RELG 235: World Religions and the Sciences

This course studies systems of human knowledge. In particular, it focuses on the ways that the world’s major religious traditions and the contemporary scientific enterprise have interacted over the past two millenia through various cultural contexts. We will be asking the following questions. What is science? What is religion? We will look at the meaning of knowledge and the meaning of culture in relation to science. A consideration is given to various approaches that can be used to conceptualize the relationship between religion and science and the ways these have developed through history sometimes in tension and sometimes in collaboration. In addition, we will reflect on the contemporary scene in the West, and will speculate on the directions this relationship is headed, and will raise some specific ethical issues in the process. So we will look at contemporary ethical and moral arguments that enlist science, and science that implies ethical and moral responses such as climate change or advances in genetic engineering.