At certain points (for example, when we discuss medieval debates about God's absolute power and God's ordained power, or when we discuss the influence of Aristotelian ideas on religious thought), some attention is given to Islamic and Jewish theology; however we focus on Christian theology and no attention is given to non-monotheistic religious traditions. (No implicit judgement on the value of studying other traditions is intended here. It is simply that other instructors would be better qualified to do this; indeed, I have little doubt that similar courses could be designed focusing on Judaism or Islam, for many issues in my course have to do with shared monotheistic beliefs about God the creator.)
The heart of the course involves careful examination of various ways in which thoughtful Christians have viewed the overall relationship between science and faith: what has Athens actually had to do with Jerusalem? A range of models is presented for consideration, each introduced as it actually appeared, in a particular historical context in response to specific questions and issues that were pressing at the time. In this way, students can see clearly the justification for each model and thus better assess its strengths, weaknesses, and relevance for the contemporary discussion. Thus, the course has a very strong historical component that prepares students very effectively to understand the state of the conversation today.
The historical portion of the course involves lectures and discussion of readings, especially primary sources -- historically significant treatments of key questions/issues -- supplemented either by scholarly articles chosen for their accessibility to undergraduates and/or by full-length texts. Recently I have used several units from the superb curricular materials on "Science and Belief" published a generation ago by the Open University Press. (A list of readings used in certain other years is also supplied with the current syllabus.) Though obviously somewhat dated, they have in my view never been surpassed in the way in which they combine helpful commentary on lengthy passages from primary texts with dispassionate historical analysis by the best scholars that brings the crucial scientific and theological issues right to the front. The contemporary portion is devoted to guided class discussion of nine important questions relevant to contemporary discussions. Here we rely heavily on the excellent book by John Haught, Science & Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (Paulist Press, 1995), which presents the questions and outlines the types of responses that might be given by adherents to each of four models: conflict, contrast, contact, and confirmation. These correspond rather closely to some of the models the students have already encountered in the historical portion of the course, so we are able at this point to concentrate on how those models continue to shape the conversation.
Throughout the course we underscore the distinction between "what God knows to be the case" and "what we think God knows to be the case." Truth must be sought, but we can do so only fallibly. The stated course objectives reflect this, especially the following: that each student should "see that science and theology are both creative activities -- that scientific theories and doctrinal formulations are creations of the human mind, educated guesses rather than absolute truths."
The overall course design reflects my expertise as an historian of Christianity and science. Most of my scholarship has examined the interplay of theology and science in the seventeenth century -- the crucial period for understanding how we arrived at where we are today, as the late Richard S. Westfall noted -- especially as seen in the life and work of Robert Boyle, probably the most important religion/science thinker of his age. However I have also published several scholarly essays on the modern period, and am now engaged in a major project to write a history of religion and science in America from 1900-1940. As a faculty member at Messiah College, I have taught introductory physics and physical science, European history, and the history of science in addition to courses on aspects of Christianity and science.
THE INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT and FURTHER DESCRIPTION OF COURSE ELEMENTS (these are too closely linked for a separate discussion of each)
Messiah College is a four-year, coeducational Chrisitan college of the liberal and applied arts and sciences. Our understanding of Christian education leads us to employ only professing Christians as faculty members and to recruit a student body consisting mostly of students who also profess Christianity. Obviously this has certain disadvantages, including a lack of religious diversity on campus. A major advantage, however, is the institutional support given to efforts to relate all academic fields to the beliefs we share as Christians.
Central to our understanding of Christian education is our goal of helping each student to articulate a thoughtful world view in which faith has a large role. This task is often called "the integration of faith and learning." In contrast to its common useage in science and religion, here the word "integration" refers not to a specific way of relating faith and a given discipline, but to the general enterprise of trying to relate Athens and Jerusalem. We work at this in a variety of ways, but it is incumbent upon all academic departments at Messiah to help students relate their Christian faith to the discipline(s) taught by a given department. This applies not only to curricula for specific majors, but also to our general education curriculum. My course is part of the latter -- it meets a requirement called "Science, Technology, and the World" (see the syllabus for a list of the goals pertaining to that area). Thus it is open to students from all majors and attracts mainly students from non-science majors, though some science majors do enroll.
Science is an area that has caused many young minds (as well as older ones!) much difficulty, particularly when it is seen as a body of well established, rational "knowledge" in opposition to religious "beliefs" held purely by faith. For quite a few people, my class may be the best opportunity they will ever have to sort out some puzzling and deeply troubling issues that have the potential to lead them right out of their faith. More than anything else, I want to give them the kind of assistance they need to see their way through the muddle. As Oliver Wendell Holmes is reported to have said, "I do not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity. But I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." What I want most to achieve is not indoctrination in any sense, but the creation of a supportive environment in which students are helped to form their own conclusions, to evaluate the assumptions that accompany their faith in order that the faith they have at the end of the course will truly be their own. Robert Boyle put it thus in an early, unpublished collection of private thoughts: "The Dialect of Faith runs much upon the First Person[,] or True Faith speakes always in the First Person." This is followed immediately by, "He whose Faith never doubted, may justly doubt of his Faith."
