RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Religion: Links to academic decay inNigerian universities

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jul 12, 2021, 3:38:45 AM7/12/21
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See what I have been harping on the hegemonic hold of the two pernicious monotheisms in Nigeria, bidding to out pace, outdo and oust each other in their zero sum game transposed to the political arena.

Note that by religiosity none of the students is talking about Amadioha or the various traditional religions.


OAA



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Religion: Links to academic decay in Nigerian universities

By Leo Igwe

22 June 2018   |   3:30 am

https://guardian.ng/opinion/religion-links-to-academic-decay-in-nigerian-universities/

 

 

Education Minister, Malam Adamu Adamu

The overwhelming emphasis has been on how the different religions have contributed to the growth of education and learning in Nigeria.

It is widely known that religious organisations have been at the forefront of building and managing schools, colleges and universities.

Christian missionaries introduced the formal education system to Nigeria while their Islamic counterparts have established several schools and other institutions of learning.

In fact, today over 80 per cent of the private schools in the country are owned or managed by mainly Christian and Islamic religious individuals or groups.  

However, little attention has been paid to the negative effects of religion on the educational system especially the fact that religion undermines academic programmes.

Religious involvement in education has not always translated into academic excellence.

In fact, in many cases, religious teachings and practices are conducted in ways that obstruct learning and acquisition of knowledge. 

Recently, students from some universities across Nigeria responded to interview questions on the state of religion and free thought on the campuses. 

According to one student, campus religiosity had become a nuisance to the environment. She said: Hmmm! religion in my school is at another level.

Almost everyone is religious or at least believes in the existence of some imaginary beings controlling the universe.

From 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. every day, my faculty, in fact, is the noisiest place on earth as all the classes are taken over by the different Christian fellowships.

The mosque behind the faculty building won’t give one a chance either, with their loudspeakers.

You will find no place to study and can hardly concentrate on anything.

There is at least one mosque beside every single building in the school, including the administrative block. 

Actually, universities have sections in their premises where places of worship could be constructed.

So one wonders why the university authorities have refused to act and take steps to sanitise the place and restore some order.

University authorities should be able to demarcate and ensure a separation between prayer and study/reading/lecture halls.

But a student pointed out that such a measure could not be taken because many university lecturers were usually behind these prayer meetings.

A student at a university in Enugu said: …all official social events begin and end with prayer including the inaugural lecture of the Faculty of Applied Natural Sciences. The lecturers encourage students to pray to God to help them pass their courses and they give religion-flavored lectures.

In an elective course on genetics that I did in my first year, the lecturer, after teaching outdated 1980s research work that regarded homosexuality as a genetic aberration went ahead to tell us that the mind was like a garden.

If you keep it clean, clean stuff will grow in it, if not, rubbish will grow in it and went ahead to state how this could be overcome by sheer will and the help of the spirit. 

So many university lecturers mixed their teaching with religious preaching. They evangelise the students during the lectures and seminars.

According to one student: It’s sad to note that majority of our scholars and academicians are under the massive spell of religious conformity. Professors who are paid to transmit scientific knowledge are rather busy preaching to students in order to advance their religious agenda.
 
In the same vein, another student linked the high religiosity among students to the university management: The school management itself is deeply religious and virtually all policies, including employment and admission, are carried out with religious bias. 

Almost all the professors in my department are pastors, bishops, deacons etc. At least one of them owned a church.

They leave no chance for critical thinking, and proselytize at any given time.. So what has been going on in the universities is a gradual religionisation of the campuses and a campusisation of religion.

Religion is slowing taking over the academic space, and eroding the culture of learning and intellectual inquiry in these places.

Not surprisingly, campus religiosity has been linked to noise pollution.

In fact, some students observed that the noise that emanated from students religious observance could not allow others to adequately prepare for their examinations: One student said: It’s now time for examinations and on stepping inside the school in the evening, you’d think it’s a crusade ground.

The noise from the prayer grounds won’t even let students who have come to study understand anything.

So many students end up not performing well in their examinations and in other academic engagements. 

Despite the high level of religiosity on campuses, some students said there was a future for free thought or atheism in the universities.

Free thought, they noted, could help improve the quality of teaching and learning on campuses.

For instance, some noted that atheism could help change the attitude of students and lecturers to learning.

As one student noted: Atheism would go a long way in at least raising the consciousness of the lecturers.

They need to be reminded that they are academics, not clerics and that they are in the universities to study and research not to pray, to teach and impart knowledge, not to preach religion. Also, I think students should start taking hold of their destinies.

