Religion and Scholarship the Academy
Michael J. Murray
Franklin and Marshall College
For over a decade now the Society of Christian Philosophers has co-sponsored the annual
Sino-American symposium on philosophy and religious studies in China. This
conference is, as many of you know, the eleventh such symposium and the first of what
we hope to be many at Fudan University. I was especially pleased when our friends at
Fudan proposed the topic of this conference because it gives me an opportunity to explore
a related issue that is an important one both in the West and, I suspect, in China as well.
Many of the papers being presented at our conference raise questions about such
topics as why religion and ethics should have a place in the modern university, how we
should think about pedagogy in the areas of religion and ethics, and how we should think
about the underpinnings of religious and ethical belief and practice. In this paper I
would like to talk about something rather different—a topic that is of central importance
to the Society of Christian Philosophers and one that lies close to the hearts of many of
the Western participants at this conference. The topic is whether or not there is any
place in the contemporary academy for religiously informed or religiously framed
scholarship.
In this paper I will begin by telling you a bit about the Society of Christian
Philosophers and the distinctive role in plays in the American philosophical community.
This will give me an opportunity to raise some objections to the sort of scholarship
commonly pursued by members of the Society. Many scholars in philosophy and in
other disciplines for the notion of “Christian philosophy” or “Christian scholarship”
paradoxical if not incoherent.
For these critics, scholarship grounded in religious or
Christian principles must essentially involve reliance upon reasons, grounds, or
arguments that cannot be verified or cannot be shared. But such verifiable or shareable
reasons are essential for rational dialogue among scholars in the same field. Religiously
framed scholarship must thus be rejected. I will argue that objections of this sort against
Christian or religiously framed scholarship fails. Finally, I will then close by
considering how my response to these objections gives raise to a holistic conception of
philosophical scholarship that permits the integration of religious belief and practice and
in fact shows that such scholarship is not different in kind from non-religiously framed
scholarship.
I. The Recent Revival of Religiously-Framed Philosophical Scholarship
Before I offer a defense of religiously-framed philosophical inquiry, let me begin by
offering the Chinese scholars a brief introduction to the recent history of Christian
philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition.
The emergence of contemporary Christian
philosophy traces its roots roughly to the late 1960’s when philosophy was beginning to
recover from the aftermath of logical positivism. The positivists had argued that since
religious claims were not subject to empirical verification, they did not even rise to the
level of falsity. Rather, such claims were downright meaningless--mere gibberish.
However with positivism out of the way, philosophers who had religious commitments
were freed to once again to look for fruitful ways to apply the resources of analytic
philosophy to traditional questions in philosophy of religion, natural theology, and
philosophical theology. In the ten year period leading up to 1978, a significant number
of philosophers began engaging in research programs which were admittedly rooted in
their distinctive faith perspectives. The rise of interest in and pursuit of research
programs along such lines led to the founding, in 1978, of our society, Society of
Christian Philosophers. The society that has now grown remarkably to become one of
the two largest special interest groups in the American Philosophical Association, with
more than 1000 members.
In 1984, the Society began publishing its own journal, and the lead article in the
first issue of the journal was written by the philosopher who is, undoubtedly, the leading
figure in the emergence of this movement within philosophy, Alvin Plantinga; the
article was entitled “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” In the essay, Plantinga noted
that the English-language philosophical community in the twentieth century had largely
counseled philosophers who took their religious beliefs seriously to leave those beliefs
aside when they began to think and work in their academic capacities. This exclusion of
religious ideas became nothing less than an endorsement of methodological naturalism, a
dogma which had become, argues Plantinga, as a first principle of philosophical practice.
But, Plantinga continues, for a Christian philosopher to embrace this sort of
methodological naturalism in their own scholarship would be duplicitous at best. If the
religious believer is firmly committed to certain claims that arise out of their religious
commitments, claims which in turn might play a foundational role in the development of
a variety of fruitful research programs, then he or she is obliged to maintain those
religious beliefs and pursue those research programs.
The result, Plantinga argues, is
that religious believer must, at least in some contexts, set aside the presumptions and
research agendas undertaken by the secular philosophical community in order to consider
the traditional areas of philosophical inquiry from distinctively religious starting points.