The overall purpose of my course is to introduce students to some of the ways in which thoughtful Christians have related their faith to science since the earliest years of the church, in order to help them relate their own faith to science today. Nothing could be more consistent with the fundamental mission of Messiah College, where faculty serve as mentors for other Christians who need to answer their own personal questions about science and faith: it is vital for us to model integration for our students. Ideally, this will be done in a way that shows students that there are multiple options and encourages students to explore more than one of them actively, on their own, for the process of world view formation is intensely personal. Pedagogically, this means that lectures alone cannot suffice; significant amounts of reading, discussion, and writing are essential; more will be said about this below. It is especially helpful if students can see, among the faculty, examples of those who hold different views on how to relate science to faith. Students who are not exposed to this kind of diversity may be quick to identify "integration" with one particular way of doing it, and just as quick to abandon the whole enterprise when, later on, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle appears to lie along the one path they have been shown. Humility, and the intellectual openness that accompany it, are the most important attitudes to bring to the integrative task. In practice, this means that no particular way of relating Christianity and science is going to answer all important questions satisfactorily. We must expect to encounter difficulties that have no clear solutions, and we must be careful not to hitch our theological wagons too tightly to any particular scientific or philosophical horses -- while at the same time we must recognize that, without particular horses, we can only stand still. Above all, we must retain that combination of mystery and faith that breathes life into the dry bones of human existence.
Indeed, although my course deals specifically with Christianity and the natural sciences, my general strategy of using multiple models to help students formulate world views is applicable widely across the curriculum, so that many of the insights students gain in my class are helpful to them in other classes, even classes that have nothing to do with natural science. This is evident from the comments on the evaluations submitted in support of this application. Clearly, students appreciate several aspects of this course, above all the way in which it has improved their ability to think about issues related to religion and science. One student said that "It has made me a more `astute' Christian," another that "the questions I had going into this course have been answered," a third that this course is "very worthwhile," since it "caused me to think, not just academically but spiritually as well," and a fourth student confessed that "my God has become much bigger!"
The multiple-models approach is also ideally suited for a course taught by a professional historian of science, such as myself. For many people in the modern West, including a large number of prominent scientists, Christianity and science have for centuries been engaged in open conflict, with science winning the war for cultural and epistemic territory. The history of science has been instrumental in debunking this myth, which has specific ideological roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it actually tells us more about the people who believe it than about the history it purports to relate. In fact, Christianity has often been a powerful motivation for the practice of science and medicine, and it has helped to mold science into the highly successful empirical enterprise that it has become in the last three centuries. Although it is important to recognize that world views must not be judged simply by their ability either to foster or to inhibit scientific activity, no world view actually in opposition to the scientific enterprise can have much influence in the modern West; the fact that Christianity has been highly conducive to the development of modern science is significant (if sometimes overstated). The Open University readers that I use in this course were written more than twenty years ago, but the authors were all acutely aware of the historical bankruptcy of the warfare thesis -- they were on the cutting edge of a view that is now generally accepted, at least outside of the scientific community -- and they did a terrific job of demonstrating in their writings the wonderful richness of numerous important historical interactions between science and religion. I am not aware of other materials that do this more effectively, not even John Brooke's recent book, itself based substantially on the Open University materials (to which he contributed several units).
No less important, much recent scholarship in the history of science helps to "demythologize" the common image of science as purely objective knowledge and faith as purely subjective belief, from which the conflict thesis easily follows. We now know that scientific knowledge is determined not by observations and experiments, but by the outcome of debates about how to interpret observations and experiments, debates that are influenced by a variety of factors -- philosophical, religious, sociological, political, and personal. It is now possible as never before to see both science and religion as containing deeply held, rationally structured beliefs, some of them not directly testable. Students are also encouraged to view neither "science" nor "religion" as fixed entities with obvious boundaries, but to develop a more informed, more thoughtful view of the relation between science and Christian faith. We also stress how, for many in the modern world, science itself wears the mantle of religion: it provides a creation myth, reveals our true nature as actualized genes, proclaims the promise of salvation, gives us every good and perfect gift, offers eschatological hope, and functions as the ultimate arbiter of truth. The historical materials from the Open University offer several nice examples of these aspects of science, presenting a clear picture of how scientists themselves have differed on attitude they ought take toward their own enterprise and the knowledge it generates.
Judging from the comments on the evaluations I have submitted with this essay, my students appreciate the strong historical bent of the course, seeing it as personally helpful as well as intellectually stimulating. As a psychology student wrote, "I did not feel like I was being required to spend (waste) time learning information I could not use; instead, I felt like I was being drawn into an age-old discussion of great importance." An English major commented that the range of topics, "from philosophical to spiritual to scientific," should all "be considered in life" and "were pertinent to my own faith." A business major found the content to be "intellectually stimulating." A Bible major appreciated the fact that "a lot of myths were put to rest." A social work student noted the value of learning about various historical issues "that aren't discussed in our churches or in public schools." Particularly meaningful to me are the unsolicited responses of several former students, including two Protestant ministers (one of whom wrote the college in support of my course at a time when its future was in doubt for internal political reasons that have since been addressed). Their comments are included with the supporting materials. A group of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars responded with comparable enthusiasm to an advanced version of this course that I taught this past summer for the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, which may be viewed by interested parties.
