There is a story about Bertrand Russell giving a public lecture somewhere or other, defending his atheism. A furious woman stood up at the end of the lecture and asked: “And Lord Russell, what will you say when you stand in front of the throne of God on judgment day?” Russell replied: “I will say: ‘I’m terribly sorry, but you didn’t give us enough evidence.’ ”

What do you think of Russell’s response?

By seeking to understand religion more fully,  Tim Crane, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and author of two books, “The Mechanical Mind” (1995) and “Elements of Mind” (2001), provides a more nuanced atheistic response.  In particular, he investigates the significant differences between the way in which science and religion approach reality.

Science too has its share of mysteries (or rather: things that must simply be accepted without further explanation). But one aim of science is to minimize such things, to reduce the number of primitive concepts or primitive explanations. The religious attitude is very different. It does not seek to minimize mystery. Mysteries are accepted as a consequence of what, for the religious, makes the world meaningful.

This point gets to the heart of the difference between science and religion. Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world, but it does not try and do this in the way science does. Science makes sense of the world by showing how things conform to its hypotheses. The characteristic mode of scientific explanation is showing how events fit into a general pattern.

Religion, on the other hand, attempts to make sense of the world by seeing a kind of meaning or significance in things. This kind of significance does not need laws or generalizations, but just the sense that the everyday world we experience is not all there is, and that behind it all is the mystery of God’s presence. The believer is already convinced that God is present in everything, even if they cannot explain this or support it with evidence. But it makes sense of their life by suffusing it with meaning. This is the attitude (seeing God in everything) expressed in George Herbert’s poem, “The Elixir.” Equipped with this attitude, even the most miserable tasks can come to have value: Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws/ Makes that and th’ action fine.

Have you wrestled with the relationship of science and religion?  How do you agree/disagree with Crane’s observations?

Note:  Crane rejects Christianity due to what he considers the lack of factual basis for the central Christian doctrines (e.g., Jesus’ resurrection).

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Advice #1: If you can't reach the top of your bookshelf, invest in a proper footstool.

Happy Labor Day! The beginning of the academic year has generated a plethora of “starting off right” articles, for everyone from new undergraduates to new professors. (Count ESN as part of the trend, too, with our Best Advice for Undergrads post.) Here’s a quick collection of links about starting off on the right foot.

1. Make College Count by Derek Melleby. Friend of ESN Derek Melleby has a new book coming out for students entering college — Make College Count: A Faithful Guide to Life & Learning. And, of course, he’s got a new website, too, including blog on making college count.

2. Making the Most out of College: Hmm…one day, I’ll have to write a post about our tendency to talk about our college experience as “making” something. Anyway, InterVarsity’s own Kevin Offner, on IV’s StudentSoul website, suggest four areas for your focus, starting with number one:

First, love Jesus Christ more than anyone or anything else. Four years of college fly by faster than you might imagine. And there are so many things you could give yourself to — so many things that can fill up your time. That’s why all your decisions need to be made in light of your relationship with Jesus. Is getting straight A’s your greatest goal? Or are friendships your primary concern? What about extra-curricular sports or clubs? Or again, overwhelmed by all the choices, will you attempt to become a “Renaissance person,” dabbling in a little bit of everything, a jack-of-all-trades while a master of none?

Photo credit: Justin Litton via Flickr

3. 10 Easy Ways to Fail a PhD: University of Utah computer science professor Matt Might offers his observations on why so many students fail to finish their PhD — or take far longer than necessary or wise to finish. I’m not sure Dr. Might (what a name!) says anything that hasn’t been said elsewhere, but it’s always good to hear the truth over and over again. Here’s one reason, though, that particularly struck me, considering the many conversations we have at ESN about life-work balance.

[Failing PhDs] Treat Ph.D. school like school or work

Ph.D. school is neither school nor work.

Ph.D. school is a monastic experience. And, a jealous hobby.

Solving problems and writing up papers well enough to pass peer review demands contemplative labor on days, nights and weekends.

Reading through all of the related work takes biblical levels of devotion.

Ph.D. school even comes with built-in vows of poverty and obedience.

