God and Science

Catalog description

It is difficult to name two arenas of human thought that have shaped civilization as powerfully as have religion and science. Yet they appear to stand in great tension -- if not outright opposition -- with one another: while religion typically involves faith in a divine creator and belief in supernatural phenomena, science purportedly deals in reason alone, describing objective facts about natural phenomena. But are science and belief in God really at odds? Do they say conflicting things about causation, free will, consciousness, morality, the origin of life and the cosmos? What roles do belief, reason, evidence, truth and objectivity play in religious versus scientific worldviews? This class explores such questions through the lens of history (principally in the West, and with respect to monotheistic traditions) and through critical examination of the nature, practices and aims of contemporary scientific and religious thought.