Non-Credit Course | Science and Religion: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives
Peter HarrisonUniversity of Queensland Emeritus
This event is in-person only. Intended for university students, faculty, and staff. Others interested in attending please contact dstrobach@lumenchristi.org.
This event is made possible through the support of ‘In Lumine: Supporting the Catholic Intellectual Tradition on Campuses Nationwide’ (Grant #62372) from the John Templeton Foundation.
Registrants are free to attend as many sessions as they choose. Sessions do not presuppose previous attendance or prior knowledge of the subject.
It is often assumed, on the basis of contemporary controversies, that science and religion have always been in an oppositional relationship, and that conflict between them is inevitable. In this course we will consider the long history of science-religion relationships, exploring the ways in which religious factors played a positive role in the emergence of modern science, and were important in establishing a permanent and prominent place for scientific activity at the heart of modern Western culture. Specifically, the course will consider how the very ideas of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ came to take on their present form, while examining historical episodes such as the Galileo affair, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the nineteenth-century invention of the conflict thesis. We will also discuss how historical insights can provide resources for helping understand present relations between science and religion.
SCHEDULE
October 8th: The Boundaries of Science & Religion
- Further Reading: Harrison, Peter, Territories of Science and Religion ch 1 and 2.
October 15: Religion and the Rise of Science
- Further Reading: Harrison, Peter, ‘Christianity and the Rise of Western Science’, ABC Religion and Ethics, 8 May, 2012.
- Further Reading: Harrison, Peter, Territories of Science and Religion, ch. 3.
October 22: Exemplars of Conflict: Galileo and Darwin
- Further Reading: Graney, Christopher, ‘Opposition to Galileo was Scientific, not just Religious’, Aeon Magazine, 21 September, 2016.
- Further Reading: Dixon, Thomas and Adam Shapiro, Science and Religion, chs. 2 & 4.
October 29: Science and Modern Naturalism
- Further Reading: Harrison, Peter, Some New World, Introduction.
FORMAT
Tuesdays, October 9-October 29
6:00pm: Dinner
6:30pm: Presentation
Peter Harrison is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland. Before joining Notre Dame, he was Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. From 2014-2019 he was an Australian Laureate Fellow, and prior to this, the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Yale, Princeton, Otago, and the University of Chicago, is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, and a corresponding member of the International Academy of the History of Science. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, and in 2019 gave the Bampton Lectures at the University of Oxford.