A student pointed out that in one university in Enugu students used to say: “My present course is not important. God already knows my future and what I will be.”

Whilst others say: After all, everyone is going to school.

It’s only God that determines who will get what: It is not how many hours you spend in the night class that matters”. Religion is used to sanctify lack of academic diligence and intellectual laziness.

Students noted that this kind of reasoning was rampant and that the spread of atheistic viewpoints would at least mean fewer people subscribing to this mediocre way of thinking otherwise the university would keep producing half-baked graduates. 

Nigeria has indeed been producing low-quality graduates and Nigerian universities are ranked low globally.

But spreading the value of free thought on campuses is fraught with risks because the intense religious climate makes it very challenging for students who are atheists or freethinkers to come out. 

One student explained his own predicament: Anytime I made myself known to anyone that I am no longer a sheep to any imaginary shepherd, and that I no longer have time for church activities, they look at me with massive disbelief.

They imagined that I had been initiated into some sort of cult.

For a university full of intellectuals in diverse fields of knowledge, in this second decade of the 21st century to be this religious is unbelievable!

In fact, I stand the risk of not graduating if my supervisor finds out about my views concerning religion.

I hope nobody from my department gets to read this.

This statement testifies to how campus religiosity has made freethinking dangerous.

Another university student observed: Free-thought, specifically atheism, perhaps will require a lot of efforts to take roots here.

Everywhere I mention or hint at it, there is a reaction and it is usually unpleasant, like when some disinfectant is applied to a wound.

And like in that analogy, free-thought is a much-needed panacea in these parts.”

According to this student, with the spread free-thought, the religious bias in recruitment and promotion of persons will drastically reduce.

Only academicians and administrators with the know-how will be put in their employed instead of this ‘my church member’ racketeering going on in the system.

And then we will “have better lecturers, a better management setup, and an all-around better academic institution. Furthermore, a student in Katsina also struck a note of cautious hope and optimism.” 


--
Okey C. Iheduru


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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Jul 12, 2021, 7:40:23 AM7/12/21
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Classical African religions also have their own issues.

Critical thinking does not seem to have been one of their strongest points.

Isaac Newton, among some other great Western thinkers, was Christian with Christianity inspiring a good degree of the work of some of them.

Same with Islam.

How does one cultivate sophisticated and humane rather than simplistic forms of these religions?

Thanks

Toyin

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Patrick Effiboley

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Jul 12, 2021, 7:40:49 AM7/12/21
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Dr Agbetuyi,
I am ignorant of what is amadioha. But what I would like to say here is that the students do not talk about it and other traditional religions because the latter are not proselytic and do not develop any strategy to conquer believers although most of Africans have a certain connections with local deities.
But the question is if we could free campuses from (rampant) religiosity; maybe by developing more equal policies in our countries.

Dr Emery Patrick EFFIBOLEY
Maître-Assitant en Histoire de l'Art
Chef, Département d'Histoire et d'Archéologie, Université d'Abomey-Calavi, Bénin
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of the Witwatersrand,Johannesburg,(2014-2016) 
 


Harrow, Kenneth

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Jul 12, 2021, 8:50:30 AM7/12/21
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the word "religion" needs parsing. the greek pre-socratics speculated on the nature of the universe. it was "religious" and "scientific." those categories have changed over time, meaning different things to different people
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Jul 12, 2021, 4:07:02 PM7/12/21
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Hmmmm....

Newton was certainly a Christian in the generally accepted sense, yet he was a great scientist.

His science and his theology are ultimately unified.

The theology inspired the science.

The science demonstrated the physical expression of the theology.

The philosophy that resulted from the theology and the science mapped the scope of human knowledge between essence and expression, a line of thought similar to that described as later developed by Kant in terms of the relationship between appearances and things in themselves, the former accessible to human understanding, the latter inaccessible.

The seminal periods in Western thought represented by the Scientific Revolution and it's philosophical correlates as well as 18th century German Idealism cannot be adequately understood apart from the inspiration force of  Christianity, along with such a discipline as hermeneutics, which has it's modern roots in Biblical criticism.

To adequately understood such an influential 20th century thinker as Heidegger, one needs to appreciate his grounding in ancient Greek and medieval European Christian and Classical Christian explorations of the nature of being, from Plato to Augustine to Aquinas, influences evident in his notes to his masterwork Being and Time.

How do we encourage critical and philosohical spirituality?