For the most part, the emergence of Christian philosophy went unnoticed by those
outside of philosophy. In 1994, however, (now) Notre Dame historian George Marsden
wrote a book which brought the issue of religiously grounded academic research into
plain view. Marsden’s book, The Soul of The American University, traces the
secularization of American institutions of higher learning from the mid nineteenth century
up to the present.
Marsden argues that pressures on American institutions of higher
learning lead them to adopt a form of methodological naturalism which, to their minds,
would preserve the integrity of individual religious commitment while allowing the
institutions to educate and unite the citizenry of a highly pluralistic liberal democracy.
As he shows however, the move away from religiously informed scholarship became
nothing short of a stampede towards methodological naturalism and, later, a de facto
naturalism of a sort that no longer accommodated, but rather vigorously and dogmatically
excluded, religious presuppositions or belief from mainstream academia.
In a postscript to the book, Marsden, himself a devout Christian, argued that such
anti-pluralist exclusions of religiously grounded or informed scholarly perspectives is
simply intellectually unsustainable. And this claim was accompanied by a call to
academics of religious faith and to the scholarly community at large. On the one hand,
Marsden enjoined religious academics to re-think the connections between their faith and
their scholarly endeavors. On the other hand, he appealed to the academy for an end to
their unsustainable, dogmatic exclusion of religious perspectives from the scholarly
enterprise.
Marsden’s postscript was widely attacked. In the most important American
journal on issues confronting the university, the Chronicle of Higher Education, fellow
historians were calling Marsden crazy. The subsequent sustained attacks led Marsden to
write a follow-up work entitled The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. In the
book Marsden addresses the arguments which were raised against the ideas advanced in
the postscript. Most of Marsden’s critics argued that religious perspectives ought to be
excluded from scholarly research programs for one of three reasons.
First, some argued
for the exclusion because such scholarship was obliged to take as starting points
presuppositions that were not or could not be “verified,” or which were not universally or
widely assented to.
Second, without shared or shareable foundations for academic
inquiry, there is no way that scholarship can go forward in a pluralistic cultural.
Once
we allow distinctively religious ideas to intrude on academic scholarship, scholars with
distinctive commitments will be unable to communicate or reason with others holding
dissenting commitments. Third, many critics argued simply that adopting such
perspective, while not objectionable in principle, would be useless in practice since they
could not possibly have any impact on one’s academic research program.
What, critics
asked, would a distinctively religious research program in chemistry or horticulture look
like?
In the following section, we will consider such criticisms.
II. Is religiously-framed philosophy and “outrageous idea”
There is an old Native American folk tale which involves a rabbit that tries to convince
the other animals in the forest that he knows how to hunt and kill ducks. The rabbit gets
into a fierce argument with a proven duck hunter, the otter. In the story the rabbit, in an
angry exhange with the otter, sits up on his hind legs, and looks the otter squarely in the
eyes [show picture]:
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Said the rabbit: “I not only can hunt ducks, I can do so better than you. [remove picture]
At that moment, a duck on the other side of the pond wades into the water and begins to
swim.
[show picture]
QuickT ime ™an d a
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ar e need ed to see this pictur e.
The rabbit, eager to prove his claim, makes a noose from some grass, jumps in and swims
underwater towards the duck. Finally unable to hold his breath, the rabbit came to the
surface of the water. The sound of the rabbit breaking the surface of the water startles
the duck [show picture]
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
The rabbit immediately plunges under the water, quickly wraps the noose around his foot,
and holds on while the duck begins to flapping its wings and flying away. The rabbit
hangs onto the grass, flying through the air, until the duck shakes him loose, dropping
him down inside an old rotted tree trunk.
The purpose of telling the story is not to illustrate anything about ducks and
rabbits. It is rather to make a point about framing. Some of you may have noticed that
the first and last pictures I showed are well-known drawings that present a certain visual
ambiguity. When shown in the context of a story most see the first drawing as a rabbit
and the second as a duck. When I do this exercise with students I tell the story twice,
once to one half of the class, the other to the other half of the class. The first time, I tell
the story just as I did here. The second time I switch the first and third pictures. When
I talk to the whole group afterward, I will hold up one of the pictures and say, “Tell me
about this character.” One half of the class will say: “He is foolish—no rabbit can catch
ducks.” The other half of the students will yell out “That’s not the rabbit, that’s the
duck!”