The end brings an ecclesiastical robe and a clerical hood.

Students that treat Ph.D. school like a 9-5 endeavor are the ones that take 7+ years to finish, or end up ABD.

(HT: Don Paul Gross)

4. So You Want to Go to Grad School: Calvin professor James K. A. Smith offers some good advice with a new series he calls “So You Want to Go to Grad School.” As of today (I’m writing this on Friday), he’s two posts in, with the latest post on choosing your discipline (and why it’s important to do so, even if you want to work in an interdisciplinary area).

5. ProfHacker’s Open Letters Series: I’ve been a fan of ProfHacker since before it hit the big time and joined up with the Chronicle. Anywho, check out their 2010-11 Open Letters series, with advice for all sorts of different people:

• New graduate students
• First-time tenure track professors
• Newly tenured professors
• New department chairs

6. NPR: Three books for surviving graduate school: Finally, molecular biologist Adam Ruben offers his suggested readings – and, spoiler alert, only one of the three is directly connected to graduate school. (BTW, Ruben is also the author of a recent book that I’m adding to my wish list: Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Graduate School.)

7. Finally, some (possible?) encouragement for science PhDs: David Ng asks How long would your Ph.D. have taken if everything worked? His answer might be encouraging if you’re in the middle of your PhD, though maybe not if you’re just starting out or yet to begin.

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“Where are the jobs” is a hot topic on campus and has a lot of relationship to politics.  Here’s a sampler from Tom:

1.  From Where the Jobs Are (and Aren’t) [in Poli-Sci] (Scott Jaschik. Inside Higher Education. 9/3/2010):

During the question-and-answer period, several exchanges pointed to lingering cultural gaps between academic departments training political scientists and those entities that might hire them. One woman from a government agency said that she loves to hire political science Ph.D.s, but is frustrated when so many discussions lead to statements like: “My adviser really wants me to become a professor. Am I selling out?”

2.  Tom knows that this is from last year, but as the fall term begins at PSU-Hershey Medical Center, he finds it just as relevant as last year.  Medical Students Face Uncertain Futures Video: Medical students are facing a decision that’s not only crucial to their own future, but also to the entire health care system: whether to choose a specialty or practice general medicine. Note: related article Summer of Work Exposes Medical Students to System’s Ills (Kevin Sack. NY Times. 9/8/2009).  In a future post Tom will share thoughts about the rigorous nature of education in the health care professions.

Financial incentives are only one piece of their decision.  “Some of the students get out there and see the doctors that they’re working with almost killing themselves.  Working eighty hours a week.” (Dr. Roger A. Rosenblatt, Director, Rural/Undeserved Opportunities Program).

“You hear about the stories of physician burnout and going into primary care.  It was kind of just reiterated over the summer … One pediatrician that I worked most closely with would see between 9 – 5 would see approximately 40 -45 patients (Jacob R. Opfer, Student) — Medical Students Face Uncertain Futures Video

3. What does undergraduate student engagement in politics look like?  College Students on the Fence Video: The students at Colorado State University are not likely to be predictable on election day brings to one’s attention the draw of one-off young voter enticement through entertainment, but underscores the lack of long term sustainability of such approach.  Maybe we should ask the Poli-Sci PhDs for input.  Will they be hired for such campaigns?  Are they analyzing them?  Are they already involved in running them?

“A bunch of friends are graduating and they’re working at fast food restaurants with a bachelor’s degree. I think that it’s affecting this young generation more than any” (Undergraduate student at Colorado State University).  Note:  related article Fewer Young Voters See Themselves as Democrats (Kirk Johnson. NY Times. 9/2/2010).

Some links from Mike on a new church-and-state-education court ruling and scientific misconduct after the jump.

4. Win for Religious Student Group at UW-Madison (Inside Higher Ed, September 2, 2010): Badger Catholic, a Roman Catholic student group at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has won a 2-1 ruling that says the university can’t deny a student organization funding for an activity just because part of the activity involves religious conduct:

A key part of the ruling involved the university’s decision to fund broad categories of activities in the first place. The majority decision indicated that the university could have blocked student fees from going to the activities in question if it had blocked entire categories of support — no matter whether conducted by secular or religious groups. Once a university allows any category of student activity to receive support, however, the court ruled that it can’t bar support for that activity just because it may involve worship.

