Rick Santorum has made a number of outlandish statements recently during this presidential campaign that appear derive from his religious worldview, ranging from the claim that contraception is ‘harmful to women’ to the claim that birth control encourages more abortions. But while his criticism of President Obama’s encouragement of Americans to attend college, calling such aspirations snobby, was also off the mark-those with a college degree, for example, have been shown to vastly greater earning potential and job opportunities than those without one-his claim that many students who enter college with a ‘faith commitment’ leave college without one may in fact have some basis in reality. However, the conclusion he draws from this claim is precisely wrong.
View Photo Gallery: Scenes of religious faith meeting politics in the 2012 campaign.
Mr. Santorum views this apparent facet of higher education as a danger, and his proposed solution is simple-less higher education and more faith.
As a faculty member at an institution of higher education, and as a scientist, however, I question the basic premise that loss of faith is a bad thing. If it is true that those who are more educated have a greater tendency to question their religious faith, shouldn’t we consider that this might be telling us more about religious faith than about how harmful getting a college degree can be?
Why do we so readily accept in our society the claim that blind religious faith is a virtue, and the lack of faith as a defect? A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social found in a survey of Canadian college students and American adult that atheists as a group are the least trusted members of society, on par only with rapists.
Surely in no other area of human activity do we place such great value on accepting claims without seeking to establish their veracity. One of the purposes of education is to teach young people how to question pre-conceived notions and to base conclusions on evidence in order to more capable of performing in their jobs and in their role as citizens.
It is no accident that 90 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science, the nation’s most prestigious group of scientific researchers, claim to have no religious faith. This is not a group of ‘indoctrinated liberals’ who have an agenda to destroy our morality. It is a group of individuals who are trained to question and explore, and in the process have helped produce the knowledge base that powers our modern society.
Joe Raedle
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Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum speaks during a campaign stop at the St. Mary’s Cultural & Banquet Center on February 27, 2012 in Livonia, Michigan.
An educated workforce, especially in areas of science and engineering, is the key to economic health in the 21st century, and an informed populace is the basis of a healthy democracy. If it is true that education tends to reduce religious faith then we have to decide which is ultimately more valuable.
If, in order to protect religious belief, areas of study that may cause students to question their beliefs be removed from the curriculum, or even if we discourage teachers from discussing such areas in class or discourage young people from seeking higher education for fear they may be exposed to them, then we risk devolving down the slippery slope of irrationality, at the bottom of which we observe societies like those in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
Santorum’s own choice of faith over empirical knowledge provides perhaps the best example of why blindly accepting faith as virtue is misplaced. When decrying colleges as indoctrination mills, he also described how hard he had to resist the pressures in college to question his faith. In so doing, he also resisted the opportunity to learn about how the world actually works.
As a politician on our national stage, his professed ignorance about the natural world is almost unprecedented. His statements on issues ranging from evolution to the evidence for human induced global warming, and most recently about contraception and birth control only serve to demonstrate that a worldview based on closed-minded faith rather than empirical evidence can result in nonsense as a basis of public policy.
Lawrence M. Krauss is Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and author, most recently of “A Universe from Nothing.”
