STUDENT LEARNING SET IN THE FAITH AND REASON LITERATURE

STUDENT LEARNING SET IN THE FAITH AND REASON LITERATURE David W. Kale, Ph.D. Director of Assessment Professor of Communication Mount Vernon Nazarene University

“When therefore you despise or depreciate reason, you must not imagine you are doing God service: Least of all are you promoting the cause of God when you are endeavouring to exclude reason out of religion….Do we not glory in this, that the whole of our religion is a ‘reasonable service?’ Yea, and that every part of it, when it is duly performed, is the highest exercise of our understanding?” - John Wesley

“To believe is nothing other than to think with assent….Believers are also thinkers; in believing, they think and in thinking they believe….If faith does not think, it is nothing.” St. Augustine

“Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge.” John Locke

“No human authority is set over the reason of the purified soul, for it is able to arrive at clear truth.” St. Augustine

The lesson of history in this millennium … shows that this is the path to follow: it is necessary not to abandon the passion for ultimate truth, the eagerness to search for it or the audacity to forge new paths in the search. It is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willingly run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good, and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason.” John Paul II

Faith and reason both come from the same source; therefore there can be no contradiction. St. Thomas Aquinas

“I do not mean that we must consult reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be made out by natural principles, and if it cannot, that then we may reject it: but consult it we must, and by it examine whether it be a revelation from God or no: and if reason finds it to be revealed from God, reason then declares it as much as for any other truth, and makes it one of her dictates.” • John Locke

“…the Church cannot but set great value upon reason’s drive to attain goals which render people’s lives ever more worthy.” • John Paul II

“When John Wesley told a group of ministers to become proficient in logic as part of their calling, he was expressing a deep understanding of the Christian faith as that faith is depicted in the Bible and throughout church history.” • J.P. Moreland

“Faith believes what God says and then seeks to understand it; for its duty, its goal and its reward is to know the God who thus reveals Himself.” • St. Augustine

“Faith asks that its object be understood with the help of reason, and at the summit of its searching reason acknowledges that it cannot do without what faith presents.” • John Paul II

“Augustine saw that in order for any person to know anything, he must begin by believing something. Credo ut intelligam; I believe in order that I may understand. Augustine saw that this meant that faith is not simply a religious activity; nor is it optional. Faith is operative in every person’s life. If it weren’t we would not know anything.” Ronald Nash

“A wise life of virtue and knowledge comes to those who, with humility of heart and reverence for God,work hard at using their minds to study, to seek understanding, to capture truth.” • J.P.Moreland

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind • Mark Noll

“Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature….It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that depends on illusions.” • Karl Marx

“Marx suggests that religion arises from a perverted world consciousness-prevented from a correct, or right, or natural condition. Religion involves a cognitive dysfunction, a disorder or perversion that is apparently brought about, somehow, by an unhealthy or perverted social order. Religious belief, according to Marx…is a lack of mental and emotional health. The believer is therefore in an etymological sense insane.” Alvin Plantinga

“If ever there was a case of a lame excuse we have it here. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it. In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes….Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.” • Sigmund Freud

“Freud’s critique…is that theistic belief arises from a psychological mechanism he calls ‘wish-fulfillment…Beliefs produced by wish-fulfillment aren’t oriented toward reality; their function is not to produce true belief, but belief with some other property (psychological comfort, for example.)” • Alvin Plantinga

“According to Freud, theistic belief is produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly, but the process that produces it – wishful thinking – does not have the production of true belief as its purpose; it is aimed, instead, at something like enabling us to carry on in the grim and threatening world in which we find ourselves.” Alvin Plantinga

“Still further, Freud thinks, once we see that theistic and religious belief has its origin in wishful thinking, we will also see that it is false.” Alvin Plantinga

“So the fundamental thrust of Hume’s suggestion, as of Freud’s, is that religious belief doesn’t emerge from the segment of our whole cognitive economy that is, as we might put it, aimed at the production of true belief; it comes, instead, from a desire for security, or a fear of death or whatever. Of course what underlies Hume’s ironic jape is the idea that Christian belief goes directly contrary to the deliverances of reason and experience.” • Alvin Plantinga

“The frustration resulting from the human inability to ultimately satisfy all desires is just one manifestation of the tension between the finite and infinite poles of our being. Note the tendency of many individuals to seek escape from reality through flights of fantasy. Rather than confront the truth about the closed frontiers of their existence, many people prefer to live in a world of dreams and illusions.” • Ronald Nash

“Both Descartes and Locke were impressed by the enormous disagreement in religious and philosophical matters; this means, of course, that error pervades our belief in these areas.” • Alvin Plantinga

“…such belief [in the Bible] is really a voluntarily induced schizophrenia, and probably a fruitful source of infantilism and hysterical anxieties about belief which are so frequently found in the area of religion, at least in its more uncritical areas.” (Emphasis mine) • Northrup Frye

“Even in early Christian times there were not wanting well-meaning men who, not having much reason themselves, imagined that reason was of no use in religion; yea, rather that it was a hinderance to it. And there has not been wanting a succession of men who have believed and asserted the same thing. But never was there a greater number of these in the Christian Church, at least in Britain, than at this day.” John Wesley

“Naturalism asserts, first of all, that the primary constituents of reality are material entities. I am not denying the reality – the real existence – of such things as hopes, plans, behavior, language, logical inferences and so on. What I am asserting, however, is that anything that is real is, in the last analysis, explicable as a material entity or as a form or function or action of a material entity.” William Halverson

W.K. Clifford argues that it is always wrong, everywhere, to believe something without sufficient evidence. He further argues that there is not sufficient evidence to support religious beliefs, therefore it is irrational to hold religious beliefs. Ronald Nash

The empiricist believes that all knowledge begins with sense experience.

