A Brief Note on Education

I tend to stay away from politics the same way that I stay away from religion: starting a debate, even with someone who appears to be sane and logical, often ends up with me being branded an offensive cynic. I recognize the touchiness of both of these subjects, especially as this country becomes more and more obsessed with “war(s) on religion” and the like. I understand that people are bound to have disagreements, and I simply attempt to steer clear of them whenever possible. When I do write, I write from a standpoint of clear and calm reason, with as little of my potentially strident intonation as possible. This is why my blog is written the way it is: with an honest (and earnest) voice of reconciliation, while maintaining a concrete foundation in demonstrable facts. I want you to be able to listen to me long enough to hear me, and I want you to hear me well enough to consider what I have to say.

This post is about politics and religion. I want it to be perfectly clear that I don’t support any candidate for any political office. I find it hard to vote for anyone because I can see the imminent failure, even in the most optimistic and outspoken of leaders. I won’t say any more on the subject of whom I might vote for, but will only address the specific issue that has brought me back to this project and back to this page.

In an interview with Glenn Beck, Rick Santorum remarked that Obama’s desire to send more of our nation’s youth to college is an attempt to secularize the nation and embattle religion. If you want to see it for yourself, here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzGPfwBm22M. Let it not be said that I’ve put words in the man’s mouth.

To the religious: I understand your beliefs and why you have them, but I think that we need to put a few things in perspective. Religion is not the export that keeps this nation afloat. Religion did not put a man on the moon, nor did it invent any of the technology that makes your daily life possible. Religion did not discover the carbon filament and it did not compile the first lightbulb. In fact, the man who invented these things was not religious at all, and neither are thousands of today’s best and brightest. Religion will not fix our economy, unless perhaps churches start paying taxes. Despite what Santorum suggests, growing up religious and shying away from the accumulated knowledge of mankind will do nothing to improve our country. What has made humanity great is its willingness to confront the unknown, discover the new, and innovate on the old—three things that religion has historically subverted, frowned upon, or outright destroyed.

More to his point, universities are not designed to strip students of their religion. Instead, they are designed to instruct students in the methodology that will allow them to be useful in the world. These skills are rather simple: the embracing of doubt, the usefulness of empirical review, and the reliance on proof-based thinking. Hypotheses that cannot be proven are rather useless in the grand scheme of things. One cannot claim to explain anything—from the behavior of mice to the inner workings of a black hole—without demonstrable proof. DNA testing is useless if it fails more often than not, as is a psychological model of economics. One who is not willing to question his assumptions in the face of contrary evidence is not thinking like a scientist. One who does not think like a scientist does not belong in a position of influence over scientific matters. Imagine if Galileo had simply laid down and allowed the Catholic church to continue its rampage against reality, or if Darwin had simply failed to publish his works in the face of the burden of religious derision. Further, imagine that the ideology of the Amish or Orthodox Jews (more closely following their religious texts than any other pretenders to those thrones) were in charge of whether or not we could create new technology, or even wear clothing made of synthetic fibers, and you’ll see what religion truly thinks of innovation. It took the Catholic Church hundreds of years to admit most of its scientific missteps, and without the onslaught of empirical proof, they might never have relented.

If you still disagree with me, consider the following hypothetical scenario:

While crossing the street in a busy metropolitan area, you are struck by a car and thrown to the street. Your arm is dislocated and the pain is excruciating. Two men approach, one of which has obviously just gotten off of a shift at the hospital across the street, the other of which is wearing a McDonalds uniform. As you stumble to your feet, they both offer you advice concerning your improperly angled appendage. The advice that they offer is similar, though both require a considerable amount of extra discomfort to put your arm back into the socket. The fast food worker insists that all you need to do is grab your belt and shake your shoulders from side to side; the doctor claims that you’d be best off laying on the ground while he puts his foot to your ribcage, pulls on your arm, and places ball firmly back into socket. Whose advice do you follow?

If you’re not an idiot, you’ll follow the doctor’s suggestion. It will obviously hurt more, but it is based on years of accumulated knowledge. He has been trained in methodology that has been tried on generations of humans, from battlefields to sports arenas and yes, metropolitan streets. If it didn’t work, he wouldn’t do it. No matter what the McDonalds employee might claim—“I’ve seen it work before,” “that’s what my dad always did when his shoulder got away from him,” “I did it once,” “I speak for God and he has told me that you will be healed”—you’re not going to trust in his abilities or his decisions because he doesn’t have the proper evidence-based pedigree behind his claims. To take it one step further, consider chemotherapy, one of the most prevalent (and trusted) treatments for aggressive cancers. If I were to tell you that we plan on injecting you with radioactive material, killing a vast number of your cells in the process, making you nauseas and ill over a period of months—but that then you’d get better—you’d look at me like I was crazy. But after it has been proven to work, and the science is firmly rooted in reality and the effects are apparent and widespread—you’ll strap yourself to a chair and allow a doctor to fill your veins with any of the elements from the periodic table that he sees fit.

The difference between how we learned about chemotherapy and how we learned about religion is night and day. Where medicine is a constantly changing challenge of ideas in the grand marketplace of empirical evidence, religion is often rooted in the ancient (and unconfirmed) past. When religion does make attempts to rectify its systems with modern life, its agents all too often cherry-pick their statistics and undermine (if not outright ignore) contrary evidence. If you don’t believe me, check any of the entries on this blog, but especially the War on Earth one here. Atheists don’t argue via Dan Brown books, but these particular Christians considered it more than fair to treat The DaVinci Code as if it were the end-all and be-all of philosophical entreaties against religious intolerance. In science, we take all comers, consider their views, and test them. Do you believe in the power of prayer? Review the scientific documentation of that power and you’ll find that it hasn’t proven to work in any legitimate setting. For a moment, imagine if the heresay that supports prayer as a viable option in some people’s estimation was all that it took to get a drug to the market or a humanity-filled rocket into the air. I have no problem with prayer—but I do have a problem with it being considered scientifically sound because it has failed that test.

Very few entities in this world are attacking religion outright, and universities are definitely not among them. Though the religious often believe that they have found a methodology that works for them, many fail to see beyond their own immediate situations and consider anomalous data. Many hate based on their own psychology. Some act based on only the circumstances that they can see from their own front porches. It is science’s job to open willing eyes to the realities of the world, and the university, as the home of science, will do its best to consider all relevant factors. When expanding one’s mind necessarily conflicts with his belief system, it is not the shackles of indoctrination but the freedom of enlightenment that will steer his future.

In closing, imagine if we as Americans were willing to stake our futures on someone whose greatest driving force was a voice that he heard in his head, and you’ll understand why those of us who worry about reality are bothered by claims like the above from people like Rick Santorum. Imagine your world without the lightbulb, electricity, refrigeration, pasteurization, the computer, the television, the telephone, the clothes on your back and the synthetic building materials that comprise most of your household and you’ll start to understand what a world without Universities, without their students, and without the simple thought that we could be wrong and we can do better, would be like. I don’t care who you vote for, but if you consider yourself a sane individual, speak out against inanity like this when you hear it. Either that or, if you would rather cease to be a hypocrite, give up what science has bequeathed to you and return to the mountaintop hermitage that religion, unfettered by the scientific method, would have offered you. Your aversion to such a decision mirrors my aversion to the defamation of science and universities. Hopefully we can find common ground here.