Yahaya Danjuma

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Jul 13, 2021, 8:35:21 AM7/13/21
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I’ve never been sure whether to be amused or disgusted with atheists who argue that monotheism and the scientific method are incompatible. The scientific method has only been developed once, in a monotheistic environment. Whether it could have evolved in an atheist or polytheist environment is debatable. Whether it is compatible with monotheism is not. The history is well known. 

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jul 13, 2021, 4:36:42 PM7/13/21
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I would weigh in this time around mostly on the side of Ken.
I would also agree with Toyin Adepoju that Isaac Newton is the essential link between pre- Christian and Christian ' scienece' science being the invented gentrified word for a pre-classical set of practices dating back to Africa ( ancient Egypt) and Mesopotamia including, embalment ( mummification.)

These practices came to the West ( and to us) via Newton ( the early modern scientists Like Copernucus, Galileo and Kepler) through refinements in known methods.

Yahaya Danjuma's query on whether science was compatible with polytheism is therefore ill framed; it always was.  During Newton's time the pre- Christian name was alchemy which was held in contempt in part because it was thought to be a surrogate for magic ( a word in itself derived from the magi, the wise ' scientific' Middle Eastern 'scientitists' before the hegemony of Christianity in the West.)

Much of the experiments carried out by Newton because they were classed as alchemy nearly led to his excomnunication from the Church of England, until he could demonstrate that he got them from the Bible under code names ( quasi patents) used to disguise chemical experiments.  We must not forget that the Bible also includes  practices dating back to the polytheistic past of the Hebrews.

Once the scientific community became convinced, alchemy became the gentrified discipline of Chemistry.

OAA



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-------- Original message --------
From: Yahaya Danjuma <yahaya....@gmail.com>
Date: 13/07/2021 13:44 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Religion: Links to academic decayinNigerian universities

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I’ve never been sure whether to be amused or disgusted with atheists who argue that monotheism and the scientific method are incompatible. The scientific method has only been developed once, in a monotheistic environment. Whether it could have evolved in an atheist or polytheist environment is debatable. Whether it is compatible with monotheism is not. The history is well known. 

On Jul 13, 2021, at 03:12, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Harrow, Kenneth

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Jul 13, 2021, 4:52:13 PM7/13/21
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galileo is another genius worth reflecting on. it was what we call science, a brilliant mind who observed, speculated, postulated, tested, etc. just his work on time and pendulums was so original. math and science went together, and eventually much came together w newton, but he had great work of predecessors to build on, as did leibnitz, whose philosophy now is making a comeback.
you almost have to feel sorry for the religious figures of those times who might have know they were dealing with minds superior to their own, but who were too afraid to accept the consequences of the new vision of the universe they offered.

kind of like the republicans afraid of things like 1619 and blm and the like.
ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Jul 13, 2021, 5:20:32 PM7/13/21
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Expanding Agbetuyi and Ken's  presentations-

History

What is now known as science, scientific method and modern technology, as they reached their defining identities in the fruits of the 17th century European Scientific Revolution and the 19th century British Industrial Revolution, continuing to grow till today,  are a continuation and distillation from the earliest human cultures, in Africa, later developments in Asia and the Mediterranean, in which Greece was particularly prominent, polytheistic cultures that fed the later emerging civilizations represented by the monotheisms  of Islam and Christianity, which both nourished and tried to stifle the growth of science.

 Africans  developed science and technology, from mathematics to ways  of working with material forms, including metallurgy and bead making. Asia contributed significantly to the origins of science, from rocketry to mathematics, among other achievements recognized within and partly shaping modern science. 

The origins of the ratiocinative style of thinking that underlies Western philosophy and science   are deeply influenced by  the polytheistic culture of ancient Greece, from the goddess inspired philosophy of Parmenides and the Socratic and Platonic orientations which were both ratiocinative and oriented towards belief in inspiring deities, to  Aristotle, who, along with Plato, sought correlations between human and divine intelligence, seeking an ultimate unification and source of existence.

These philosophical and scientific initiatives are also central to the development of philosophy and science in Islamic cultures, which, in the work of such figures as the polymaths Ibn Sina aka Avicenna and Ibn Rushd aka Averroes,  built upon and  transmitted the Greek achievement to the West which had lost touch with the Greek texts, a transmission catalytic for the religio-philosophic efflorescence of the European Middle Ages and the careers  of such foundational Western Christian theologians and philosophers as Thomas Aquinas.

