As Christian professors I believe many of us think of the university as being pretty resistant to the knowledge of God.
Sometimes, God proves us wrong.
This story may make more sense if you understand my background. An interest in science made me an avid reader in high school. It also cooled me toward the teachings of Christianity in which I had been brought up. Intellectuals, I concluded, tended to disbelieve in God or at least did not take religion seriously.
I entered college as an agnostic and spent the next decade quite comfortable in this. Then the vicissitudes of graduate school led me to doubt my doubts; extensive reading of CS Lewis, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn led me to Christ.
Bayesian Decision Theory and God
Around this same time, I was taking courses in theoretical statistics, including Bayesian decision theory. Bayes’ theorem can be used to evaluate the probability of a hypothesis based on evidence. A few years later as a professor at Oklahoma State University I tried my hand at using Bayes’ theorem to evaluate the probability of the existence of God.
Later I found that Richard Swinburne had made very sophisticated use of Bayes’ theorem in his book The Existence of God to argue for God’s existence. Oxford philosopher Swinburne is one of the foremost living philosophers of religion.
Eventually, I decided to email Dr. Swinburne about Bayes’ theorem and also invited him to come to Oklahoma State University. As I had never met Dr. Swinburne and did not work in his academic field, I did not expect to get a reply from him. To my surprise, he did respond and proposed that he would be able to visit OSU when he would be traveling to other universities in the U.S.
Dr. Swinburne suggested I contact the OSU philosophy department about the possibility of him lecturing there. Surprisingly to me, we obtained the complete cooperation of the department — including funding for an honorarium to deliver the Converse-Yates-Tate Lectureship: “Arguments for the Existence of God.”
On the night of the lecture, the theater was completely packed; we had to use an overflow room where others could view remotely. After his talk, there was an extensive question and answer period. One questioner familiar with his work said that Dr. Swinburne had “saved his faith.” The following day, Swinburne delivered a lecture to the philosophy department on the existence of the soul. Before his public lecture, he also had dinner with many of the faculty and grad students.
Since then I have wondered: are there opportunities to engage the university at large in conversations that we may be discounting?
T0m Lynch
OSU