Should Harvard University be stripped of its accreditation?

“[T]he fanatical atheists . . . are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’—cannot bear the music of the spheres.” (Albert Einstein) 

A few years ago, Professor David Holland — yes, he’s a son of Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Council of the Twelve, was interviewed regarding Mormonism and women.

The most amusing reaction that I saw to that interview came in response to a comment from a pseudonymous businessman who holds a doctorate in the biological sciences.  He is an extraordinarily dogmatic atheist who routinely expresses his militant and rather crude scientism on an atheistic ex-Mormon message board that I enjoy watching.  (He has boasted, for example, that, if an applicant for a science-related position in his company turned out to be a theist, that would essentially be an indicator of incompetence and would provide strong reason not to hire the applicant, since belief in God is obvious evidence of debilitating irrationality — a viewpoint that, if put into actual practice, might, for all I know, even violate federal law.)

David Holland is a professor at Harvard Divinity School.  And that fact doesn’t sit well with this particular atheist.  Reacting to the interview, he professes shock that divinity schools even exist in the twenty-first century West.  They’re  just vocational training programs, he says, based on mythology and unfounded beliefs.

Whereupon — and here’s the really funny part — another anonymous poster chimes in with the implicit demand that Harvard lose its accreditation.  “Here, here,” he says, presumably intending to say “Hear! Hear!”  “Accrediting bodies should not be allowed to extend any accreditation to institutions of higher learning that teaches [sic] both physical sciences and mythology (er, I mean religious studies). . . .  You cannot teach sorcery and science at the same time.”

So much for the rubes and irrational hicks at third-rate diploma mills like Harvard, Yale, Duke, Chicago, Claremont, Vanderbilt, Toronto, Oxford, and Cambridge!

Here here!  Schools that teaches stuff like that shouldn’t ought to be in business.  And decent folk shouldn’t have no dealings with them.

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One of the staple elements in the arsenal of the aggressive “New Atheism” is rhetoric about an ongoing battle between religion and science, pitting human rationality against irrational religious obscurantism — a battle in which religion, constantly on the retreat, has nonetheless managed to do great harm.

Few if any serious historians of science buy into that caricature any more, if, indeed, they ever really did.  But the general public, influenced by misreadings of and flat fictions about such things as the silencing of Galileo and the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” remains vulnerable to it.

Here’s an interesting article from an eminently qualified historian of science that takes quite a different view:

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0131.htm

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There might conceivably be worse ways of spending a few minutes than in reading my latest column in the Deseret News:

“The supposed scandal of multiple First Vision accounts”