Harvard and Benedict in the Dock

It's not often that Pope Benedict and Harvard University stand accused as accomplices in a scheme to overemphasize the importance of faith to reason.  This op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education does so, focusing on the Pope's Regensburg speech and Harvard's (now abandoned) proposal to include religion in the core curriculum.  Here's an excerpt:

Of course one may attempt to apply reason to the study of faith, as the pope remarked. Because of my own efforts to defend science against religious attacks, I have had the opportunity recently to learn a tremendous amount from distinguished theologians. For example, I find fascinating the intellectual machinations that the Roman Catholic Church has used to accept historical facts associated with the evolution of life and, at the same time, to insist that the facts are consistent with a divine plan and free will.

But such analyses are esoteric at best. Why should college students or the religious faithful be held accountable for connecting reason and faith when reason is as irrelevant to the experience of religious faith as it is to, say, romantic love? As the French have known since Blaise Pascal's day, nearly four centuries ago, "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know."

It is true that religious faith has profoundly affected human history, and that students need to understand the role of religion in both the past and the present — for example, its impact on current American politics. But if Harvard feels that its graduates need such knowledge, should the university not expect them to get it through required courses in world or American history?

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, voiced similar concerns in The Harvard Crimson shortly after the Task Force on General Education released its report. Religious faith may have been a powerful historical force, but, Pinker argues, "so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism, class, and globalization. Why single religion out among all the major forces in history? ... For us to magnify the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs, is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism."