The highly repetitive recourse in both readings and lectures to what The Crimson's "Confidential Guide" terms the "traditional pantheon" of the social sciences--Marx, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim (one might also add Nietzsche)--illustrates this attitude further. Whatever truths they have to teach, and they certainly offer some, all of these writers to one degree or another made it their special interest, and a matter central to their most influential thinking, to cast doubt on some portion of traditional religion and theology. It may be difficult to ignore such intellectual giants, and even inappropriate in courses devoted to the history of ideas primarily; but one must wonder why so few constructive alternative views have been revived or created since Weber and Durkheim first made their great impact on Harvard's consciousness before World War II.

As one alternative, one might demonstrate to students that nearly all the great creative geniuses of early modern science approached their subject with consciously religious motives; thus one could counter the widespread falsehood that religious faith and scientific progress are somehow incompatible. One might employ in this task the writings of a highly respected 19th-century American scholar, Andrew Dixon White, who made the crucial point that genuine religion often differs from the attitudes of unimaginative and institutionalized theologians.

One could go further, into the works of Arnold Toynbee, unpopular today with professional historians, but in fact a highly perceptive social and political critic, as well as the author of a powerful claim that religious faith provides the chief cultural foundation for civilization. Throughout the horrible years of the still-continuing Indochina War, Toynbee's warning cry for peace has been heard alongside those of the Berrigans and the Quakers and the various experts on Communism who could see that the most damaging and unwelcome intrusion in Southeast Asia was that of Western colonialism. If one looks for the origins of the smug social-Darwinist philosophy held by the LBJ's and the Nixons who perpetrated this war "to save us from the evils of socialism," one finds none other than the Ivy League's (well, Yale's) William Graham Sumner, who probably did as much to push positivistic social science at the expense of religion and the classics as anyone in the history of American education. Considering this contrast, how backward does the religious approach look now?

Of course, one cannot complete the argument that religious faith promotes social and intellectual health unless he can demonstrate the converse, that the onslaught of atheism in our own century has been accompanied by decline on nearly all fronts. The arguments are obvious as regards war and social decay, but very obscure in the matter of scientific progress. Too many still confuse the undoubted technological progress of our times with increments of scientific theory.

The most dogmatically and uncritically-honored theory in science today was published and promoted solely in the 20th century: Einsteinian special relativeity. In happens that Einstein as a boy experienced an "orgy" of revulsion against all traditional religious teachings. During my graduate study of history and philosophy of science, I became convinced that his special theory and all of its claims of evidential support are invalidated by unwarranted assumptions and circular reasoning; but trying to communicate this measage has proven a formidable task. Herbert Dingle, a renegade from the physics establishment, has tried to do so for many years in England; his new book Science at the Crossroads tells an appalling story of intolerant thought-suppression by scientific journals. An even more incisive dissection of the illogicality of special relativity, by University of New Mexico philosopher Melbourne Evans, was published in the Swiss journal Dialectica in 1962: "The Relativity of Simultaneity: a Critical Analysis." (I have placed Evans's article on reserve in Lamont and the Science Center for those who may wish to escape the one-sided presentations by local--and nearly all other--philosophers, physicists, and astronomers.)

Such is only one of many barriers to intellectual and social progress in this century of dwingling altruism, receding horizons of imagination, and increasing protection of vested material interests. The pale humanist condescension towards other-directed ethics that prevails so widely among today's agnostics and atheists cannot really substitute for the great sacrificial devotion to their tasks recognizable in the lives of the social reformers and natural philosophers of past centuries. Kepler, for example, was not only the most profoundly original of the great scientists, but also the closest to being a religious mystic, seeking to justify his faith by finding regularity in the universe. Unless Harvard can teach lessons like this, and like Toynbee's demonstration of the life-giving force of religious ideas in society, its possible rank as the best American university will prove of no ultimate value.

John E. Chappell, Jr. '54 is a fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center.