AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2007 > July > 11
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Why are more educated people less likely to believe the Bible is literally true?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Diane Glass, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
The disciplines of science and religion may be mutually exclusive but can, and do, live happily married in the human spirit without a piece of paper or ring. Most of the time. The rest of the time there’s a lot of bickering: science demands proof and literalist fundamentalism demands wholesale belief.
Not surprisingly, fundamentalists are increasing in numbers because we struggle to process all of the information we read on our laptops, Blackberries, and television sets. Before you know it, microchips will be embedded into our visual cortex, taking wireless to a whole new dimension.
Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up and know the milk that you drink is good for you and not a cancerous time bomb? And wouldn’t it be nice to know if you didn’t accept Jesus as your Savior before death that you won’t be sent to Hell? It would, but I’m not sure anyone will ever know the answers to these questions.
That’s why you’ll find a lot of families at church who don’t necessarily share all the views of the Church they attend. The data may show the more educated the individual, the more they shy away from literalism, but the data also show a positive correlation between a parishioner’s educational level and church attendance in Vol. 26 of the Review of Religious Research.
An educated parishioner can participate in the social aspects of religion without buying the horse and the cart. There are other sources of truth not found behind a Priest’s confessional door. And there is still room for magical thinking in a rational world.
But Fundamentalism demands a moral imperialism that is unyielding to outside interpretation. It insists that those of us who cannot accept a single belief when interpreting the mysteries in life, miss the beauty of taking that giant leap.
I’d argue that literalists are the ones missing out. They miss out on the wonder of accepting mutiple truths that make our lives so unique. Because someone who can embrace mystery and science is someone who thinks independently, someone who is more tolerant, someone who is open, someone who feels comfortable with real mystery.
Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
I remember my shock in graduate school, when a Teacher’s Assistant assumed that “only poorly educated, simple people believe the Bible is literally true” - and how shocked she was when several highly educated, critical-thinking graduate students defended Biblical literalism. A May Gallup poll showed that one third of Americans do take the Bible literally, but - sadly - that the more educated they were, the less likely that was to be the case. Those with college and graduate-school educations were actually most likely to believe the Bible was “inspired” by God (not just man-made “ancient fables or history”) but least likely to take it literally.
Why? Well, our culture is led and populated by those who have had Biblical skepticism drummed into them by humanistic college professors. If a student manages to arrive at college with literal views of the Bible intact, his “naiveté” is quickly attacked by professors - classroom sages who are overwhelmingly humanistic and liberal in their own worldviews. When the American Enterprise Institute tracked professors’ political affiliations, they found a huge disparity between the number of conservative and liberal professors on most campuses. At Cornell, for example, out of 166 leading professors, only 6 were conservative, for a ratio of 26:1. The best ratio found was still pathetic, 3:1 at the University of Houston.
Ironically, the intelligencia’s increasing distrust of the Bible coincides with ever-more- significant archaeological and geological findings that consistently support rather than disprove its authenticity - even including its depiction of certain events usually derided as fable. For example, Dr. Bryant Wood, an archeologist, mechanical engineer and Director of Associates of Biblical Research, gained international acclaim via findings that correctly identified the age of the ancient city of Jericho and how it was destroyed - which precisely matched the seemingly mythological biblical accounts.
In a phone interview, Dr. Wood explained that, “What we have in the Bible is an eyewitness account. And archaeology has born out that account. It has never contradicted the Bible.”
I wish our society and educators were able to hear the other side of the story - and realize that it is actually more intellectually consistent to believe even the seemingly supernatural accounts, in a book that is the most thoroughly researched and proven document in history.