What had been the effects of higher education on religions and beliefs?

Question

Please tell us in your opinion what you believe the impact of higher education have had on people's beliefs and religion.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Pastor Billy says: you have this question in reverse. The right question should be, What have been the effects of religions on higher education?

In our Western civilisation assuming of course you are from this part of the world the Catholic Church established the university system of higher education. Religion and science have gone hand and hand together except for the last 20-50 years where the secular atheist media attempts to present otherwise.

I will return with further information


Try finding the book : How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

here is a small brief,

By far the book’s longest chapter is "The Church and Science." We have all heard a great deal about the Church’s alleged hostility toward science. What most people fail to realize is that historians of science have spent the past half-century drastically revising this conventional wisdom, arguing that the Church’s role in the development of Western science was far more salutary than previously thought. I am speaking not about Catholic apologists but about serious and important scholars of the history of science such as J.L. Heilbron, A.C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, and Thomas Goldstein.

It is all very well to point out that important scientists, like Louis Pasteur, have been Catholic. More revealing is how many priests have distinguished themselves in the sciences. It turns out, for instance, that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Fr. Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher (also called "master of a hundred arts" for the breadth of his knowledge). Fr. Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic theory.

In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits

had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics – all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents [Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189].

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Fr. J.B. Macelwane, who wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America, in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Fr. Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible. Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the nineteenth century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments, and cartography. In Central and South America the Jesuits worked primarily in meteorology and seismology, essentially laying the foundations of those disciplines there. The scientific development of these countries, ranging from Ecuador to Lebanon to the Philippines, is indebted to Jesuit efforts.

The Galileo case is often cited as evidence of Catholic hostility toward science, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization accordingly takes a closer look at the Galileo matter. For now, just one little-known fact: Catholic cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, and Rome were constructed to function as solar observatories. No more precise instruments for observing the sun’s apparent motion could be found anywhere in the world. When Johannes Kepler posited that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini verified Kepler’s position through observations he made in the Basilica of San Petronio in the heart of the Papal States. Cassini, incidentally, was a student of Fr. Riccioli and Fr. Francesco Grimaldi, the great astronomer who also discovered the diffraction of light, and even gave the phenomenon its name.

I’ve tried to fill the book with little-known facts like these.

To say that the Church played a positive role in the development of science has now become absolutely mainstream, even if this new consensus has not yet managed to trickle down to the general public. In fact, Stanley Jaki, over the course of an extraordinary scholarly career, has developed a compelling argument that in fact it was important aspects of the Christian worldview that accounted for why it was in the West that science enjoyed the success it did as a self-sustaining enterprise. Non-Christian cultures did not possess the same philosophical tools, and in fact were burdened by conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science. Jaki extends this thesis to seven great cultures: Arabic, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya. In these cultures, Jaki explains, science suffered a "stillbirth." My book gives ample attention to Jaki’s work.

Economic thought is another area in which more and more scholars have begun to acknowledge the previously overlooked role of Catholic thinkers. Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, paid tribute to the overlooked contributions of the late Scholastics – mainly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish theologians – in his magisterial History of Economic Analysis (1954). "[I]t is they," he wrote, "who come nearer than does any other group to having been the ‘founders’ of scientific economics." In devoting scholarly attention to this unfortunately neglected chapter in the history of economic thought, Schumpeter would be joined by other accomplished scholars over the course of the twentieth century, including Professors Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, and Alejandro Chafuen.

The Church also played an indispensable role in another essential development in Western civilization: the creation of the university. The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, come to us directly from the medieval world. And it is no surprise that the Church should have done so much to foster the nascent university system, since the Church, according to historian Lowrie Daly, "was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."

The popes and other churchmen ranked the universities among the great jewels of Christian civilization. It was typical to hear the University of Paris described as the "new Athens" – a designation that calls to mind the ambitions of the great Alcuin from the Carolingian period of several centuries earlier, who sought through his own educational efforts to establish a new Athens in the kingdom of the Franks. Pope Innocent IV (1243–54) described the universities as "rivers of science which water and make fertile the soil of the universal Church," and Pope Alexander IV (1254–61) called them "lanterns shining in the house of God." And the popes deserved no small share of the credit for the growth and success of the university system. "Thanks to the repeated intervention of the papacy," writes historian Henri Daniel-Rops, "higher education was enabled to extend its boundaries; the Church, in fact, was the matrix that produced the university, the nest whence it took flight."

As a matter of fact, among the most important medieval contributions to modern science was the essentially free inquiry of the university system, where scholars could debate and discuss propositions, and in which the utility of human reason was taken for granted. Contrary to the grossly inaccurate picture of the Middle Ages that passes for common knowledge today, medieval intellectual life made indispensable contributions to Western civilization. In The Beginnings of Western Science (1992), David Lindberg writes:

[I]t must be emphatically stated that within this educational system the medieval master had a great deal of freedom. The stereotype of the Middle Ages pictures the professor as spineless and subservient, a slavish follower of Aristotle and the Church fathers (exactly how one could be a slavish follower of both, the stereotype does not explain), fearful of departing one iota from the demands of authority. There were broad theological limits, of course, but within those limits the medieval master had remarkable freedom of thought and expression; there was almost no doctrine, philosophical or theological, that was not submitted to minute scrutiny and criticism by scholars in the medieval university.

"[S]cholars of the later Middle Ages," concludes Lindberg, "created a broad intellectual tradition, in the absence of which subsequent progress in natural philosophy would have been inconceivable."

