Darwin, Dogma, and Ecology

Catalog description

In his 2015 encyclical, On Care for our Common Home (Laudato Sí), Pope Francis makes an urgent appeal to "every person living on this planet" for dialogue and action in the face of impending environmental collapse. Of course, the pope's argument is grounded in Roman Catholic teaching; however, his critique is more philosophical than theological. It concerns not just the detrimental effect modern technology has had on the environment, but, more fundamentally, how modern science understands our knowledge of the world, and how in turn this understanding has adversely affected human action. The course will investigate the development within Catholicism of an evolutionary worldview that critically embraces neo-Darwinian science, but also distinguishes between religious faith-traditions and secular faith-traditions, suggesting how the former might prove more effective than the latter in addressing the ecological crisis.