Acting Dean of the College Dan Nelson '75 led a discussion among four students and four adults about the link between religion and ethics in Fahey Hall's basement Tuesday evening. The discussion was the fourth in the Faith Matters series hosted by the Tucker foundation.
Nelson began the discourse by discussing his own religious background. The son of a minister, he noted that faith has always played a prominent role in his life, but that his father's position caused him to rebel against religion when he was younger.
"For children of the clergy, whether it's Christian denomination or other faiths, it's not uncommon to have a love-hate relationship with religion," he said.
Nelson mentioned that he reached his own decisions about religion in college, where he said he found his "intellectual home at Dartmouth" and began approaching religion from an academic perspective rather than a faith-based one. After a five-year stint in journalism, he returned to graduate school to study religion and philosophy.
Nelson opened up the discussion by alluding to current events as he suggested that religion and morality are practically tied.
"When you open a newspaper or a magazine it's pretty hard to avoid the connection between people's religious convictions and their moral decisions," he said. "But I really, from a philosophical perspective, don't think that there's a necessary connection between religion and ethics."
He referred to the burning of witches at the stake, the Crusades, recent history in Ireland and the Holocaust as he posed the possibility that religion may be antithetical to ethics, and he challenged participants to consider whether religion and ethics are tied together and if religion may in fact bring about more destruction than prosperity.
Students provided mixed responses.
"I think organized religion does a lot of good things, mostly in the form of materialistic things like providing monetary aid and metaphysical things like providing incentives to do good things," said Adi Sivaraman '10, who called himself an atheist. "Ultimately religion is just the codification of ethics."
Nathan McNamara '10, on the other hand, concluded that religion has caused more bad than good over the years.
"I'm kind of of the opinion that the net effect of religion is bad in terms of historical trends," he said. "There will always be good people and there will always be bad people but it takes religion for good people to do bad things."
Others, however, expressed frustration with trying to quantify the good and bad effects of religious faith.
"I think it's easier for us to see the negative and it's harder for us to see the positive that comes out of religious beliefs," Jennifer Compton, the Seminary Intern at Tucker, said.
Trak Lord '08, meanwhile, mused on the Catch-22 of trying to extricate ethics and religion from one another.
"I think it's interesting that you're asking us to evaluate whether good or bad has come from religion when doing that is basically turning the question around and looking at it with a moral view," he said. "You could argue that 'bad' things are morally justified. How do you objectify something that is inherently rooted in one's view of morality?"
