ESSAY: Critical thinking skills — ‘wrong, but useful’
Each Friday in April CM Life will run a winning essay from the Speak Up, Speak Out Writing Competition.
On the first day of my “Seminar in the Study of Religion” course last semester, Dr. Michael Ostling, an assistant professor, made an interesting comment.
All of the theorists that we’d soon be discussing in the class, he stated flatly, are wrong. The course syllabus included readings from the likes of Freud, Marx and Weber. How could these accomplished intellectuals, I thought, be wrong? And if they are, then why are we bothering to read their work?
Of course, all of the theorists we analyzed had redeeming qualities and noteworthy insights that made them worthy of study. But they also had serious flaws that, at times, undermined their theories.
It turns out that, unlike the cold world of mathematics, or the formulaic certainties of chemistry, the study of religion is composed of large swaths of ambiguity.
Clearly, when endeavoring to fathom such a subject, learning by rote is not sufficient. It is also not possible to simply apply the standard paradigm of the field, because in the discipline of religion, no such paradigm exists!
How, then, is one to make sense of the subject?
One could say that, in this regard, the study of religion is quite comparable to political and civil affairs. In those arenas, the lines between right and wrong are often blurred.
There is no panacea, for example, to the daunting challenges facing the world today, and the solutions to those problems do not reside entirely in one ideology or political party. To think otherwise is akin to suggesting that Freud, and Freud alone, had entirely unearthed the secret to understanding religion. Such thinking is pure naiveté.
For that reason, “blind faith” in any one cause is dangerous and irresponsible. In my religion class, we learned not to trust any one theory, but to question all of them and retain the parts that are useful. Likewise, citizens should engage their world with diligence, questioning politicians, the media and even the academy.
My religion seminar class never did “solve” the phenomenon of religion, nor did we establish a ground-breaking paradigm that would fundamentally alter the discipline. We did, however, learn how to analyze material from various sources, synthesize across disciplines, and critically evaluate theories and arguments.
I may one day forget much of the information I learned in that class (e.g., Freud’s conjectures on the “primitive” nature). But the skills that I acquired from it — particularly the ability to think critically — will remain with me long after my four years at CMU.
Nicolas Persons
Bay City Senior
