Science, religion and education

Decades ago, when I was writing a lot of feature stories for Northwest Magazine, editor Joe Bianco had me live a week at Mt. Angel Abbey and write a series of stories about activities and my experiences there. One of these stories focused on the high school seminary. I spent a day going to classes -- and was blown away. I knew from meeting guys in the Army with Catholic educations (Jesuits, in this case) that such studies could be impressive but I was not prepared for what the Benedictines at Mt. Angel showed me. In a philosophy class -- a philosophy class in high school! -- students were finding the fallacies in classic proofs for the existence of God! In a seminary! Even more mind-boggling, in a literature class they were studying James Baldwin's Another Country, a novel about homosexual love that would be banned in most public high schools. Here was a religious institution that was not afraid to look the real world straight in the eye and defend its own beliefs accordingly.

On the other end of this spectrum is the more common propensity for religious institutions to fear knowledge. I witnessed this in the 1970s when two Mormon missionaries showed up at our door on Maryland's Eastern Shore. "Sally" had grown up in Salt Lake City, her parents "Jack Mormons" (i.e. kicked out of the church), and she knew a lot of Mormon history and doctrine. Accordingly, she welcomed the missionaries into the house and began a polite debate with them about their doctrine, a line of thought that began to interest the younger among them so much ("I never thought of that") that the older hustled his ass out of there before he began thinking for himself.

Religion and science don't have to be incompatible -- but they become incompatible in religious environments that deny science by fiat. There's too much of this going on now.

The failure of our educational system is a failure to nurture the natural inquisitiveness of children. I remember a book given to me when I was 8 or 10 that replicated, in simple form, many of the great break-through scientific experiments using common household materials. You followed steps in this cookbook of science, made careful observations and measurements, and then through a Socratic dialogue were led to hypotheses that explained what you had observed. Your natural curiosity was rewarded with explanations that explained the evidence, i.e. what you had carefully observed. What a concept!

I think religious education should begin after this development, not before. Religion most often is presented as doctrine. This is the way it is. Period. Why? Because the Bible is God's Truth. Because the Koran is Allah's Truth. And so on. Shut up, don't ask questions and believe. Not only does this stifle natural curiosity, it perverts the stronger foundation of faith, which is based on what science cannot answer.

At the basis of all this is Epistemology -- the question, How do we know what we know? This question never appears in education until college at best, in philosophy classes. I think it should be presented at the very beginning of education. How do we know what we know? Because from the answer to this, everything follows.