What has happened here?
The answer is that each group of students approached
the “data” within a certain frame. And each group walked away from the data seeing
things in quite different (though in this case, equally reasonable) ways.
Of course the issue of “framing” is much less foreign to scholars in the humanities
like ourselves. Anyone who has engaged in philosophical dialogue on philosophical
issues, like those of us in this room, are acquainted with the role that framing plays.
Many of us, I imagine, have been involved in dialogue between Western philosophers and
Chinese philosophers on questions that concern human nature. Anyone participating in
such a dialogue can quickly detect that there are fundamental and often unarticulated
differences in framing that inform the positions of the dialogue partners. For example,
Chinese scholars with whom I have spoken tend to endorse the view that human nature is
fundamentally good and that human well-being simply requires that we harness those
tendencies toward goodness and promote them. Westerners often endorse a quite
different view, sometimes inspired by the Christian belief in the depravity of humanity
(though sometimes arising from apparently quite secular sources--as we see in Hobbes for
example and his endorsement of “the state of nature”). These differing positions
provide a frame for thinking about philosophical problems concerning human nature that
operates, in many ways, like my story did for thinking about the pictures I showed.
There is no doubt that “framing” is something that plays an important role in how
we understand central problems and topics in our disciplines. And this leads us to
confront a much more vexing question: what kinds of commitments can we or should we
build into or permit in our frames?
More specifically, I want to ask the question of
whether or not distinctively scholarship in philosophy and in religion can be informed by
distinctively religious frames.
If I were giving this talk in the United States, most scholars in the humanities
would be quick to argue that religiously framed scholarship is impossible. And they
would further argue that even if it were possible, such scholarship should be abandoned
or excluded.
As University of Akron political science professor, John C. Green,
remarked when considering this very issue,
If a professor talks about studying something from a Marxist point of view, others
might disagree but not dismiss the notion.
But if a professor proposed to study
something from a Roman Catholic or a Protestant point of view, it would be treated
like proposing something from a Martian point of view.
What is it about Christian or otherwise religious scholarship that makes it tantamount to
“Martian scholarship”?
objections to it.
Critics of religiously framed scholarship offer three different
Those objections go as follows:
Argument 1: Academic scholarship is rooted in the ideal that our intellectual concerns
can be rationally adjudicated. But for such rational adjudication to be possible, we must
hold and defend views using shared standards of assessment and evidence available to all
the relevant disputants.
Without such standards and evidence, there will be no way to
establish the legitimacy of one view over another and thus no way to approach our
disciplines objectively. The problem with religiously framed scholarship is that it
cannot abide by such rules. If there is such a thing as religiously framed scholarship, it
must amount to scholarship that derives some of its evidence or some of its standards of
assessment from authority, revelation, or tradition.
Unfortunately, sources of standards
or evidence that spring from these sources are accepted by “faith” and so, by definition,
cannot be assessed objectively.
Argument 2: Some argue instead that the problem with religiously-framed scholarship is
not that it rests on faulty foundations, but rather that it rests on foundations that makes it
impossible for the scholars who embrace it to participate in discourse with those who do
not.
In the twenty first century, the university reflects viewpoints that are more diverse
than at any time in the past.
For the academic community to function effectively it is
essential that scholars argue for their positions and adopt standards of assessment that do
not make it impossible for others, employing objective standards of reasoning, to share
those positions and standards. However, by adopting distinctively religious
perspectives, the scholars who approaches his or her discipline with religious-framing has
done exactly that. As a result, religiously-framed scholarship has no place in the
contemporary academy.
Argument 3: Even if religious scholars were to draw upon distinctively religious
principles or claims in pursuing their philosophical research, it is hard to know exactly
what kind of difference this could really make. Is there a distinctively Christian way to
approach questions of ethics or epistemology or metaphysics?
Christians might rely on
the belief that it is morally obligatory to love your neighbor as yourself, as Jesus taught.
But when it comes to philosophy, this belief has to be justified as part of a larger moral
framework that stands on its own. The religious believer couldn’t use the teachings of
Jesus to provide a philosophical defense of the claim that it is morally obligatory to love
your neighbor as yourself. Likewise, the religious believer might be committed to the
claim that God exists, but in the context of a discussion of metaphysics, the religious
believer will have to argue for the truth of the claim that God exists despite his or her
religious belief. This is something to be argued for, not simply assumed.