The scientific achievements of the West were both partly inspired by Christianity, among other belief systems, and achieved in opposition to Christianity. 17th century Western science and philosophy were partly inspired by Christian beliefs. Muslim civilizations were once pivotal in the development of science, with such figures  as the polymathic medical researcher and philosopher Ibn Sina and the mathematician Al Khwarizmi being luminaries of those glorious centuries of Islam.

 Dogmatic Christian authorities, however,  fought against ideas that conflicted with their own religious views, a conflict which they lost, enabling science, as critical enquiry, inspired or not inspired by religion, to  thrive.

A landmark example in this conflict is the struggle between Galileo and Church authorities on whether or not the Earth revolves round the sun. Newton had to be careful about revealing to the world his unorthodox brand of Christianity and even more so his investigations into what was then the occult world of alchemy. Its argued that the decline of science in Islamic civilization is due to the victory of dogmatic religionists in Islam.

Western cognitive culture may be understood as having assimilated the cosmological inspiration of Christianity, as represented by the Christian faith of its medieval and later thinkers, and later moved beyond such explicit alignments.

The maturation of science into its post-18th century Western developments are  associated with secularity rather than religion, with clear demarcation between the goals and methods of science and those of religion. 

After the 17th and 18th centuries, one is less likely to find Western scientists or philosophers identifying as Christian yet science has continued to grow exponentially.

Contemporary Western scientists are more likely to declare religious  questions as beyond the reason centred methodology and materially based focus of science.

Those Western scientists who declare particular philosophical or religious orientations demonstrate a range of orientations, such as quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger's philosophy which draws significantly from Indian and Hindu thought, Albert Einstein, who seemed to have subscribed to a kind of cosmic philosophy unaffiliated to any religion, the mathematician Kurt Godel described as believing in mathematical forms as aspects of the cosmos discovered by the human mind, an idea with parallels in African and Asian cultures but  most influential in the West through the ancient Greek figures of Pythagoras and Plato and the Indian origin mathematician Ramanujan who is described as crediting  his astonishing mathematical insights to his family's Hindu goddess.

 One of the best known, if not the best known effort to correlate modern science and religion is Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, which uses Asian religions as its framework, with the image of the Hindu God Shiva, one of a number of unifying deities in Hindu polytheism, as its organizing figure. 

Those Asian cultures building most strongly on the scientific synthesis arrived at by the West and its related technological advances,  India, Japan and China, are either defined by polytheistic spiritual cultures, such as India's Hinduism, Japan's Shinto and the state as religion, of Chinese Communism, or China's  own older religions,  Buddhism,  Taoism and Confucianism.

Epistemology 

The Abrahamic monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and a good number of religions, are faith based and not reason based, and are therefore not inherently aligned with the ratiocinative methods of science.

An Abrahamic monotheist and a good number  of religious people who wish to harmonize religion and science need to be careful to work out how to reconcile  the largely faith based orientation of religion and the ratiocinatively centred thrust of science.

The scientist, like Newton was or his predecessor in Western scientific cosmology, Kepler, may be inspired by religion, but their own kind of religion is not likely to be one that substitutes religious belief for ratiocinative enquiry when such critical enquiry is vital, as in the study of the material universe, the province of science.

Newton  believed that the world was created by God and made that declaration part of the culmination of his masterwork the Principia, but  states that human reason is unable to grasp the essence of phenomena, such an ultimate essence, I expect,  being understood as God, the source of phenomena.

Intersecting World Views

Was the  monotheistic orientation of Christianity indispensable to the origins of Western science? 

What elements of Christianity were recurrently inspiring to early Western scientists?

 The cosmological unification represented by the image of God as ultimate reality? 

The belief in the human being as made in the image of God and therefore capable of cognitive powers which though limited, are of divine origin?

These ideas, however, are universal, recurring in the cosmological unifications of Asian and African cultures, integrations represented by such personalities as the Hindu Brahman,   Shakti and Shiva and the Yoruba Olodumare and  abstract forces such as the Yoruba ase.

They are also evident in Hindu and Yoruba  ideas of human identity as grounded in an ultimate unifying essence, the atman of Hinduism and the ori inu of Yoruba thought, among various similar examples across African and Asian cultures.

They are also evident in thought of  the ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle, who correlated human and divine intelligence.

Was monotheism indispensable to the efflorescence of Western science?

Perhaps other factors, in harmony with creative approaches to religion, rather than monotheism per se, may provide an inclusive understanding of why science achieved it's spectacular rise in the West.

thanks

toyin




 

 



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