That part of the course devoted to improving students' writing skills also seems to have been effective, judging from the comments of several students: and this is highly relevant to the success of the course. Several years of teaching religion and cience have strengthened my belief that the primary goal of this course -- to encourage each student to put together her own understanding of the proper relation between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge -- can be met only in a setting that facilitates extensive discussion of well chosen readings, in which students are confronted with ideas and made to respond to them thoughtfully. There is no better tool to facilitate this than writing, which is why this course carries a "W" as a suffix to the course number, indicating that it meets a curricular requirement for all students to take at least one "writing-intensive" course; thus this course satisfies both a content requirement (Science, Technology, and the World) as well as a skill requirement (writing) and thereby attracts an even wider range of students than it otherwise might attract.
Three types of writing (in addition to essay examinations, described below) are used, each tailored to a different aspect of the course content. When I explain them to students, I call them "informal," "semi-formal," and "formal," reflecting not only the type of language employed but also the level of difficulty involved in thinking about what to say.
(1) Informal writing -- "Green sheets." One of my own pedagogical ideas, green sheets (which are always printed on green paper, hence the name) are hand-written responses to specific questions about primary and secondary sources we will be discussing in class. Their main purpose is to prepare students effectively to discuss readings in class. They do this not only by ensuring that students have done the assigned reading prior to class, but also by helping students to see some of the important points we will be talking about in class. In this way they can gather their thoughts ahead of time, which makes for much better discussions -- discussions in which the students' views are more likely to be voiced, and this is crucial to a course of this kind. Because they are not graded formally -- being marked simply, "satisfactory/unsatisfactory/outstanding" -- they do not overburden either the students or the instructor. This is the most common type of writing assignment in the course.
(2) Semiformal writing -- chapter summaries. One of the more effective ways to help students read a good scholarly book is to have them write summaries of the thesis (if there is one) and main points of each chapter. I do this for Haught's book, which is worthy of such treatment since it has so many insightful things to say. Students must summarize the opening chapter, in which Haught sets up the scheme of four models that he uses throughout the book. Then each student may choose five of the remaining eight chapters to summarize, allowing him to concentrate on the specific topics that interest him most. Every one of the nine chapters is discussed in class, with students taking the lead to present the main points based on the summaries they have written. Thus each student sees the main points in a given chapter, whether or not he chose to summarize it. These are assigned points based on both content and style, with emphasis on the former. Although students find this exercise somewhat tedious, they have been heard to admit that it is a very effective way for them to digest the book and also serves to improve their writing skills. [Other books I have treated this way in other years include John Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, and Jerome Langford, Galileo, Science, and the Church.]
(3) Formal writing -- Short essays (usually 1500-2000 words) on set topics, based on lectures and readings. I have used several different questions over the years, all of them aimed at helping students to formulate their own ideas about how to relate science and faith; some sample questions are included here. As these essays work at the goals of the course more than any other assignments I employ, they should be studied with some care. Galileo looms large in several of the questions I have used over the years, for important pedagogical reasons. Because my students simply do not care whether or not the earth moves -- it is no longer an issue for most people in our day -- it is easy for them to give Galileo's views on the proper relation between science and faith a fair hearing. This lessons the difficulty of getting them to think critically about other science/faith issues that do matter to them. Furthermore, the complexities of the historical situation in which Galileo found himself make this an ideal case study of the falsity of the conflict model -- a splendid irony, since this has traditionally been seen as the paradigmatic instance of conflict between religion and science! Thinking about Galileo, then, can help my students avoid the pitfalls of fundmentalism in both its scientific and religious forms, which is a large part of what I am trying to achieve.
Finally I use essay examinations, which do not fall within the categories above since they are both formal (in that students are given questions in advance and are expected to come to the examination period prepared to write about them, and they are graded formally) and informal (in that style counts hardly at all, as they are written by hand under time pressure). Unit examinations call for students to synthesize material from the lectures and readings, in ways that are probably not particularly innovative. The final examination, however, calls for students to reflect on several specific models for relating science and faith, including warfare, harmony, dialogue, and complementarity. Students are expected either to choose one of these models for reasons they can articulate, to develop a model themselves, or to refuse to adopt any model for reasons they can articulate. The key is that they are expected to think critically and creatively about various models, and that this is a realistic expectation to place upon them at this point. Early in the course I have them submit a preliminary statement about religion and science of not more than 400 words, in which they state views they bring into the course. The final examination calls for them to re-examine their own earlier statement in light of what they learned in the course. A copy of the final question is included with the sample essays.