Theology is a subset of philosophy, not of literature or history. It’s philosophy in a religious context.
I, on the other hand, have no trouble imagining Dawkins saying that.
He has published this. While I imagine most of us would agree with him that a lot of what spouts from literature and some other humanities departments is nonsense, he certainly seems close to labeling it all as worthless, for instance when he starts a sentence with “As for the harder task of reclaiming humanities and social studies departments for genuine scholars…”
I studied Religion at a top-tier secular university, and had at least a couple professors who were non-religious “bible scholars.” My Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) professor, for example, was a non-practicing Jew. The head of the department was a specialist in medieval church history and theology - more of a literary historian rather than a theologian himself.
That’s nonsense and I’m surprised to hear it said on this board. I spend my day and have spent my career with hard scientists and you see passionate respect for the humanities.
This thread certainly deserves a repeat of what I mentioned in this post, that religious studies and philosophy majors are, on average, higher scoring than biology majors on the SAT. Perhaps Dawkins is just suffering from brain envy.
Indeed, one of my close relatives was chairman of the Physics Department at a major university in North America. He collected art from all over the world and was also a huge opera fan.
Funny, my neighbor across the street was head of a physics department at a major university and well known art collector/dealer as well. Makes you wonder how many there?
Kimmy_Gibbler, it comes down to if these scientists are considered elite and who is stating it as such. This best explains the discrepancy. Calling scientists elite for the sake of being scientists in their professions seems like an abuse of that word. Her numbers are similar to other surveys but only in the sense when they pick scientists in general. Here’s one. It asked the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) members if they believed in God. It says:
And remember Edward Larson? He’s also in that latest link and can agree with those figures too, but not for leading scientists where the numbers are considerable down in religious belief.
To be a part of the National Academy of Sciences, one is elected based on colleagues and the value of published works. The AAA says that a “Fellow of the AAAS” is among the more well respected scientists in their group and I think goes through a similar process. For the Brits, to be a Fellow of the Royal Society one has to be elected by a peer-reviewed process based on the excellence of science.
In the main editorial on Amazon, it says of her book:
If she breaks down that 50% of religious, it’s probably similar to the other surveys where this is taken as some form of “deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power” which I’m guessing would probably be close to her numbers as well if she worded it similar.
Believers in God can discuss evolution without any inclination at all to bring religion into it. That wasn’t done in my small Southern rural area even in the 1950s! That may not have been true in all schools, but we didn’t discuss there being a contradiction. The creation story was Sunday school stuff. And the biology teachers that I’ve known through my teaching years just didn’t make any big production of it. I knew plenty of religious teachers who just went nuts whenever anyone suggested that “Creationism” belonged in a classroom. I think many would have quit rather than teach it as science. There is more of an issue made of it now than there was sixty years ago in my opinion. The Scopes trial would make one think that the truth of evolution was never taught in Tennessee.
Believers in God can discuss evolution without any inclination at all to bring religion into it. That wasn’t done in my small Southern rural area even in the 1950s! That may not have been true in all schools, but we didn’t discuss there being a contradiction. The creation story was Sunday school stuff. And the biology teachers that I’ve known through my teaching years just didn’t make any big production of it. I knew plenty of religious teachers who just went nuts whenever anyone suggested that “Creationism” belonged in a classroom. I think many would have quit rather than teach it as science. There is more of an issue made of it now than there was sixty years ago in my opinion. The Scopes trial would make one think that the truth of evolution was never taught in Tennessee.
The curriculum at The Divinity School – Vanderbilt University was too difficult for me to download. (I’m not very technically-inclined.) But I would think that for starters, a study of many, many theologians and their “issues” would be required. But I can’t imagine that would be all that was required for a doctorate at Vandy.
One of the theologians that I find interesting is Søren Kierkegaard. He is considered by some to be “The Father of Existentialism.” I first heard of him when a young minister that I knew spoke of Kierkegaard’s theory of “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” I think it would be easy to say that he was a “Biblical scholar” and much, much more. His studies included criticism and philosophy.
The assumption that Biblical scholars study only the Bible is ignorant. Do biologists study only onion skins?
