Are there any convenient truths?

Not according to Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University. Here is a quote from his article in the Harvard Crimson in which he defines what it means to be educated:

Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.

I believe that a person for whom this understanding is not second-nature cannot be said to be educated.

It is a view that puts science and education at odds with the revival of religious sensibilities that see the loss of cultural certainties at the hand of science to be a betrayal of Western civilization. But it is not a betrayal of Western civilization, but a defining element, this tension between faith and reason. It is a tension that won't allow for a convenient separation of spheres between the Church and the Academy. Pinker makes a valiant argument in defense of this separation:

My second major reservation concerns the “Reason and Faith” requirement.

First, the word “faith” in this and many other contexts, is a euphemism for “religion.” An egregious example is the current administration’s “faith-based initiatives,” so-named because it is more palatable than “religion-based initiatives.” A university should not try to hide what it is studying in warm-and-fuzzy code words.

Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology” or “Psychology and Parapsychology.” It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.

Third, if this is meant to educate students about the role of religion in history and current affairs, why isn’t it just a part of the “U.S. and the World” requirement? Religion is an important force, to be sure, but so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism, class, and globalization. Why single religion out among all the major forces in history?

It is perhaps ironic that Pinker is trying to excise the religious viewpoint from the educational mission of an institution that was originally founded to provide a source of well educated, home-grown clergy for the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. But it is an inevitable irony for a culture that is informed by the heritage of both Athens and Jerusalem. It is a culture built upon a faultline.

One simple way to look at this faultline is to contrast the objects to which each culture aspires to gain knowledge of. For Jerusalem the object is God. For Athens it is the self. The ancient Greek aphorism "Know Thyself", which was inscribed on the lintel of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, summarizes the Greek philosophical project. It is most famously remembered in Socrates' dictum "the unexamined life is not worth living".

When one examines the self, one examines the aspirations of the self, including the aspiration for God. The Western religious tradition has always maintained an uneasy coexsistence with Athenian reason because of this. As long as reason is turned outward from the self towards the phenomenon of the world, it supported the religious aspiration. When it was allowed to be turned inward at the self and the religious aspiration itself, it "broke the spell".

Western culture is a divided house. Pinker is right to complain that the attempt to reintegrate the house by a clumsy attempt to inject faith into the Academy is futile. Reason and faith really are two opposing ways of looking at the world. The fact that most people are capable of employing both modes in different contexts just speaks to the divided, compartmentalized nature of our psyches. They coexist, but they operate differently. How they do this is a mystery. But you can't teach an institution to do it.