The end of the religious university?
The debate over Trinity Western University is merely a skirmish in a long war. A war that traditional religion is bound to lose.
I have been following with great interest the debate stirred up recently about the nature of Trinity Western University and its statement of faith required of all instructors. Much of this has spiralled off into debates over the nature of absolutist vs relativist belief and whether there is really such a thing as secular and so on. But I think the issue is, at heart, a simple one.
A university’s main goal should be the rational pursuit of knowledge and truth. Traditional religion, premised as it is on faith and revelation, is incompatible with that goal.
Related: Academic freedom at Trinity Western? Also see: TWU in its own words: special no-straw edition, and Christian universities are necessary.
Take, for example, Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I am teaching to my introductory literature students right now. Paradise Lost attempts a defence of God’s justice in the light of evil and suffering in the world. This, of course, is a knotty issue and one that philosophers have struggled with over the centuries, and any decent presentation of Paradise Lost must at least acknowledge the complexity of the philosophical problems that the poem raises. If evil exists in the world because humanity — in the form of Adam and Eve — have brought it upon themselves, why is there so much evil? Why are children made to suffer in this world without having done anything wrong? For that matter, why should any humans suffer for the crimes committed by their ancestors? There may be good answers to these questions, but any responsible professor will have to acknowledge that the problem of evil may pose insurmountable difficulties to traditional theism. But how can the English professors at TWU propose such a possibility if they are committed to traditional Christianity “without reservation” as their statement of faith requires?
Let me put it another way. Imagine that you are a student and you have written a paper and received a low grade on it. You go to your professor and the following conversation ensues:
YOU: I believe I deserve a higher grade on this paper.
PROF: Okay. Why is that?
YOU: Well, that may be, but I felt inspired to write what I did. I really felt that God was speaking to me when I wrote that paper.
PROF: Hmm… that’s strange. Because I really felt that God was speaking to me and told me to give you an F.
YOU: But I have faith in this paper.
PROF: And I have faith in my red pen.
The above is absurd, of course, because there can be no resolution to this disagreement. How can you argue about belief when the only reason for the belief is the belief itself. The only real standard for university work must be the conventions of reasoned scholarship. Did the paper conform to the standards of the discipline? Did it cite appropriate evidence? Were its arguments logical? Was it clearly expressed?
A university based on traditional religion cannot claim to value any of these standards very highly since religion, as it is normally practiced, discounts evidence and reason in favour of the choice to believe, otherwise called faith. Faith, of course, is the right of the believer, and I will always defend the right of citizens of this country to believe what they choose and to express that belief. And I have no objection to any religious group setting up whatever schools or colleges they like (provided they are not funded with public money). But we should hold institutions called “university” to a higher standard.
Eventually, I think, the problem will solve itself. Religious universities will fade away as more and more people feel free to evaluate traditional religion with an even hand and find that, at its heart, its claims are nonsense. Christianity is very quickly going the way of Greek mythology, becoming a series of shared stories embodying potentially valuable lessons, but not an account of the world to be taken literally. Does anybody really believe that Noah saved all the animals of the world on the Ark? Or that Joshua made the sun stop in the sky? Most sensible Christians that I know are not dogmatic or evangelistic; but then, Milton would have considered them atheists. Even devoted academic Christians are fast becoming near-atheists, increasingly seeing the Bible as a series of metaphors and fables, and God as merely an underlying force, rather than a personal being.
No doubt a few old-fashioned die-hards will hang on for a while yet, maybe centuries yet, but the day will come when TWU’s statement of faith won’t matter a bit. Because no one in their right mind will sign it.
There are those that believe, without objective evidence, that reality transcends the material reality. There are those that believe in the equally unscientific notion that there is nothing that is real beyond the material reality. Often, this is a faith in what Charles Taylor calls “subtraction stories” (stories that explain secularity as human beings liberating themselves from “certain earlier confining horizons”). No one can fault a scholar for having a faith in this “secular” story, or in any other story for that matter. It only becomes a problem when that person insists that his story is the only true and right story and works to suppress the voice of any other story. This is what I fear from those in the CAUT, Mr. Pettigrew – as much as I fear the same from any religious fundamentalist.
There are all sorts of academics, both good ones and bad ones, but in my experience, the line that divides the good from the bad has little relation with their belief in the presence of a transcendent reality or not.
I agree with Mr. Pettigrew, that religion as it is often practiced, discounts evidence and reason. But this is not always the case. I have encountered professors in public universities with the same faith as Mr. Pettigrew and they were excellent scholars. I have also encountered the same in Christian universities.
There is no human being that isn’t influenced by some form of faith. The best we can do is be aware of the faith from which we experience reality, and the best way for a scholar to do this is to encounter meaningfully with other scholars of varying faiths – secular and otherwise. One should be very interested in this dialogue, so much so that he would actively seek it out even to the point of paying for his own plane ticket to create such a meaningful encounter.
Based on that pathetic “straw man” argument, you would clearly benefit from an education at TWU which has always had high marks for the excellent education its students receive.
Many universities today teach a moral relativism that does not even recognize there is objective good and evil. I suggest you crusade against them. They are the ones teaching a world view that does not match with reality.
