Professor Peter Lowentrout
Department of Religious Studies Office Phone: 562-985-5341
EMAIL: Plowen2@AOL.com (this is the quickest way to contact me)
Web site: http://www.csulb.edu/~plowentr Fax: 562/985-8999
U100 Office: LibE 127     U100 Phone: 562-985-4906 (best for phone messages)
Office Hours: in the evening after class, and by appointment anytime in LibE 127

Course Objectives:

This course will introduce you to the occasionally harmonious, sometimes acrimonious relationship between religion and the sciences. We will examine the fundamental insights and claims of both religion and science, and I hope to move you quickly beyond the sharp prejudices many people bring to a consideration of religion and science to a more reasoned understanding of each alone and of both in relation to each other.

Required Texts:

Barbour, Ian, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues,
      HarperCollins, New York, New York, 1997.
Davies, Paul, God and the New Physics, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992.
Religion and Science Course Reader, available at CopyPro

Course Requirements:

1) Take-home Midterm Essay Examination (7-8 pages)
     or
     Short Research Paper (8-9 pages)on a topic of your choice

2)  In-class Final Essay Examination (2 hours)

3) Class Journal: to include lecture notes, notes on your reading and, of course, a critical response to the lectures and readings to include your own reflections upon the nature of
     religion and science and their relationship.  To be turned in with your final exams.

Each required assignment counts 1/3 of the final grade. Extra credit projects can be undertaken with my prior approval. In your Class Journal, take notes on and record your thoughts about the reading assignments. The journal is more than just a serial book report – in it you do your best to engage and critically reflect upon the assigned readings. Exams, journals and research papers will be available in my office for one semester after the end of the class.

Structure of Course:

Section 1 Method in religion: how does religion claim to help us know the world and ourselves? Through an introduction to the phenomenology of religion and the phenomenology of mystical experience we will see how religion "works." Can we know God in the cave of our hearts? How does religion act upon us to induce in us an experience of the sacred? In other words, what is the method of religion? What is the epistemological and methodological value of intuition and deduction?

    Read for Sections 1-4: Course Reader 1-10 and 43; Barbour, Part Two (Chapters 4,5 and 6)

Section 2 Method in science: how does science claim to help us know the world and ourselves? We can achieve an excellent clarity of thought and intellectual formulation through the inductive or "hypothetico-deductive" method of the sciences. We’ll see how this is done.

Section 3-4 Science and Religion: the roots of scientific and religious inquiry in the single process of human knowing. Coleridge once asserted that the clearest sign of a mature mind is its ability to tolerate ambiguity. We must ignore the ideologues of science and religion who constitutionally seek clear but too simple answers to the question of the nature of scientific and religious enterprise – we must look beyond what many scientists and religionists say they are doing when they do science and religion to what they actually do.

Barbour’s four ways of relating religion and science
The myth of science: seven assumptions that inform our understanding, and
         scientist’s self-understanding, of science
Kuhn’s social epistemology of science: a contraindication to hard induction
         theories of scientific knowing; Kuhn on the humanities and religion
A close look at what scientists and religionists do when they do science and
         religion: the primary role of creative intuition and empirical evidence in
         both science and religion

Section 5 Science, Religion and Pseudo-science: case studies in method. Jeane Dixon never published a correct "psychic" prediction (I’ll prove this to you) – so why was she the most famous of the public "psychics?" Could it be the "Jeane Dixon fallacy?" A.J. Ayer, on the other hand, was the most famous atheist of the Twentieth Century – so what was he doing publishing the tale of his near-death experience and professing intimations of immortality in the year before his death in the late 1980s?

Logical fallacies and fallacies of theory testing: the hallmarks of pseudo-science
Creation Science: a clear pseudo-science
Parapsychology: pseudo-science or nascent science in its Kuhnian natural historical phase?
Wegener’s theory of continental drift: he was right, but is it fair to revile those who reviled
       Wegener?

    Read: Radner and Radner; Course Reader (Selections 11-18, 28-33); Barbour, Chapter 9

Section 6 Science and Religion at Loggerheads? A brief history of the relationship of science and religion from ancient times through the 19^th Century.Why did science not develop in the ancient world? Was Western religion, as some claim, a necessary prerequisite for the rise of science in the early modern period? How close was the relationship between early science and mystical/occult world-views? Was the "conflict" of science and religion a 19th Century reading of history? Did religion in some ways nurture and not simply oppose the development of science?

The science of the ancient world
The development of scientific astronomy
The development of mechanical physics
The development of scientific evolutionism in geology and biology

    Read: Barbour, Part One (chapters 1, 2, and 3)

Section 7 Modern Science and Current Religious Belief

Two early 20th Century attempts to unify science and religion: Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It may be true, as some charge, that these two men are "not sufficiently critical." But this may paradoxically prove to be their strength. While Jung’s and Teilhard’s unifications remain half-buried in and deeply informed by their respective religious myths, perhaps our thought culture is itself not sufficiently critical to accomplish a more fully and rationally articulated unification at this time. Perhaps we get the fullest view possible today of the lineaments of a future unification of science and religion half-buried in the mythic subtexts of thinkers like Jung and Teilhard. We will see what we can tease out of the work of these two men and then see if the development of our thought culture since their deaths has borne out their expectations.

    Read: Barbour, chapters 11 and 12

The Epochal Process of Secularization: the impact of science and the cultural and ideational change science drives upon religion. Two early 20^th Century sociologists, Emil Durkheim and Max Weber, believed that religion would shortly die out of industrial cultures. Though even today there is much of great use in what these two had to say about the processes of secularization and their affect upon us, they clearly wrong about the impending death of religion. What happened? Modern views of secularization understand it to be self-limiting. This alone is perhaps a more important realization about who and what we are than anything in the work of Durkheim and Weber, for all their importance in the development of early sociology.

    Read: The Course Reader (selection 19)

The "New" Physics, Scientific Cosmology and Religion: Thirty years ago, cosmology was too speculative to be properly called "scientific." Today, however, theoretical physics and scientific cosmology have raised many fascinating (even weird) possibilities for our consideration of universal origins and the deepest nature of the world. We can find in these new developments many interesting parallels between religious and scientific thought, though we must be careful not to draw our circles too tightly.

    Read: Davies; Barbour, chapters 7 and 8; the Course Reader (selections 20-27)

The Natural History of the Mind and Religion: What is "human nature?" What does biology tell us about the balance between nature and nurture? Biology is entering its "Classical" (mechanical) period – a time of rapid advance and great creativity. But might it follow physics into a "post-Classical" phase? Are the roots of consciousness to be found in large-scale biological processes, in biologically significant quantum processes, or do they lie deeper than the experimental and intellectual tools of our biologists and physicists can yet reach?

    Read: Barbour, Chapter 10

Section 8 Into the future: ETs, AI, cyborgs, clones and male pregnancy -- are there limits to God's love and to our moral and religious imaginations? Be prepared for an in-class discussion that will range over and pull together the entire course. We will take a look at where things might be heading during your lives and the lives of your children. We will discuss your research papers. And, yes, I will review you for the final exam. You must be at this final session of the class or I will want to know why you are not!