As a lover of argumentation and debate little gets me more excited than a rousing contest between two sides. The problem with loving to argue is that when a debate gets too one-sided it leaves the viewer feeling cheated, that there was so much left unsaid that it crippled the position of the losing side and made the debate stale and unfulfilling.

Maybe I love debate too much, but after reading the responses to Peter Weeks’ article “Faith is not a virtue,” I feel as if the case for why faith can be beneficial to learning at Gustavus was lost amongst other tangential arguments. Instead of reading about how monasteries served as centers of intellectual progression and education, how madrasssas served as bastions of learning and history during the dark ages in Europe or a quotation from a notable speaker on this subject, I read about how Christian morality predated human morality and that people confuse faith with rational thinking.

To be fair, Mr. Legeros and the FCA leadership team made compelling points about faith and role it plays in an individual’s life and purpose, but largely they didn’t address the thesis of Mr. Weeks’ article, “that faith is in principle opposed to learning.” On its face the thesis seems pretty straightforward—how can something rooted in a lack of verifiable evidence (according to Merriam-Webster) ever support something that is rooted in evidence (math, science, etc.)? The answer to this question can be found within the motivation of people to learn.

A person’s desire to learn about the world around him or her can be rooted in becoming closer to god or a creator. What better way to be closer to god than to learn about the world he purportedly created? “We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.” —Albert Einstein

I won’t talk too much about the broader topic of faith-based morality vs. humanistic-based morality, but since it has been brought up I’ll touch on it. It is easy to chalk up the evils of fundamentalist religious zealotry to the institution of religion as a whole, but I would caution how these connections are made.

The vast majority of people of faith here at Gustavus would view these acts of evil in much the same way scientists view propagators of pseudoscience: as people who take advantage of the gullibility of humankind and aren’t true scientists. The overwhelming majority of a religious group considers people who claim violence is justified by their religion unfaithful to the core precepts of that religion. In this way, people of faith and people of scientific learning share the sentiment that the actual goals and objectives of their respective viewpoint are being distorted by another group that claims to be infallibly correct and immune to criticism.

Faith as it exists at Gustavus is not diametrically opposed to learning. In fact, it can act as a motivation for learning about the world around us. While learning (especially scientific inquiry) and religion seem to be at odds with each other, they may in fact be integral to the continued survival of the other. I believe that Albert Einstein put it best when he said, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”