“…a major cause of our current cultural crisis consists of a world view shift from a Judeo-Christian understanding of reality to a post-Christian one. Moreover, this shift itself expresses a growing anti-intellectualism in the church resulting in a marginalization of Christianity in society and the emergence of the most secular culture the world has seen. That secular culture is now playing out the implications of ideas that have come to be widely accepted in a social context in which the church is no longer a major participant in the world of ideas.” • J.P.Moreland

“…there are signs of a widespread mistrust of universal or absolute statements, especially among those who think that truth is born of consensus and not of a consonance between intellect and objective reality.” John Paul II

“Our modern post-Christian society is perilously close to regarding Christian claims as mere figments in the minds of the faithful.” J.P.Moreland

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe nothing; rather the problem is that they will believe anything. G.K.Chesterton

“Sundered from truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as persons ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data….It has happened, therefore, that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation toward the truth, has wilted under the weight of so much [information] and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being.” John Paul II

“God is not honored when His people use bad arguments for what may actually be correct conclusions. Proportionality involves distinguishing a conclusion from arguments used to reach it and recognizing that rejecting certain arguments is the same as rejecting a conclusion.” J.P.Moreland

Now it’s time to get to meddling…

How is it that many faculty will not accept anecdotal reasoning for even the most inconsequential issues (which they shouldn’t), but will take a couple of “thank you” notes from students in a class as evidence that students learned a lot in that course? Remember, God is not honored by bad arguments for what may be correct conclusions. The poor argument may lead us to reject the conclusion.

Most faculty know that a common (the dominant?) mode of student study for exams is to cram for two days before the test and then remember little of that information two weeks after the test is over. How is it that they still without question consider course grades a valid source of assessment data?

What are we doing to reduce the likelihood that students can produce evidence of learning without really trying? (I.e., manageable class sizes, using classroom assessment techniques, spot checks on student learning, use of multiple drafts of written documents, research on what really produces student learning, etc.)

Why use wishful thinking as a means of arriving at a conclusion that effective student learning has occurred in a classroom and leave the impression that Freud was right? Is this the mode of thinking Christian faculty members and administrators use to document that they have been good stewards of the truth the Lord has shared with them? If it is, then perhaps this is the mode of thinking they use in all aspects of their spiritual lives.

Are we really passionate for the truth? Do we really want to know how much student learning has occurred in our classrooms? Let’s not perpetuate the scandal of the evangelical mind by weak, sloppy arguments about the nature of student learning.

If the evidence shows that students have not engaged in an educational process that is rightly aimed at the production of true belief, how open are we to changing the process to increase the likelihood that this will happen? What changes have we made in our educational processes that were really driven by the desire to improve student learning? What documentation do we have as to whether in fact it succeeded?

What significant budget decisions have been driven by a desire to improve the quality of student learning? What priority does this matter have in building the overall institutional budget?

What discussions have been conducted with the Board of Trustees regarding the quality of student learning? What decisions have been made by the Board of Trustees that have a direct impact on the quality of student learning?

KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF AND STUDENT LEARNING

TERMS DEFINED • Acquaintance knowledge – knowledge attained by direct experience • Belief – propositions accepted based on the testimony of another • True beliefs – Propositions accepted on the testimony of another that are in fact true. • False beliefs - Propositions accepted on the testimony of another that are in fact false.

BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE • These concepts are obviously very important when we think of the spiritual life of the Christian. They are also, however, important for understanding what happens in student learning. We need to demonstrate that we highly value the role of reason in both of these processes.

FROM BELIEF TO KNOWLEDGE • Do you remember when something you accepted on the word of a teacher (belief) you later encountered by personal experience (acquaintance knowledge)? • What was it? What were the conditions that provided you with the acquaintance knowledge? What changes occurred when your belief turned to knowledge?

FROM BELIEF TO KNOWLEDGE • I remember learning from a teacher that evaluative, rather than descriptive, language tends to make the other person defensive and reduces the quality of communication. • I distinctly remember later witnessing a conversation where one person used very evaluative language toward another person and seeing how defensive the listener became. It certainly reduced the quality of their communication! • My belief turned into acquaintance knowledge and I became much more sensitive about the use of evaluative language.

FROM BELIEF TO KNOWLEDGE IN THE DISCIPLINES • Within each discipline, what understandings do you want students to have based on acquaintance knowledge rather than belief, based on experience rather than on the testimony of the faculty member? • What is your plan for facilitating that learning? • What process do you have for evaluating whether the learning occurred and then improving the process for future students?

STUDENT LEARNING SET IN THE FAITH AND REASON LITERATURE