Michael, you may be interested to read my other post on TWU, where I answer your concern about the straw man question.
As for the “high marks” that TWU gets, my impression is that this claim is based on student evaluations, but given the nature of the institution, I suspect that the students there are pre-disposed to appreciate TWU’s approach, so I am doubtful as to how useful such evaluations are. If TWU has been positively evaluated in other ways, I would be glad to know about them. I have said I would gladly accept an invitation to go to TWU and see for myself, but so far no one has invited me.
As for moral relativism, I know of no university dedicated to promoting the idea of relativism as part of its expressed mission. Indeed, I doubt that even the most dedicated post-modernists would support moral relativism on all issues. You’d be hard pressed, for instance, to find any scholar at a Canadian university prepared to argue that raping a child is wrong only because of social convention. If you know of any, please let me know. I’m sure the TWU folks would enjoy calling them names for a while.
But even if relativism was the norm at secular universities, Christianity is not the only non-relativist position. And even if it was, it would not, in my view, be a satisfying alternative. I’ll take relative truth over absolute falsehood any day.
If the goal of TWU is to engage in the same level of academic investigation as a secular university, then why does it exist at all?
Isn’t the point to limit the scope in some way? Either you want to give full assessment to the wide diversity of opinions that is out there or you don’t. TWU clearly, on some level, does not, for even if it claims to encourage much more academic freedom than its statements of faith and codes of conduct would imply, those documents immediately exclude from the discourse anyone who would never sign or write such a thing.
The students who went to my Christian high school–a school whose graduates populate the corridors of TWU–would also have claimed that our school was completely open to alternative opinions. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth. The questions we “wrestled with” involved trying to reconcile the complexities of life with the Christian worldview. There was no effort to analyze situations from other viewpoints or to ask questions that, in the asking, challenged Christian beliefs. Indeed the “tough questions” if I may use Daniel Reynolds’ words, would not be considered tough to a person weighing all interpretations equally. Rather, they were “tough” because they asked students to contend with the reality that Christianity sometimes contradicts common sense morality.
Certainly there are secular versions of this same type of reasoning, in which academics attempt to fit new learning into a predetermined worldview. However, in neither case does this represent honest academic inquiry.
Part of the point of education is to expand and adapt one’s worldview, whatever it may be, to an increasingly complex understanding of reality. While faith is no barrier to this, a willingness to change one’s faith in the face of new learning is.
Prohibiting certain representatives of the world’s complexity from finding their way into an institution–because they do no conform to a predetermined statement of faith–is antithetical to this process of learning.
And I believe it shows in the postings from TWU faculty here in the comments section.
“The Enlightenment ideal of progress through human reason crumbled in the wake of two devastating world wars,” writes Kelsey Haskett. Yes, and wars fought over Christianity devastated Northern Ireland. No worldview has a monopoly on either deliverance or devastation, but Haskett, like so many of the people I went to high school with, thinks nothing of citing history selectively in order to support her belief in hers. This is not academic investigation. It is dogma.
Dear Todd, No university may be officially “post-modern”, but that is their world view nonetheless. More importantly, that is the evil nonsense they teach their students.
You may be correct that no Canadian professor (so far) has claimed child rape is morally right. Many (most ?) seem to think the rapist needs counseling or treatment however, rather than declaring their actions evil. Movement in that direction seems to be increasing in our society.
In any case, despite your numerous attempts at clever sophistry, the central issue is can Christians be trusted to pursue and follow the evidence and proclaim truth despite “their faith”.
May I suggest that academic freedom, as well as the North American universities that proclaim it are the product of Christian thought and action. Perhaps you should read a politically incorrect history for a change. You could start with “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success” by Rodney Stark.
[...] Apparently the CAUT disagrees with institutions who require staff to pledge to “statements of faith” as a condition of employment. This dispute pinpoints the technical definition of what makes a modern university (academic freedom), and the debate has stirred up the question of “could this be the end of the religious university?” [...]
The unfortunate thing about universities teaching a secular fundamentalist doctrine is that this sort of ignorance regarding faith will exist and continue to grow.
If I have faith that my credit card will be accepted, the plane I am on will get me to where I am going safely, or that a chair will take my weight, is that the “blind” faith the writer so ludicrously describes?
No, it is based on evidence, reason, and experience. That is the Christian faith. Secular institutions teach a one-sided perspective, one could argue is purposefully designed to prepare devout secularists for the future. Is that free thinking?
re-reading this article really has me scratching my head. Does the writer really believe that the recent 80 million plus Christians in China who are committed to suffering presecution from the atheist state, or the Christians around the world being beheaded and burned are believing a Greek fable that will soon fizzle out?
Their faith is very real, as is God. It is a relationship with a real, living Saviour. Don’t allow your own inability to recognize this cloud your thinking. If you have sat in secular institution all your life pandering to atheist Profs, read the liberal press, and had only secular friends you are the result of the very thing you are trying to express your contempt for – a biased, slef congratulating bubble.
“It is a relationship with a real, living Saviour. Don’t allow your own inability to recognize this cloud your thinking.”
Lol… priceless. “Dont let the fact that you see no evidence for religious assertions cause you to dismiss them as bunk”.
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.