{"id":61442,"date":"2018-05-31T17:06:06","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T23:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=61442"},"modified":"2018-09-05T09:53:38","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T15:53:38","slug":"should-harvard-university-be-stripped-of-its-accreditation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2018\/05\/should-harvard-university-be-stripped-of-its-accreditation.html","title":{"rendered":"Should Harvard University be stripped of its accreditation?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Harvard<\/a>
At Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the \u201cH\u201d stands for \u201cHicksville.\u201d
(Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c[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\u2014in their grudge against the traditional \u2018opium of the people\u2019\u2014cannot bear the music of the spheres.\u201d (Albert Einstein)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A few years ago, Professor David Holland \u2014 yes, he\u2019s a son of Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Council of the Twelve, was\u00a0interviewed<\/a> regarding Mormonism<\/a> and women.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0He 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. \u00a0(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 \u2014 a viewpoint that, if put into actual practice, might, for all I know, even violate federal law.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

David Holland is a professor at Harvard Divinity School. \u00a0And that fact doesn\u2019t sit well with this particular atheist. \u00a0Reacting to the interview, he professes shock that divinity schools even exist<\/em> in the twenty-first century West. \u00a0They\u2019re \u00a0just vocational training programs, he says, based on mythology and unfounded beliefs.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whereupon \u2014 and here\u2019s the really<\/em> funny part \u2014 another anonymous poster chimes in with the implicit demand that Harvard lose its accreditation. \u00a0\u201cHere, here,\u201d he says, presumably intending to say \u201cHear! Hear!\u201d \u00a0\u201cAccrediting bodies should not be allowed to extend any accreditation to institutions of higher learning that teaches [sic<\/em>] both physical sciences and mythology (er, I mean religious studies). . . . \u00a0You cannot teach sorcery and science at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here here! \u00a0Schools that teaches stuff like that shouldn\u2019t ought to be in business. \u00a0And decent folk shouldn\u2019t have no dealings with them.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the staple elements in the arsenal of the aggressive \u201cNew Atheism\u201d is rhetoric about an ongoing battle between religion and science, pitting human rationality against irrational religious obscurantism \u2014 a battle in which religion, constantly on the retreat, has nonetheless managed to do great harm.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Few if any serious historians of science buy into that caricature any more, if, indeed, they ever really did. \u00a0But the general public, influenced by misreadings of and flat fictions about such things as the silencing of Galileo and the Scopes \u201cMonkey Trial,\u201d remains vulnerable to it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an interesting article from an eminently qualified historian of science that takes quite a different view:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.catholiceducation.org\/articles\/science\/sc0131.htm<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There might conceivably be worse ways of spending a few minutes than in reading my latest column in the Deseret News<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe supposed scandal of multiple First Vision accounts\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u201c[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\u2014in their grudge against the traditional \u2018opium of the people\u2019\u2014cannot bear the music of the spheres.\u201d (Albert Einstein)\u00a0 \u00a0 A few years ago, Professor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nShould Harvard University be stripped of its accreditation?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    "he fanatical atheists . . . are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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