The problem with Academia

The problem with academia is that it starts and ends with human understanding, and rejects outright God our Creator. Western academia today regards God the Creator, Sustainer, and Future as superstitious nonsense.  In western academia,  God is a figment of human imagination arising from a merely emotional need to to cling to something beyond us. Intellectuals dismiss out of hand the idea that the very conception of God in us indicates God’s existence.

Just dismissing God’s existence, however, is not only to ignore evidence; it is also to refuse to examine a different perspective on this world. Yet, assessing evidence, and considering how we approach evidence [the preconceptions, prejudices, perspectives at work]. these are the fundamental principles and mechanics of the academic system. That is how academics arrive at their findings – findings which they regard as contributing to the accumulation of human knowledge – that accumulation of knowledge constituting their “truth”.

What then causes them to discard their own fundamental principles when considering God ? Answer: Prejudice – and prejudice reveals the shortcomings of academia. Fundamentally, academia is not concerned with truth seeking but with justifying a human centred understanding of our world: they require the evidence to conform to human preconceptions and human limitations of awareness. Therefore no conclusion can be reached which is outside their own finite view of our existence.

But the philotheist maintains that God is outside and beyond our understanding and our experience, as well as partly within the range of our experience and understanding. God is transcendent, whereas human beings lack a sense of the transcendent. Why ? Because humans are preoccupied with the material.

God’s existence is manifestly evident in both the complexity of our world and in our individual conscience. Yet philosophically based academia refuses to recognise this. It therefore denies a fundamental aspect of truth and so warps our view of existence. It starts off with a prejudiced and distorted view of our world. Yes, the natural scientist can go a long way to explaining and manipulating our physical world by using evidence based reasoning. But the researcher into the fundamental questions of “Why?” and “Who we are?” cannot. The wider question of this existence concerning “Why?” goes beyond physical science and its explanation of our mortal bodily functions – beyond the physical functioning of the natural, physical world necessary to sustain physical life.

But our lives are not just physical; we are spiritual – and that is not the same as emotional. Emotional is physical, not spiritual. Major problems arrive for the academic when it comes to studying the interactions of human beings and considering the fundamental question, which is:

WHY ARE WE HERE ?

The natural scientist can only explain how we are here, in the here and now. How our physical bodies function and survive. The social scientist endeavours to explore and arrive at how we interact as human beings in society, in order to come to explanations for human behaviour. But the social scientist starts to fall foul of the limitations of the academic outlook when trying to formulate and codify how we can best function together. The social scientist defaults to the natural scientific method of examining physical evidence about interactions in order to arrive at definitive laws of human behaviour.

The study of psychology into human emotion and reaction does indeed provide helpful insights about human behaviour. But it also comes up against the limitations of treating our existence as purely natural and subject to particular, solely natural laws. People are manifestly not robots, are they ? Attempts to pin down human behaviour to certain given, universally applying natural laws is not only fallacious, it insults the most fundamental sense of human dignity.

In the section on The problem with History, I cite schools of thought which reflect this sense of tidy explanations, but which are manifest nonsense when examined. How can any human being assert a definite working of history according to a preset plan when that preset plan – e.g. Marxism – is dreamt up by a finite human being who lived at a given time in a particular society with an outlook reflecting – or indeed rejecting – the mores of their time ?

Impossible.

But Universities harbour many such believers in the impossible analysis of Karl Marx – believers whose dedication is no less than religious in its motivation and in its conduct.  They are paid vast sums of money for peddling what is total nonsense dressed up as serious research and analysis.

What academia actually amounts to is another religion. I began to see this 20 years ago while sitting in the public gallery of a university graduation ceremony. Academia has all the trappings of a religion. It has a priesthood which preaches its version of reality; and its priesthood has a hierarchy with titles and honours. Its gospel message for the salvation of our souls amounts to this.  More and more knowledge and understanding according to human beings own knowledge and understanding will make the world a better place. However ….

You may have noticed that the world has unprecedented levels of education and vast numbers of university graduates of all ranks, yet there is zero improvement in the state of our planet along with an incredible readiness by the most advanced nations to resort to war …

Academia even has HOLY SCRIPTURES. The learned research of its priesthood is accumulated and referred to by other priests as if it contains THE TRUTH. It is fundamental to the academic process to read and know whatever has been asserted by others on a given subject already. The researcher must then add more research which demonstrates support for their particular argument or idea in order to add to this accumulated store of truth.

There is only one problem with this. Each piece of research is considered sacrosanct as a piece of academic research – even though later it may be proven demonstrably false. Academics claim to seek the truth, and to pass on this truth to the world. It is the entire justification for their existence.

But they will then argue with each other, even insulting another person’s hard work, to assert that a predecessor is quite wrong – or failed to get it right. And yet, they will systematically and religiously cite the work already done in their field as authoritative. ABC  found and asserted XYZ.  They cite this as if it has some special significance, qualifying it to supercede every day knowledge and intelligence. The innate, unquantifiable human intuition called “Common Sense” has no value whatsoever. Arising from a combination of sense, conscience and thought, Common Sense is meaningless and lacks credibility compared to REASON.

They cite Research the way Preachers cite their Holy Writings. But where the Bible is demonstrably Holy Writ, addressing fundamentals practically, their research comprises the gropings and ideas of mere human beings.

Where the Bible addresses the fundamental issues of our humanity, and gives us the answers, academic research pretends to the same – if not indeed to a superior status – and yet falls far, far short.

In reality,  Academic research feeds human pride and ego, while claiming a superior status as sound instruction and insight.  It assumes that human beings will inexorably improve by amassing human knowledge in defiance of divine wisdom.