Random aside: the opinion was written by 7th Circuit Chief Justice Frank Easterbrook, brother of one of Mike’s favorite journalists, Gregg Easterbrook.

5. How damaging are the ethical violations of Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser? A three-year investigation recently concluded that Hauser, a prominent scholar of the evolutionary basis for morality, was guilty of several counts of scientific misconduct. The WSJ’s Eric Felten thinks this is a serious blow to the discipline, but a victory for science:

It’s important to note that the Hauser affair also represents the best in science. When lowly graduate students suspected their famous boss was cooking his data, they risked their careers and reputations to blow the whistle on him. They are the scientists to celebrate.

Writing in the Chronicle, Florida State’s Michael Ruse notes the particularly serious nature of Hauser’s ethical lapses:

If you pinch the ideas from someone else, say a grad student, one person suffers, but the community does not; it still gets a good idea or result. If you fake the ideas or results, and publish them, the poison spreads. We are all now at risk of using phony information, and our own work suffers. The community suffers.

Further, it fuels skepticism about the whole enterprise of evolutionary psychology:

Evolutionary biology today, especially anything to do with humankind, is loathed and feared by a range of critics, from prominent philosophers (like Jerry A. Fodor, author of What Darwin Got Wrong?), to the supporters of intelligent-design theory (like Phillip E. Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial), to the out-and-out young-earth creationists (like Ken Ham, the force behind the Creation Museum in Kentucky). Like sharks in the water, they circle waiting for a sign of blood. They seize on issues that supposedly discredit evolution and parade them publicly as the norm and the reason to reject modern science.

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September/October 2010 Books & Culture Cover

It’s for me!  Hard to believe that the feast of Books & Culture* enters 15 years of production.  The new issue has a time line on the cover and an accompanying podcast which I commend to you.

Out of curiosity …

*Books & Culture, has extended to all ESN members an offer for new subscriptions at only $5 a year. Also available: a 75% discount on electronic access to the Christianity Today Archives. Members: see our Subscription Discounts info for ordering details.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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What? Your freshman move-in day didn't include a visit from a friar? I guess you didn't go to Siena College.

It’s that time of year again – the NFL Preseason! Just kidding. I’m actually thinking about the beginning of school, especially all of the undergraduates who are either beginning their college experience or starting to think of life after their bachelor’s degree. For undergrad members of ESN, this likely includes thoughts about graduate school.

I’ve asked about advice for undergraduates before, receiving some great comments in the process. Since the responses were so good the last time, I’ll just repeat the same questions:

• If you were once an undergrad, what do you wish someone had said or asked you at that stage of your academic career?
• If you are an undergrad, what kinds of questions do you have about grad school and the life of an academic?
• What kinds of resources would be most helpful for ESN to produce or distribute?

Leave your advice in the comments, or send it directly to me, if you wish.

Photo credit: sienacommunications via Flickr

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A typical St. Olaf classroom...featuring a gigantic blackboard build for the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man

Mike here. Tom has spent the week in an intensive theology course, so I’m tackling the Week in Review solo. This is a great opportunity to clean out my “guilt file” – articles that I’ve had bookmarked for weeks and haven’t had a chance to write about yet. Enjoy!

1. How does a Christian college remain distinctively Christian? The usual answer has to do with defining who can be a faculty member or student. At Duke Divinity’s Call & Response blog, Jason Byassee ponders St. Olaf College, which has taken a different path.

A school can make Christianity a robust possibility, but not a mandate. It can offer top-flight worship. It can ask faculty across the board to respect the historic Christian mission of the school. And in that way, it can create room for possibility, hopefully to lure, woo, entice students and faculty into more faithful Christian life.

