Cambridge 02138
Le professeur, global warming and deficits, outside the academy
FAITH AND UNBELIEF
I am surprised that Katherine Dunn (“Faculty Faith,” July-August, page 15) does not refer to the main historical source of the higher percentage of “nonbelievers” among faculty than in the general public. It derives, like the secular university itself, from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and its embarrassment about and hostility toward religion. Harvard historian Crane Brinton has stated, “The spirit of the Enlightenment is hostile to organized religion....The corrosiveness of the Enlightenment is nowhere clearer than in its attack on Christianity.” The result is the continuing embarrassment about religion in the academy and the fact that divinity schools in secular universities are usually at the bottom of the status hierarchy. I speak as one raised by fine atheist parents in Greenwich Village and with graduate study in physics and the philosophy of religion.
Owen C. Thomas
Berkeley, Calif.
Academics’ belief or nonbelief in God is only one part of their views on religion. Organized religion provides powerful rituals and supportive communities for the like-minded, which help to stave off anxiety and despair at the present state of affairs by connecting participants to rich heritages of music, architecture, liturgy, and ethical activity. For just such reasons, one can be an agnostic and also an adherent of an organized religion.
David C. Balderston
New York City
It may not take “a longitudinal study over decades” to find out why nonbelievers are overrepresented among professors of psychology and biology. A simple question such as, “When did you become a nonbeliever?” might reveal that disbelief predated the choice of discipline. If so, maybe it wasn’t that psychology and biology made these professors into nonbelievers, as the article suggests, but rather that their disbelief contributed to their chosen career path.
Jorge Colapinto
Wynnewood, Pa.
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