End the University religion department as we know it?

In today's New York Times the most e-mailed article is an Op-ed piece, End the University as we know it, by Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the religion department at Columbia University. The article is worth reading and raises issues worth considering. The opening sentences are provocative:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues),

I disagree. I think overall US graduate education is the envy of the world and is one of the most effective institutions in the USA (besides the car industry, compare research universities to health insurance, public schools, immigration, banks, Wall street, welfare, public housing, ....). Most graduates, particularly in science and engineering are highly sought after by industry... (and until recently Wall St.)... There are certainly things to improve. I did a Ph.D in physics at Princeton and am very familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. system. But overall, I think Taylor's views and arguments are coloured by his own experience. He states:

In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

Unfortunately, I fear this may be an apt description of much research that goes on in religion departments. I certainly would not describe research in the physics department at Columbia in these terms. A return to academic theology, in the tradition of Karl Barth, would go a long way towards addressing the problems of irrelevance plaguing religion departments.

The heavens declare the glory of God

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Psalm 19:1 is sometimes used to justify natural theology. However, it needs to be read in the context of the whole Psalm. I have given this talk a few times. The two parts of the Psalm nicely contrast the differences between God's limited revelation through nature and his much clearer revelation through his Word.

Myers and McGrath on natural theology

On his blog, Faith and Theology, Ben Myers has an extremely interesting review of the book associated with Alister McGrath's 2009 Gifford lectures. The comments and Ben's responses are also particularly informative.

The role of Natural theology

This week I hear a nice talk by Andrew Brown at UniBible Talks on 1 Corinthians 2. This together with the hospitalisation of Stephen Hawking prompted thoughts about natural theology. How much knowledge of God is available to all human beings without recourse to faith and special revelation? This issue is often intensely debated by those with an interest in the relationship between the natural sciences and theology. Earlier this year I read a nice article, "Karl Barth and the legitimacy of natural theology" by Rodney Holder (now at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge). It drew a critical response by John McDowell (who is now the Foundation Professor of Theology at the University of Newcastle, Australia; I am really looking forward to meeting him).

A key issue is the exegesis of Romans 1:19-20:

¹⁹For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

which is often used (along with Psalm 19:1) to justify natural theology. Holder makes an important point which I think is often overlooked by advocates of natural theology:

"In Romans 1:19ff also, we read that human beings are without excuse because they could know God from creation, but in practice turned to idols and perversion. There is natural knowledge of God, but God's revelation in Christ is essential for salvation."

This is clearer when one reads the above verses in context:

¹⁸For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. ¹⁹For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. ²¹For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Thus, sin corrupts our ability to reason and so from what is revealed in nature it is not possible (without a redeemed mind) to know the real truth about God.

As an aside, Holder mentions an article, "Natural theology in Paul? Reading Romans 1:19-20" by Douglas Campbell that I need to read.

The laws of thermodyamics in my family

So what are these laws C.P. Snow said we should all know? A couple of years ago my daughter gave me framed version of this which sits on my office desk and often attracts attention from visitors.

The McKenzie family law's of thermodynamics.

1. The more energy the kids have the less energy the parents have.

2. If you don't clean up your room it just gets messier and messier.

3. The McKenzie house will never be completely clean. Even if it does almost reach the state of complete cleanliness but before it does it will always get messed up again.

How educated are you or what culture are you from?

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

Who will be the Master?

In a lecture on C.S. Lewis and scientism, Fritz Schaefer recommends reading the novel The Masters, by C.P. Snow for insights into the internal politics within Oxbridge colleges. I finally read it on my most recent holiday. The novel is part of a series, Strangers and Brothers, chronicling the life experience of Lewis Eliot as over course of several decades he moves from law office to university to industry to government. Some of the series parallels Snow’s own diverse life experience: he began his professional life as a molecular physicist, turned to writing novels, and eventually became a Baron and held high positions in the U.K. government. He is probably best known for his 1950 Rede lectures: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. ( A book I really want to re-read).
The novel, the Masters, describes the political struggle amongst Fellows in a Cambridge College as they position, posture, and politic in anticipation of the election of the next Master of the college, while they wait for the current Master to die, after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Snow is perceptive about human nature and paints an intimate portrait of his characters. Here is a random selection (page numbers are from the Penguin 1983 edition):

“I had known for miutes past, that this was coming: I had not wanted to talk of it that nigh. Jago was longing for me to say that he ought to be the next Master, that my own mind was made up, that I should vote from him. Had had longed for me to say it without promopting. It was anguish to him to make the faintiest hint without repsonde. Yet he was impelled to go on, he could not spotp. It haradssed me to see this proud man humiliating himself.” (p. 15)

The Master says, “Do you remember the trouble we had getting him [Calvert] elected [as a Fellow of the College], Eliot? Some of our friends show a singular instinct for preferring mediocrity. Like elects like of course. Or between me and you,” he whispered, “dull men elect dull men.” (p. 20)

Nightingale “was intensely suspicious, certain that there was a web of plans from which he would lose and others gain….. He had once possessed great promise. That was his bitterness. … By twenty-three he had written two good papers on molecular structure… but the spark burnt out… Often he had new conceptions: but the power to execute them had escaped from him. ……It would have been bitter to the most generous heart. In Nightingales’s it made him fester with envy…. Each job in the college for which he was passed over, he saw with intense suscpicion as a sign of the conspiracy directed against him…… as March came round each year, he waited for the announcement of the Royal Society elections in expectation, in anguish, in bitter suspicousness…” (p.46,47)

“Chrystal wanted to be no more than Dean, but he wanted the Dean, in this little empire of the college, to be known as a man of poer. Less subltle, less freflective, more immediate than his friend [Brown], he needed the moment-by-moment sensation of power. He needed to feel that he was listened to, ……, that his word was obeyed.” (p.61)

This is both comical and tragic. It shows the vanities and trivialities that academics (and maybe anyone in any close community) can become so absorbed with. Unfortunately, it also portrays accurately how often administrative decisions (including some very important ones) in universities are often not made with the same rational detached objectivity and impartiality that we would like to claim we apply in our scholarship.

Who will be the next Master?

"Sin is crouching at the door; it desires to have you, but you must master it” Genesis 4:6

"For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under lawy, but under grace.” Romans 6:14