Not surprising. The SATs are just math and grammar. There’s certainly no biology.
Neither is there philosophy nor comparative religion religion, so I’m not sure what your point is precisely. Could you make it a little more explicit please?
Just saying that the 1950s was before the relatively recent creationist and fundamentalist attack on evolution. I took science in the early 1960s in New York, and while I wouldn’t expect any issues it just wasn’t even controversial. If there were protests about Inherit the Wind I’ve never heard of them.
You and I should both know that people in the 1950s were not necessarily any stupider than people today.
Yeah, C. P. Snow was so 1950s. I’ve hung around engineers and scientists for a long time, and I never heard any who thought literature was stupid, or was proud that they knew nothing about the arts. On the other hand it seems that humanities people, in some cases at least, think it is cute to be innumerate or not understand science. (None around here, of course.) If a scientist expressed such an opinion, he’d be considered a trog. And rightfully so.
I stand corrected.
Still, I get the feeling that while scientists can love art and literature, they don’t have a huge amount of respect for those who *study *arts and literature professionally, or a least, they don’t consider them their peers. And frankly, I’m not sure they’re all that wrong.
I don’t think that’s what Snow was saying. In his experience, most scientists (and to be fair, he was largely talking to and about young male scientists) simply were disconnected from literary and artistic tradition.
In my experience too, while scientists often cherish a number of popular and/or classic authors and artists that they’re deeply interested in, they just don’t have the broad acquaintance with literature that many humanities scholars do. I’ve met very few, if any, English-speaking scientists who’ve read, say, Shakespeare and Milton and Austen and Dickens and Vergil and Gide and Woolf and Ford Madox Ford and Yeats and Balzac and Proust and Twain and Nabokov and so on and so on and so on. For many non-scientist scholars, on the other hand, this kind of broad exposure is basic background.
I’m certainly not arguing that scientists in general ought to be equally widely read in the literary tradition: they’re entitled to their own tastes and priorities which are in no way inferior to or less meritorious than literary breadth. I’m just arguing that it is to some extent reasonable to recognize some sort of cultural separation between intellectuals who do have that sort of literary breadth on the one hand, and on the other intellectuals who like Shakespeare and Tolkien and maybe a handful of classic literary works into the bargain, but who are nowhere near as immersed in the literary tradition as a whole.
All I know is that I went to a prestigious research institution for my undergrad, and worked in a research lab for many years there, and my major required me to take more humanities, language, art, and Lit classes than science classes. It was a firmly rooted liberal arts education. I found the Econ folks the most narrow in scope by temperament. Not the scientists.
My phd was also at a prestigious institution and my grad school friends and I went to art shows, talked about literature etc. Not everyone, but not the weird minority either.
Was it a Catholic school? I recall that the grade school Sisters often seemed to have a problem with evolution, but my high school teachers (often priests, sometimes deacons* or Brothers) did not. I even clearly recall that my 10th grade Biology text showed the descent of the classes of vertebrates. Not only that, but there was an elaborate diagram of a possible explanation for Abiogenesis, with no objection ever mentioned by the priest. (And my attendance tended to toward perfect in those years.) Not that Abiogenesis is part of biological evolution, but the line is sometimes drawn at that.
It wasn’t until my senior year, March 1969, that I received my first real “Creation Shock” from a January ***Plain Truth ***magazine that my homeroom teacher, also a priest, had laying around. Besides an article on the supposed impossibility on the evolution of bee colonies, it had a compendium of the shocking news stories of 1968. Then there was also an article on how much movies had changed since 1966 with the “observation” that things were already “quite bad in 1966.”
I was so surprised at the stark rejection of evolution that I asked the priest about it, and he said that the magazine was reflective of the “fundamentalist” view of things.
- This was before the Permanent Diaconate was restored to Roman Catholicism (as opposed to Eastern Orthodoxy) and those deacons were on their way to being priests.
I mentioned my relative who was the chairman of a university Physics Department. He has two daughters who went into the humanties. One is now an elementary school art teacher and the other is a history professor at a small college in New England. He is totally supportive of both, as they both ended up in careers that they love.