To begin class on Friday, I went over a few interesting entries that have been made on the class blogs. As part of this course, the students are required to maintain a personal blog over the topics of this course. Up to this point, they have each been asked to post entries on a series of questions, such as encountering conflicts between science and religion, their perspective on miracles, their firm or nor-so-firm opinion on the origin of the universe, etc. In the past (this course having been taught twice before), we have simply had the students fill out a questionnaire handout. The blogs allow the students to read one another’s entries and make comments. I have also been making comments and have found their participation, thus far, to be very encouraging. Fortunately, it is a fairly small class so I can manage to read each of their entries in detail.
Following this review of some of the interesting postings, we entered into our discussion on the definitions of the terms we will be using throughout the course. In order to be very precise in our debates we want to establish specifically what we mean by the terms Faith and Science, as well as some related terms such as Religion, Natural, Evolution, Creation, etc. In many cases, a debate can be made fruitless when two sides use the same term to mean completely different things. For example, we can propose a definition for Science that basically makes it the study, through observation and experimentation, of the natural world. That works just fine but you must specify what is meant by the natural world. One might define natural in such a way to exclude any influence from the supernatural. If so, one decides from the very beginning that any “scientist” that studies how God might be revealed in nature or how the natural world points to a supernatural origin cannot be doing science. We have yet to discuss those issues so we’ve made not conclusions about the validity of such theories as Intelligent Design or even Theistic Evolution. And yet, how we define science can exclude it from the very start if we are not careful.
I had the students prepare for class today by searching for various definitions of the above terms and they were asked to identify the important components of each definition that they feel are vital to a precise and foundational definition of the term. We focused primarily on Faith, Science and Natural. After collecting many varying components, writing them on the board, and discussing, the class was divide into two groups and asked to formulate their working definitions. Class ended in the middle of this activity and we will pick up there next time.
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