2. Homosexuality and the Moral Failure of Higher Education (R. R. Reno, First Things, Aug. 5) Wow – some title, eh? We linked to a column by R. R. Reno last week, and we’re a little late to this one (which, as you might imagine, has generated considerable online discussion). Reno, of course, is writing about the cases of Kenneth Howell at Illinois and Jennifer Keeton at Augusta State, but Reno expands the point to cover all of higher education. It’s difficult to select or summarize a single point from Reno’s argument, though this is a good quote:

Sexual liberation seems to have become the great moral cause. It is true that American schools expect ideological homogeneity on all manner of topics, and being pro-life or a person of faith—or even a Republican—can get you in trouble. But homosexuality alone seems to call forth the full repressive power of educational institutions.

3. Is the Husband Going to Be a Problem? (NY Times, August 12) Carolyn Bicks (English, Boston College) shares the experience of her husband and herself as they faced a problem common to many academic couples: a long-distance marriage. To “normal” people, the obstacles they overcame to pursue their dream of academic careers seem both heroic and insane:

When the hiring season was over, we’d landed two good tenure-track jobs in two good cities with two airlines that flew directly between them. I dismissed the nagging concerns the process had raised for me and threw myself into divvying up the wedding platters. We pooled our moving allowances, packed up a Ryder truck in California, dropped half of our stuff in my new Midwestern city, then drove to his East Coast city and dropped off the other half. We had our car on a trailer behind the truck. This made backing up a treacherous proposition. For the whole 3,000 miles, one of us would jump out to scope the turnaround prospects whenever we were about to pull off. The literature scholar in me loved the metaphor: There was no going back.

Bicks even manages to time the birth of their first child to fit into a 10-week research break. There are still more twists (they eventually join each other in the same city, only for her husband’s tenure bid to rejected). In case you have family who wonder what the academic life is like, this could be a good essay to share.

Photo credit: John McNab via Flickr

Bad academic advising and the strange lives of 20-somethings, after the jump.

4. Confessions of a Bad Academic Advisor (Chronicle, August 8) Mark Montgomery comes clean about his academic advising abilities – or, rather, his lack thereof.

It’s a simple process, but apparently I’m no good at it. Some years ago, over pizza one night, a group of advisees explained to me how disappointing they found the experience of having me as an adviser. I was genuinely surprised. They spoke of coming to me, with jittery enthusiasm, to announce the first life-altering decision they had made on their own, with no supervision by parents: to major in economics.

Personally, I’m thankful for Montgomery’s honesty. My own undergraduate advisor was truly awful – at least as bad as Montgomery, if not worse. Through his negative example, he makes a good point that, for students, the choice of a major and their classes is a moment of tremendous importance, but rarely for their professors.

5. What Is It About 20-Somethings? So asks Robin Marantz Henig for the New York Times Magazine. Henig

sheds light on an often overlooked segment of the population…the post-baby boomers who must endure “legislated nostalgia (to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually own)” and who indulge in “knee-jerk irony (the tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course . . . ).”

Sorry – that actually the Publishers Weekly summary for Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (published in 1991). Funny how young people who are unlucky enough to graduate from college in the middle of a recession are seen as defining a strange new post-adolescence stage of life…

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Leon Kass

Each year, a senior scholar at the University of Chicago is chosen to deliver the Aims of Education address to incoming students. (An archive of the addresses since 1995 can be found online.) In 1981, Leon R. Kass delivered perhaps the best known of the addresses, “The Aims of Liberal Education.” After dismissing several other goals as insufficient as the fundamental aim of liberal education (i.e. as opposed to education for professional training), or as objectives that can be better achieved elsewhere, Kass proposes thoughtfulness:

What, then, could be left for the aim of liberal education if we exclude professional training, research and scholarship, general broadening and culture, the arts of learning, and familiarity with the intellectual tradition? I have already hinted at my answer: Not the adding of new truths to the world, not the transmission of old truths to the young, but the cultivation in each of us of the disposition actively to seek the truth and to make the truth our own. More simply, liberal education is education in and for thoughtfulness. It awakens, encourages, and renders habitual thoughtful reflection about weighty human concerns, in quest of what is simply true and good. (86-87, emphasis added)

Leon R. Kass, “The Aims of Liberal Education,” published in The Aims of Education, edited by John W. Boyer. Copies are pretty hard to come by – I could not find one for sale anywhere, so check your local library.

