PHIL 383: Philosophical Approaches to Religion

Course Materials

Assignments:

• Assignment 1
• Assignment 2

Readings:

• McGrath, "Historical Landmarks"
• John Paul II, "Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences"
• Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria"
• Dawkins, "Obscurantism to the Rescue"
• Popper, "Science: Conjectures and Refutations"
• Kuhn, "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research"
• Lakatos, "Science and Pseudoscience"

Handouts:

• Handout 1 - Interpretation: Literal or Non-Literal?
• Handout 2 - Hume and the Teleological Argument
• Handout 3 - The Biochemistry of Vision
• Handout 4 - More on Cilia and Irreducible Complexity
• Handout 5 - Evolutionary Explanations
• Handout 6 - Computational Arguments

Links

• McGrath interviewed on CBC's The Hour
• Dawkins interviewed on CBC's The Hour
• Dawkins explaining the evolution of the eye
• ARN's page on molecular machines and irreducible complexity. If you look around a bit, you can find animations of cilia and other molecular machines.
• Here's an hour-long interview with Behe in which he discusses molecular machines and many other things. He begins talking about molecular machines at about 8 and a half minutes into the interview. Here he is on The Colbert Report.
• Here is the transcript of an interview with van Inwagen.
• You can find an interview with Smith here at Closer to Truth. The website contains many interviews of reputable thinkers on various topics having to do with God, consciousness, and the cosmos. I highly recommend it.