Religion and academia

From David Bernstein:

Outrageous, If True: According to the Columbia Spectator, Barnard religion professor Alan Segal was asked by the university to provide a list of archeology experts to comment on the controversial tenure case of Nadia Abu El-Haj’s tenure–archeologists who “preferably” were not Jewish. Segal quite properly refused, noting that religion “has nothing to do with what you say as a professional.”

El-Haj’s “scholarly” work is premised on the idea that Jewish Israeli archeologists invented evidence of ancient Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel to justify Zionist claims to the land. Besides the issue of discrimination, which would be unthinkable in any other context related to any other group, the request to Segal seems like an implicit endorsement of her thesis, that Jewish archeologists cannot be trusted to be objective in their work related to Israel (which makes one wonder why the university would trust El-Haj, of Palestinian Arab origin, to be objective).

James Miller replies thus:

If I were Nadia Abu El-Haj I would prefer, all else being equal, that Jewish people not be among those evaluating my scholarship for tenure. So as not to be accused of anti-Semitism let me say that my mother and wife (although not my father or myself) are Jewish. But based on my experience, Jewish people on average have a far more positive view towards Israel than non-Jewish people do. El-Haj’s scholarship directly attacks Israel and so on average I would suspect that her scholarship would get a more favorable review from non-Jewish than Jewish archeologists.

In a world without bias the religion of El-Haj’s reviewers wouldn’t matter. But we don’t live in such a world. Given that this bias exists, it is rational to try to minimize the harm it might cause El-Haj.

Imagine that El-Haj’s research consisted of archeological evidence that she tried to use to disprove the historical accuracy of parts of the Koran. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to try to avoid Islamic reviewers for her tenure case?

Religious beliefs often cause people to be bias towards those who attack such beliefs. To deny this, or to assume that college professors are too professional to allow such bias to influence them, is silly.

Religious people are often biased towards their religion — almost always so. Academic scholarship, such as archeology, is (or should be) about analysing and collating facts about something and then dispassionately drawing conclusions from these facts.

Religion doesn’t work like that: people have religious beliefs either because they were brought up with them, or they converted to a religion. The first reason is an absurd reason to believe anything; if someone said that they believed that the number of prime numbers was finite, and they believed it because their father and his forefathers had believed that, we’d laugh at them. And the second reason is little better: to believe in something because you want it to be true, i.e. because it gives you some emotional satisfaction, is ludicrous; if an archeologist said they believed they’d found the tomb of King Arthur, on the grounds that they have an emotional attachment to Arthurian legend, people would be incredulous.

So religion can best be thought of as a form of diseased thinking, and religious ways of thinking are thus at odds with what academic ways of thinking ought to be. It may be that a religious person is capable of thinking rationally on subjects outside their religion, but on subjects close to their religion, they probably won’t be.

As well as religious bias, someone might have nationalistic bias towards their country. (Nationalistic bias is similar to religious bias, but differs in one respect: countries exist, and God does not. Religious people are in the business of building intellectual superstructures around an entity that doesn’t exist.)

There are many parts of the world where history is a matter of current political controversy — Israel is one of those places — and as James Miller says it’s silly to expect people with religious or nationalist sentiments to be unbiased when evaluating data relating to such history.