Historian of science Edward Grant concurs with this judgment:

What made it possible for Western civilization to develop science and the social sciences in a way that no other civilization had ever done before? The answer, I am convinced, lies in a pervasive and deep-seated spirit of inquiry that was a natural consequence of the emphasis on reason that began in the Middle Ages. With the exception of revealed truths, reason was enthroned in medieval universities as the ultimate arbiter for most intellectual arguments and controversies. It was quite natural for scholars immersed in a university environment to employ reason to probe into subject areas that had not been explored before, as well as to discuss possibilities that had not previously been seriously entertained

The creation of the university, the commitment to reason and rational argument, and the overall spirit of inquiry that characterized medieval intellectual life amounted to "a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world…though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged. Perhaps it will always retain the status it has had for the past four centuries as the best-kept secret of Western civilization."


Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [send him mail] holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Columbia. His books include the New York Times (and LRC) bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, and the just-released How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.

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Some Amazon reviews

Reviewer: Kevin Beckman (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews

About the Catholic Church that is. Ask the average layperson about the Middle Ages and he'll probably say it was a time of ignorance and superstition, where the Church ruthlessly stamped out dissent. Surprise! Woods shows just the opposite is true: it was the Church that gave us the university system. It was the Church, the monks specifically, that preserved the wisdom of the ancient world and drove technological innovation for centuries.

But the Church crippled scientific progress right? Wrong. Woods proves again that just the opposite is true: science as we know it would not have arisen without Christian presuppositions, i.e. God's creations operate according to laws that can be discovered by man. This is in stark contrast to other ancient cultures which believed nature was unpredictable and the gods were capricious.

Charity, morality, economics, international law, the idea that all men are created equal, and many other things we take for granted all have foundations in Catholic thought. The title is accurate: the Church built Western civilization. I'm sorry the book is so short at 225 pages. Each chapter could easily become a book in its own right. Woods has a gift - also evident in his other books - for swift narratives, delightful anecdotes, and discovering astonishing facts that were there all along but somehow became great secrets. Woods says that our debt to the Church is one of history's greatest secrets. I hope more people are able to learn this secret. Woods's book is a great start, and the bibliography provides other excellent sources.


Source(s):

http://www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/wes...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcmaken/mcmak...

Source(s):
http://sg.answers.yahoo.com/question/ind...

http://sg.answers.yahoo.com/question/ind...


In today's secular education we must return to our roots which are sadly missing. Religion in the west is not at odds with science and neither should science be at odds with religion.

Answer 2

It really does depend on the person. A person's core beliefs may not be altered by being exposed to a general sense of learning that one gets in higher education. But for some, higher education will make a person question more, and may impact their thought process, and some aspects of religion may be challenged upon further thought. I read one study that did conclude that people with higher education, typically are less religious, but that does not necessarily mean that it was just due to the higher education.

Answer 3

What is needed is true religiousness and not religions and beliefs. And the higher the so called education the effect is the farther it will take one from the true religiouness, all the so called religions are really only a group of people thinking in certain way, having certain rituals,having certain dress codes,having certain beliefs philosopy and so on, but far from true RELIGIOUSNESS.

A true Religion is universal.Which is the law of nature applicable equally to all the human beings on this earth and this universe, no matter what one's belief or philosopghy is. So first one has to come out of all the beliefs and the so called religions to experience the ture religiousness.

Be joyfull

"Start the day with love,
fill the day with love, end the day with love: this is the way to peace."

LET PEACE AND PEACE AND PEACE BE EVERYWHERE..

Strive to be Happy

Answer 4

It seems that people who don't have much exposure to religion and obtain higher educations fall into the traps that are layed by science such as that of evolution in biology. Evolution is a theory and not fact, the so called evidence they have for evolution is not evidence there are creationists on t.v. and other places that talk about this. I was basically raised in the church from birth and that is why I am able to be strong and still believe in God in spite of the fact that I am a third year student of science (biology and chemistry to be exact). No one who believes in evolution can call themselves a Christiian, you can't serve two masters. It doesn't take a genius to know that man can not be formed from rock and that something so complicated as the human body could not have happened by chance.

Answer 5

Since religions strive on ignorance, higher education explains why in countries with an efficient school system religion and superstitions are on the brink of extinction.
This should bring the world closer to peace.

Answer 6

My experience is that the more people learn and question, the more they become free of religion. The exception is the 'God Squad' who go around knocking on doors - trying to convert - and when they find a wavering Christian - pester them until they join them or have a break down (literally).

On the other hand, many of my friends are both highly educatied and Christian. However - none try to convert me.

Answer 7

higher education has always been available,..... however conservative standards and expectations have succeeded in stifling widespread dissent..

The progress of time though has continued to march,.... to the point that eventually, sufficient numbers of questioners and dissenters conjoin to form a body effective enough to challenge established doctrines.

If central and core questions are asked, concerning key areas of the bibles teachings,.... compelling explanations are expected, or dissent will surely follow,... particularly amongst younger members of a church.

So really,..... its not neccessarily education on its own thats altering the dynamics of modern church goers, but in tangent with the progress of time, and other factors,..... have simply combined, to produce church members who are no longer satisfied with flimsy answers, to decisive questions.

Answer 8

DEPENDS on who is running the "higher learning" MR TODA and his mentor were teachers in Japan before the war,,the "Approved Priests" condemned the future SGI leader to prison,,only to be released after the nukes dropped..if we all let our children learn at school there would be less problems..instead of "teaching"..alot of money and time is spent on sectarian dogma,,,alot of tax dollars!!!,,my property taxes are spent on "teaching my kids the right way"...NOT!!

Answer 9

Science and the arts can only strengthen faith. It is impossible to look at the natural world and not believe in a Supreme being. Education is vital in understanding Christ. It is impossible for me as a Christian to not praise God every time an advancement in science is made, or when a beautiful painting is displayed . . . If you believe in Christ then he is incorporated into everything.

Answer 10

Statistically speaking, the more educated one is, the less likely they are to believe in a god.

Answer 11

it depends on what is being studied