Monday, January 22, 2007
Lead a Horse to Water
Alvin Saperstein, a professor of physics and editor of Physics and Society, a newsletter of the American Physical Society, has an article in the January-February AAUP Academe Online on the problems of teaching science to biblical literalists.
Saperstein suggests, that "a fundamental difficulty is that many of the students apparently don’t have a sophisticated knowledge of their own religious heritage."
Saperstein suggests, that "a fundamental difficulty is that many of the students apparently don’t have a sophisticated knowledge of their own religious heritage."
They seem unaware of the great body of religious writing by scholars and clergy of all faiths that manages to keep religion in the Bible and the world while not abandoning science. An appropriate response to the biblical literalist problem might be to point out students’ gap in understanding to them—not to try to teach them their own religious traditions but indicating, with appropriate citations, that most religious traditions are much more complex than biblical literalism suggests.