How should we assess these arguments?
Let’s consider them one at a time.
III. Responses
The sentiments that stand behind the first position can be summarized in the words of
Ohio State philosopher Bernard Rosen,
Any personal belief—religious or otherwise . . . have to be supported by evidence,
and that evidence should meet the standards of the profession. But faith is, by
definition, a belief in that for which there is no proof: once a believe can be
supported by independent, scientific evidence, it loses its religious nature . . . .
.when considering any theory, ‘the evidence has to carry the day, not the fact that it
is Christian.’
However this view, though initially quite plausible, is ultimately unsatisfying for at least
three reasons.
First, it is no surprise to a room full of scholars in religion and
philosophy to learn that attempts to export this scientistic sort of model to the humanities
has been nothing short of complete failure. The topics under discussion in the
humanities simply are not amenable to adjudication simply by appeal to the empirical
evidence as disputes concerning personal identity, the adequacy of the categorical
imperative, and the compatibility of freedom and determinism make quite clear. More
important is the fact that, in the post-Kuhnian era, there are few people that think that this
methodological constraint applies even in science itself.
The second reason for this is that scholars in all disciplines are aware of the fact
that there are numerous framing beliefs that are accepted and put to use even though we
have no empirical or otherwise publicly available evidence which demonstrates their
truth. For example, scholars are almost universally committed to the claims such as (a)
that people of different races and genders merit the same measure of moral respect, (b)
that there is a mind independent material world, (c) that it is good to be especially
concerned with the poor and disadvantaged, etc. However, no scholars can offer
empirical evidence in favor of these claims, nor can most of them offer anything but
halting attempts at defending these beliefs at all.
Nevertheless, their commitment to
such claims is not tenuous or wavering—it is indeed quite firm.
This simply shows us
that framing beliefs are an ineliminable part of the baggage that we bring to scholarly
inquiry. The question is not whether or not they are permissible, but which ones we are
willing to permit.
Some might be unwilling to permit religious framing beliefs, but they
cannot argue against allowing them on the grounds offered in this argument.
The third reason this view is unsatisfying is because by excluding religiously
framed scholarship it unreasonably favors purely naturalistic framing. This problem is
evident in a number of areas in contemporary scholarship, none more striking than in the
area of cosmology. For a number of years now cosmologists have noted that the
universe is governed by an array of physical constants which appear to be balanced on a
razor’s edge so as to make life possible. The atheist cosmologist Fred Hoyle said of
these constants that “Such properties seem to run through the fabric of the natural world
like a thread of happy coincidences. But there are so many odd coincidences essential to
life that some explanation seems required to account for them." Some cosmologists,
finding no defensible natural explanation for this apparent fine-tuning of the universe for
life, argue that in the absence of such explanations, the only reasonable hypothesis is that
the apparent design is indeed actual design. From this they argue that the best
explanation for such universal fine-tuning is the existence of a supernatural designing
mind.
Other scientists have argued instead that the explanation for the apparent fine-
tuning of our universe is that this universe is simply one among innumerable universes
each of which has a different set of constants governing its activities. One might
wonder what sort of evidence these cosmologists have for the existence of these “other
universes.” In a revealing article in a recent issue of the journal Scientific American tells
us. In the article, the author, provides an impressive array of graphs and charts showing
that our universe is indeed fine-tuned for life. He then offers the “many universe”
explanation for this fine-tuning as follows, “Cosmologists infer the presence of [these]
universes by scrutinizing the properties of our universe. These properties, including the
strength of the forces of nature and the number of observable space-times dimensions
were established by random processes during the birth of our universe. Yet the have
exactly the values needed to sustain life. This suggests the existence of other universes
with other values.” The reader might wonder why it suggests other universes rather than
a designer. The answer to this question is that the author approaches the question at
hand within a naturalistic frame. The existence of this fine-tuning suggests other
universe because . . . . the only alternative is that the universe is designed—something
that, on this way of framing the problem, is excluded apriori.
This example is meant to show how the attempt to exclude religiously-framed
scholarship is not as innocent as it appears. By making such an exclusionary proposal,
the defender of this exclusion rules out certain avenues explanation apriori, even when
such explanations appear to have a great deal of initial plausibility.
