Going to college does not decrease your faith unless your faith is in a concept of God that has not changed much since we knew for certain that the earth was flat. Back then sitting at the end of the flat earth was a human-like God waiting to review everyone's life and send some people off to burn in a lake of fire and others would be pulled up in rapture to dwell in a land of milk and honey.
Colleges are not indoctrination mills, as one of our 2012 residential candidates contend. I have taught at colleges for 30 years and from first-hand experience I know that more youngsters come to college to escape being indoctrinated, indoctrinated by their parent's flat-world theology.
The science departments in college now teach Unified Field Theory, which can fit with any concept of God. Students now learn that the universe was created, or generated, out of an invisible, infinite, eternal field of forces, which is what Christians have always said God was.
As I said in, Jeremy Lin-sanity and Rick Sanctimonious, the "biggest challenge for those who go to elite schools, like Harvard, as went Lin and Obama... the biggest challenge is not to think you're so smart or that your education is so grand that you know more than humans can know." I was referring to claiming to know the un-manifested aspects of the unified field, the mind of God, Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of the last century, called it.
Scientists working away in their laboratories and theologians working away in religious department, even at Catholic universities like Georgetown and Norte Dame, have one thing above all else in common -faith.
The scientists have as much faith as the theologians. Some scientists work with faith that they will help in the search for the God Particle, or the Theory of Everything (TOE), which of course Einstein did not believe we will ever find.
Some scientists simplify things for students by telling them a probability wave collapses and something moves from the un-manifested world charted by mathematical physics into the manifested world of physical existence. "Somewhat like God created the heaven and the earth and all that in them is," a religious sophomore might say.
"Somewhat," an open-minded indulgent science professor might respond, thinking of how nearly impossible it would be to explain to the student how much the lifetimes of work by 10s of thousands of scientists has taught us, and how much we have yet to learn about energy making quantum leaps from a world of infinity possibilities into a single actuality. But it can be proven that it happens in the presence of an observer.
"Like leaps of faith," the sophomore might blur. "A leap of faith is like a quantum leap except in reverse. Energy leaps from a single actuality into the world of infinite possibilities."
"Well. . .yes and no," the professor might say, if he or she is not afraid of being run out of the physics department. Science departments can be as dogmatic as churches. But looking at it from both sides at once none of what the professor can in truth say contradicts what theologians have known for centuries by way of our spiritual and religious traditions: Hinduism, Yoga, Buddhism, Vajrayana, Zen, Taoism, Tantra, Shamanism, Kabbalah, Sufism (Islam), Spiritism and Christian mysticism.
I once gave a lecture on all this at a conference jointly sponsored by the Media Labs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Divinity School. I spent ten years conducting the Spiritual Intelligence Action Research Project at Rutgers University, investigating parallels between all post-Newtonian sciences and spiritual and religious traditions.
Thousands of other professors have done similar work. On campus religion and science may not be married yet because their backgrounds are so different and neither is willing to risk getting thrown out of their departments by angry associates.
Somewhere in all religious traditions is the idea that by the very act of trying, through faith, to know the not-yet-manifested world (the mind of God), sometimes, miraculously, energy is transferred. In both science and religion there are eureka moments.
For the religious and non-religious it all depends on what you have faith in, which depends on the personal and cultural history you bring to college with you. You can keep your religion because all religions fit.
We of Christian faith can hold onto our Adam and Eve story of creation that is given in the Hebrew Bible. I would add to it a poem by James Weldon Johnson called "Creation."
And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
"I'm lonely -
I'll make me a world."
And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, "That's good!"
That is a poem that we used to perform in Sunday school in African American churches in the rural South. I like the poem because it is hard to sing a Spiritual about a unified field. And Spirituals contributed to the music that America shares with the entire world; so that everyone -atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims-- can benefit even in secular endeavors from the transfer of energy between individuals and the manifested and un-manifested universe in soul inspiring, rhythmic music. We don't know how or why but we do know that such transfers of energy happen, and sometimes miraculously.
George Davis is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and the creator of the interactive, world-sourced, digital series, Barack Obama, America and the World.