Educated All The Way To Heresy

Guest Blogger: Mark Moore spent over a decade as a public school science teacher. Prior to that he was an officer in the United States Navy. He hosts a well-read blog in his home state of Arkansas, called Arkansas Watch. He and Dr. Donald J. Eckard provide content for the site, “textbookaccuracy.org”, which counters public school textbook macro-evolutionary bias. Mark currently works in private business and lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife and daughter.

The current manner in which doctorates in theology (and to a great extent history) are awarded serves to promote heresy rather than truth. The system can actually serve to reduce what we know is true rather than add to or preserve it. It encourages lies to be given the same consideration as truth, and thus adds confusion rather than clarity to our sum total of knowledge.

The three orders of degrees awarded in most of the world are those of bachelor, master, and doctor. Generally the bachelor’s degree indicates a working knowledge of the field of study, deep enough to prove useful. No thesis is required for this degree.

A master’s degree indicates just what the name implies, a mastery of the subject of study. Final evidence is offered by means of a thesis from the applicant in most universities in the United States. A thesis is a proposition or proposal that the applicant advances and defends in a written work. A Doctorate is the highest degree, and in most universities in this country is obtained after a work called a dissertation. A dissertation is sometimes used synonymously with thesis, but commonly there is a distinction between the two. The dissertation contains a thesis, but the thesis is related to original research by the applicant for degree.

For some fields, finding something new and original to research is relatively easy. Materials science is undergoing rapid change. There is no shortage of new things to research. And as new materials are created, candidates for engineering doctorates will have that much more to work on. Again, there is no shortage of substantive questions to be explored and thus the efforts of doctoral candidates really do expand the frontiers of mankind’s search for knowledge and truth.

This is not the case however, with other fields of study. The amount of new evidence discovered does not compare to the number of Doctoral candidates who must produce something “new” in the field. The pressure for “original research” in fields like history, and most especially theology, has a perverse effect on humankind’s core body of knowledge. One of the foremost missions of a good primary and secondary education is to transfer our culture’s core body of knowledge to the next generation. Our public schools are terrible failures at it, and the way higher education is structured contributes to the problem instead of being part of the solution.

The tension between transferring a core body of knowledge and challenging that body in a search for “new” truth produces great advances in fields that are supposed to be dynamic, like Science and Engineering, but have the opposite effect in fields whose subject matter is more staid. Absent a major archaeological find, history should not change that much. All that the pressure for “new truth” in such subjects does is enable crack-pot revisionist ideas to get a better hearing than is merited by the evidence. Dissertations about Abraham Lincoln’s supposed homosexuality or the supposed “origins of the resurrection myth” get written and considered as if new evidence was compelling the re-write of history or theology. In reality it is the nature of the educational process, which puts a premium on “discovery” even where there is none to be had, that drives aspiring scholars to challenge the status quo -regardless of whether there is good reason to do so. If inadequate evidence for changing our ideas of X exists then such evidence must be manufactured, else no more doctorates can be issued in the field of X.

By creating non-evidence driven pressure to constantly re-evaluate what was previously considered known truth, the current process actual creates chaos and confusion. It actually subtracts from mankind’s sum total of knowledge by introducing confusion on historical or doctrinal fact when previously there was clarity. We “know” less than we did because every doctoral candidate out to make a name for themselves even in subjects like history or theology is out to “prove” something “new”. They advance some wild idea on scant evidence and groups with an agenda jump on it. The truth takes a back seat to the need for “new discovery”.

One may protest that many real discoveries, especially in the hard sciences, were made precisely because prior assumptions about truth were challenged. Granted, our sum total of knowledge can never increase if assumptions are never questioned. This would be education solely as preservation of existing knowledge. That should not be scoffed at. Preservation of existing knowledge is a worthy goal and one we too often fail to achieve vis-a-vi transmitting it to the next generation. Still, Pure Preservation is an extreme, just as Pure Discovery (the way doctorates are now awarded) is the opposite extreme.

Truth is best served if there is balance between a desire to preserve existing truth and advancement of mankind’s knowledge through challenging what is thought to be established truth. Right now, there is no balance. Too many who hold doctorates in fields like history and theology got them by stretching evidence in order to advance a new thesis. They control education now, but the process by which they capped their own biased them against respecting established truth. No wonder those trained in this way are failing to hand estasblished truth down to the next generation.

To restore balance, we must put as much prestige on confirming existing knowledge as we do in undermining it. In theology, we must honor those whose dissertation refutes a heresy at least as much as those whose dissertation asserts one. We must accept that not all subjects are alike in their nature, and it is thus folly to use the same procedure to award doctorates in vastly different fields. Materials science is more prone to new discovery than is history or theology because of the nature of the field and the amount of legitimate new evidence to explore. If the education establishment still feels any obligation to fact and truth, it should guard against those who would stretch the facts of history or theology for ambition’s sake. They must honor “defenders of the faith” as much as they celebrate those who attack established fact.

Perhaps some day this might mean that fewer doctorates are awarded in certain fields (because a smaller amount of new discovery on which to build a thesis is present relative to other areas of study). If so then that is a price worth paying- a fidelity to the truth demands a return to balance. For the foreseeable future, there can be doctors enough made simply by de-bunking previous theses which were crafted out of a desperation to confuse and overturn existing truth simply because that was how one scored academic points.