Faith and Reason

In late 2006, the task force charged with overhauling Harvard’s Core curriculum dropped “reason and faith” from its proposed list of general education courses, sending a very poignant message to the entire student body: religious debate does not belong in the realm of an undergraduate education.

For some students in the sciences, however, the collision of faith and academia is unavoidable.

When Natalie J. Peters ’09, a biochemical sciences concentrator, first arrived on campus, she was forced (like many religious students on campus) to tackle her faith in a new way.

“I vacillated between being a creationist and a strong evolutionary believer,” Peters says. “When people come here they’re finally confronted with other people who have different answers on what life’s about. People figure out if what they believe is what they said they believed all along.”

At a university where your identity is constantly called into question, the classroom becomes a test of faith for some students. Mixing science with religion can be tough chemistry at Harvard, but for those few students who choose to do so, the results are sometimes one-sided and leave many things unanswered.

CLASS IS IN SESSION

Sitting in a crowded lecture hall while another evolutionary science professor tries to tackle the age-old religions, David M. Silvestri ’07 is biting his tongue.

“There you are sitting in class with 250 of your classmates around you,” Silvestri recounts, of the times he’s had his views challenged in a classroom. “They’d really be better off if they heard both sides of the argument.”

“Students become convinced by the authoritative figure at the front of the class with a Ph.D into thinking that science necessarily points towards the lack of a God,” Silvestri says.

In Silvestri’s opinion, if professors refuse to make accommodations for religious viewpoints within scientific beliefs, perhaps it would be better if it wasn’t mentioned at all.

As a student in Science B-29, “The Evolution of Human Nature,” Kristen M. Jones ’08 experienced a similar situation when, again, a professor’s lecture failed to meet expectations of her religious beliefs.

“I thought the professors were unnecessarily rude to the position of faith and Christianity in several of the lectures,” Jones says. “I don’t think it was given the time it warranted.”

But from the viewpoint of the Gund Professor of Neuroscience John Dowling, doubts of evolutionary biology simply hold no place in his classroom.

“Evolution today is accepted by 99.9 % of scientists as fact,” Dowling says. “It is not something that you need to believe in—you can see it.”

Yet despite these harsh figures, Jones still chooses to follow a faith of her own.

When faced with a conflicting belief in the lecture halls, Jones says, “I’m forced to come up with an argument about why that’s not true.”

CLASS DISMISSED

Outside of the classroom, Christian beliefs can also be called into question.

“Most of my friends are curious, I guess,” biochemistry concentrator Michael D. Wang ’09 says. “[But] I haven’t really found anyone who is antagonistic towards Christians.”

As far as his studies go, Wang hardly sees any conflicts, because to him science cannot explain his faith.

“Both in the understanding of science and the understanding of the Bible and Christian faith, human understanding is imperfect,” he argues.

Perhaps faith, like some aspects of science, is still beyond our ability to understand.

“You wouldn’t expect a monkey to understand calculus,” Wang points out. A funny parallel to our primate friends, yet still, something that points to an evolutionary growth in the comprehension of advanced conceptual ideas.

“It’s imaginable that there’s an understanding that’s beyond our biological capability,” he says.

It is this potential inability for us to understand religion that makes it easy for some students to reconcile their faith with their academics. And perhaps it is just this insistence that can forge the happy median between the two formerly conflicting arenas.

BACK TO THE BOOKS

Compared to other colleges that require their students to study some form of faith, Harvard makes few accommodations towards enlarging the scope of a science to include religious ideals.

“Harvard does not really provide that platform,” Jeffrey Kwong ’09 says, a board member of the Catholic Students Association. And it’s sad, because, as Kwong attests, “some of the best scientists are some of the best Catholics.”

As controversial a topic as faith may be, the university’s decision to exclude faith and reason from the Core curriculum may be doing more harm than good.

“It’s a pity that the faith and reason proposal was eliminated from the general education proposal, because it would have thematized these questions in a way that would have been relevant to the believing students, as well as to non-believing students” says visiting professor of science and religion at the Divinity school Philip Clayton. “And surely these questions are of cultural importance in our world today.”

Professor Dowling agrees and regrets that the class he teaches must work more as a divisive force, and less as a means for gaining more understanding of the complicated relationship between these two dynamic foundational beliefs.

“Where I run into trouble is when I try to teach religion in a science course,” he says. “[The reason and faith requirement] was dropped, but not as a result of a decision from scientists. I think it would be a terrific thing.”

Until that day comes, however, the realm of science will most likely remain the main site of religious and academic intersection for many observant Harvard students.