To the editors:

Steven Pinker writes that religion “is an American anachronism, I think, in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it” (“Less Faith, More Reason,” Oct. 27, op-ed). As a consequence, he believes, we should reconsider the “Reason and Faith” requirement in the Report of the Committee on General Education. At best, this statement can be interpreted as hyperbole; looking at census data worldwide, in which religious affiliation is generally self-reported, 16 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as non-religious, compared to 14 percent in the United States.

His other significant claims generally ask why we should single out religion as either an “equivalent [way] of knowing” to reason or as a significant historical driving force—the same question could be asked about any requirement. Religion should be singled out simply because it affects us, just as the United States is singled out in the U.S. and the World requirement: because we live here. Perhaps there are other motivators that should be singled out as well (economic disparities, race, and so on), but religion seems at least as viable as any.

The fact that the university, as Pinker writes, is “about reason, pure and simple” makes it the ideal place to discuss something as fundamentally unreasonable as faith without the baggage of intolerance and hysteria that its discussion occasions elsewhere.



DANIEL A. LITT ’10

October 29, 2006