that it had been Christo et Ecclesiae (“For Christ and the Church”). The separation of faith from reason at Harvard took place in the early part of the 19th century, and Pinker insists that this secularization of the University was an achievement that should not be compromised in any way. Indeed, as Ms. Miller writes, all of Pinker’s work “coheres under the broad notion that a scientific, rational world view is the highest achievement of the human mind.” According to Miller, Pinker’s wife, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, said to him: “All forms of irrationality irk you, but religion is the irrationality that irks you most.”

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In any case, in 2006 Pinker won the fight and religion was not included in the core curriculum-reform. Now the subject is being discussed again, and the battle has fired up. Menand accuses Pinker of fundamentalism in his insistence that the current view of scientific reasoning is the only reasonable path to truth. Menand’s argument, however, is not about faith as a path to truth. His argument is one of relevance: his point is that “religion matters” in the world today and it matters to Harvard students.

There are other fascinating aspects of the discussion at Harvard in Miller’s article, but this is enough to describe the confusion taking place at the nation’s most prestigious university. As Miller writes: “The Harvard faculty cannot cope with religion.”

I must confess that my sympathy in this discussion lies with Pinker. Of course I do not agree with his position, but at least he takes seriously the claims of faith to be a path to knowledge. Menand’s view of “relevance” ignore the question of truth.

Both sides should study the words of Pope Benedict XVI at La Sapienza when he was the victim of “scientific fundamentalism”: “In modern times, new dimensions of knowledge have opened up, and in the university, they are appreciated most of all in two spheres: above all, in the natural sciences, which have developed on the basis of the link between experimentation and the presumed rationality of matter; and in the second place, in the historical and humanistic sciences, in which man - scrutinizing the mirror of history, and clarifying the dimensions of his nature, seeks to understand himself better… Man's journey can never be said to be complete, and the danger of falling into inhumanity can never be simply abjured - as we see in the panorama of current affairs. The danger for the Western world - to speak of this alone - is that man today, especially considering the greatness of his knowledge and power, surrenders when faced with the question of truth.”