What about the second argument?
Does religiously framed scholarship rule out
dialogue between disputing factions within the academy?
There is certainly no reason to
think so. Philosophers are quite accustomed to considering disputes between Kantians
and Hegelians, analytic and Continental stances, Marxists and capitalists, and so on. In
many respects disputes between these factions are disputes between individuals adopting
conflicting frames. How then can such disputes be resolved?
In some cases we can
attempt to look at particular components of the disputants positions and consider their
plausibility in isolation: who has a more plausible conception of labor: the Marxist or the
capitalist?
But in other cases, resolving disputes between such disputants will require
considering where their “webs of belief” lead us in their totality. Which “view of
things” leaves us with a more satisfying position overall?
Which “worldview” confronts
the fewest “anamolies” to use a Kuhnian phrase.
Asking such questions should make it clear that it may not be possible to resolve
disputes like these in such a way that every rational person would be compelled to adopt
one position rather than another. But that doesn’t mean that we lack rational grounds for
engaging in these disputes at all.
Let me now give brief consideration to the final argument against religiously
framed scholarship—the one that claims that such framing could not possible be relevant.
Can religious framing potentially contribute something to academic scholarship?
not in a position to answer for the chemist or the horticulturist.
I am
But philosophy is
another matter, and here it is clear not only that such background assumptions can make a
difference, but that they have.
But before I mention a couple of examples, let me add a word or two about what
sorts of presuppositions scholars like Marsden or Plantinga have in mind here, and how
these might function in a research program.
Do Marsden and Plantinga think it
appropriate to begin an article in a journal of anthropology or musicology by citing
relevant passages of a purported divine revelation as evidence?
If so, then the views of
those critics who have claimed that such research cannot have a place in the modern
academy simply because it must take as its starting point claims which are rejected by the
majority of scholars seem to have at least some force. One cannot simply begin an
article by citing passages of purported revelation as data, can they?
The answer for scholars Plantinga and Marsden is: “that depends.” The
community of contemporary Western Christian philosophers has conducted their research
programs on two distinct levels.
On the one hand, they have sought to approach the
traditional issues in philosophy in a way that is informed by their religious beliefs, but
which do use utilize the religious beliefs as evidence. So, for example, a religious
believer might well be committed to some or a number of the following claims: mentality
is not essentially physical, there is an objective structure to the physical world, some
moral claims are objectively true, human cognitive capacities are suitably equipped–by
design–to come to know at least some truths about the objective moral and physical
structure of the world, the world is not eternal, natural laws are not inviolable, human
beings consciously survive physical death, human beings are free in such a way that they
can be morally responsibile for their actions, etc. Such assumptions do not need to
figure into a research program in as evidence, though such presuppositions might limit the
alternatives one is willing to countenance when developing theories on the nature of
minds, or free choice, or ethics, to name three examples. Thus, if one has religious
grounds for thinking that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism,
one will look to defend views of action and the mind that preclude determinism. If one
thinks that physicalism precludes individual conscious survival of bodily death, one will
look to defend a non-physicalist theory of mind. And so on. Religious beliefs do not
have to figure in as evidence in the defense of such positions within the larger
community, but they will provide prima facie (and maybe ultima facie) direction for
research for the religious believer with such commitments.
On the other hand, Christian (and to a lesser extent Jewish) philosophers have
sometimes used religious tradition or revelation as evidence, when engaged in certain
specific kinds of philosophical scholarship. This can be seen most clearly in areas such
as philosophical theology. When engaging in this sort of scholarly endeavor, religious
philosophers might address intramural disputes among those who are willing to take
purported religious revelation as commonly accepted data. Thus, journals focusing on
the philosophy of religion, and even more general philosophy journals, will include
articles discussing distinctively religious doctrines such as atonement, the Trinity, the
Incarnation, post-mortem punishment and reward, petitionary prayer, etc. In such cases,
taking purported revelation as data might well be appropriate.
The larger issue that these recent developments present to the larger academic
community are obvious. The emergence and advocacy of such faith-based perspectives
on scholarship will force us all to be reflective on what sorts of presuppositions and
research programs we are willing to countenance in our disciplines. But however we
come down on this issue, mere ad hoc exclusions of the sorts of faith-based perspectives
described here are unwarranted.