What do you think? Is thoughtfulness the aim of liberal education?

Photo Credit: U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics, via Wikipedia

Updated 10:12 AM: Fixed typo in title

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Archibishop Teofan Savu of the Romanian Orthodox Church in a moment of prayer

As I mentioned in Friday’s Week in Review, my InterVarsity colleague Tom Trevethan pointed me to a recent post by Fuller president Richard J. Mouw on Duke’s Call & Response blog.

Mouw asks:

What difference does it make to open class with prayer?

In Following Christ 2008′s Humanities track, Classics scholar Dora Rice Hawthorne, who was then at Baylor, shared a paper reflecting on Anselm’s practice of not merely opening his classes with prayer, but even stopping in the middle of his lectures to offer up prayers giving thanks for the subject matter, asking for the Spirit’s guidance in understanding Biblical texts, and so on. She remarked that, even at a Christian school like Baylor, stopping in the middle of class to pray about the subject matter seemed like a gross violation of academic propriety.

Mouw, borrowing from Mark Schwehn’s excellent Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America, wonders if there is something misguided with our common reluctance to pray in class:

The Western academy emerged out of worshipping communities, after all. And, as Schwehn boldly states his case, “the continued vitality [of academic life today] would seem to be in some jeopardy under wholly secular auspices.” Schwehn suggests much of the academy today is “living off a kind of borrowed fund of moral capital.” For example, to the degree that the virtues that are crucial for a sense of communal academic trust are still present in the broader academy, they are drawing on resources from past spiritual practices that are no longer seen as necessary to the intellectual quest.

Mouw’s blog post deals primarily with Christian universities, but Tom Trevethan wanted to begin a conversation about how faculty and students integrate prayer in their academic work at secular universities.

What are your thoughts about Mouw’s blog post? Do you include prayer as part of your academic work? If you’re at a public or secular private university, how do you define the boundaries between your private/public prayer life and the secular/pluralistic environment of the university?

Photo credit: iulian nistea via Flickr

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Annie Savoy: "...there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball." Except, of course, that there aren't 108 beads in a rosary.

1. Mary and the Modern University (First Things): In light of the false perception that religion has little to do with thought, R. R. Reno (Theology, Creighton) asks:

What, then, does Christianity add to academic life? What should make teachers and students at Catholic colleges and universities–and other Christian institutions of higher education–confident in the intellectual integrity of their enterprise?

Reno offers the surprising suggestion that we look to Mary’s response to the Annunciation:

When the Angel of the Lord comes to Mary, she is told a truth–the truth of human destiny–that she cannot understand. Her response: “Behold, I am the handmaiden of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

Good stuff. (HT: Kenny Benge)

Photo credit: B Tal via Flickr

2.  Vocational concerns in higher education. In addition to the material covered in The End of Philosophy? – check out the Sociology The Satisfaction Gap (Scott Jaschik. Inside Higher Ed.  8/17/2010). The article comes face-to-face with the question of how to prepare students for graduate school.  In particular, student formation along with appreciation of student (possibly faculty) fancies/interest doesn’t bring to the attention of students how much research stats comprise the work of Sociology.  Comment from Tom:  Maybe it also indicates some loss of direction of taking some the bigger picture into consideration when engaged in Sociological research and interpretation. I’ll survey my friends in Sociology. Feel free to also post your thoughts.

Lou Gehrig, international admissions, and Richard Mouw on praying in class after the jump.

3.  Research changing how we understand our heroes? In Study Says Brain Trauma Can Mimic A.L.S. (Alan Schwarz. NY Times.  8/17/2010) we learn about new insights regarding

A peer-reviewed paper to be published Wednesday in a leading journal of neuropathology, however, suggests that the demise of athletes like Gehrig and soldiers given a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, might have been catalyzed by injuries only now becoming understood: concussions and other brain trauma.

How should the public and the A.L.S. Association respond to the work of science?  A quote from the author of the Luckiest Man, i.e., “definitive biography of Gehrig,” concludes the article:

“Lou Gehrig wanted to know everything possible about his own illness — he got to know his doctors, talked with scientists with obscure approaches, and volunteered himself as a guinea pig to find any way to combat the disease,” Mr. Eig ] said. “He wouldn’t stick his head in the sand and not want to hear about this. If he were around today, he would continue to have that same curiosity, and that burning desire, to help his situation, or to help others.”

