Harvard, Yale, Princeton and others schools were founded primarily for the training of ministers for the evangelization of the world. The world may be surprised to learn that a full-fledged university was a Christian idea, not a secular one.The Church may be even more surprised to learn that such world-renowned universities used to be ministerial training centers.
The idea of a University, a place where all different sciences can be learned and studied in depth was born out of a desire to study God’s world precisely because creation was thought to be a revelation of the true God. It was thought that compartmentalized knowledge (the focusing on only one subject) was not worthy of a man created in God’s image. Man should be able to discourse on different subjects, was the thought, so a place where all avenues of knowledge could be explored for the glory of God was devised in the university.
I am not sure when anti-intelectualism hit the Church, but I have a feeling that part of it had something to do with Darwin’s theory of evolution. The thought was that if science had disproven God by making Him obsolete due to evolution, then believers either accepted science and denied God or held on to their faith by closing their eyes to modern science. Such thinking was very mistaken (and that’s a huge understatement), specially because evolution used faulty assumptions to construct its main theories.
Apostolics are called to reclaim science (and other disciplines) to the glory of God. I can only speculate the difference that Harvard, Yale and Princeton (among others) would have made in our world if they had remained Christian centers of knowledge and training. God and true science are never opposed to each other.
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