Comment from Tom:  it is a tragic story. In addition to our lack of knowledge of the affects of concussions “back in the day,” we must also keep in mind that working hard and pushing through difficult situations was a lot different in the 1920′s-30′s, even for athletes in New York City.

4.  Graduate-Admissions Offers to Foreign Students Bounce Back (Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/19/2010).  Welcome!  For those from the United State, please extend hospitality (recommendation: visit InterVarsity’s International Student Ministry’s Hospitality resource page).  Keep an eye out for new friends from China, India, and South Korea.  They “account for fully half of all non-U.S. citizens on temporary visas attending American graduate schools.”   Although U.S. graduate education has “bounced back” and continues to be valued beyond our shores. Mr. Bell writes in Findings From the CGS. International Graduate Admissions Survey, Phase II: Final Applications and Initial Offers of Admission:

“with continued competition for international students from other countries and an increased capacity for graduate education in some countries, U.S. graduate schools cannot assume we will always remain the destination of choice for students from abroad.”

5. What difference does it make to open classes with prayer? So asks Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller, at Duke Divinity School’s Call & Response blog. His brief reflection is helpful, as are the comments left there by James K. A. Smith (of our ESN fave Desiring the Kingdom) and Alissa Wilkinson (who ESN interviewed not too long ago). (HT: Tom Trevethan)

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I think that David’s life was truly worthwhile. But was he a bit like a lamplighter, someone who had a good career in his day but for which we no longer have need? Are we getting to the point where philosophy, if it is to be taught at all, could just be a subgroup within an English department? (Wouldn’t they just love that, with their obsession about Heidegger!) ****  And if philosophy goes, what about classics and more? What about departments of religion?!

Quite apart from the economic worries I expressed above, I cannot but feel that something will be lost if universities do just become glorified technical institutions, or business schools. Personally, I don’t think you can claim to be an educated person if you have never done any philosophy. With Socrates I agree that the unexamined life is not worth living, and unlike the average scientist or engineer in my experience (Richard Dawkins being at the top of my list), I don’t think you can do philosophy on your own after work in the pub. I think that knowing something of the great thinkers of the past is vital.

But then don’t forget that I am only five years younger than was David Hull, and, like him, I have had a full-time career as a philosopher. Maybe you are just hearing the sad lament of another lamplighter.

So, what do you think, “Do we need philosophy?”  Is the economic downturn (and/or shifts in our culture) leading toward the end of various specializations in philosophy?  Should the focus of philosophy be upon ensuring each student has a class (or 2) in living the examined life and/or informing the faculty of each class in how to incorporate reflections/musings upon living the examined life? Reflecting upon my studies at Grove City College, the core curriculum provided a glimpse of philosophers and worldviews in the context of following Christ.  I took logic as an elective.  All of these classes, and the others in the core curriculum, have been foundational in providing perspective for my daily work on campus and the blog.  In addition, the material in these classes (and my other classes in general) have been a “para-academy” gift to offer in many ministry contexts.  So, “yes, we need philosophy.”  Of course maybe, I’m actually arguing for a certain stream of philosophy founded upon Building a Christian Worldview (developed further in Revolutions in Worldview: Understanding the Flow of Western Thought. What do you think?

*For more by Ruse visit Philosophy of Science Association.

**Mark Taylor is the chairman of the religion department at Columbia University.  In addition, he’s the author of the forthcoming Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, click here to check out a Chronicle of Higher Ed Commentary (8/8/2010) adapted from the book.

***Related article of interest: Stop Admitting Ph.D. Students (Inside Higher Ed. 8/18/2010) by Monica J. Harris, professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky.

****Update (8/18/2010, 8:50 am): I just finished reading Okla Elliott’s Guest Review: Logic: The Question of Truth (Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Indiana University Press, 2010) for Inside Higher Ed (8/17/2010). Anyone have insights to share regarding the question of truth?

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