Unlike Ethics, which is a chronological, Western Canonical based course, my Philosophy of Religion is a problems based course. Due to the subject, the class is easily engagable. It is also more likely to stray and motivate interruptions, often stifling forward progress. So the “Phil-Rel” class (which I pronounce “Phil-Ril” because it rhymes, and I like to pretend I am a poet of excellent talent) has a very different class texture than Ethics, which is more inclined to smooth sailing (students are often easily engagable, but less excitable, allowing me more control to lay my planned narrative).
Perhaps because of this different texture, Phil-Ril can never match my Ethics in the goals I set forth below. However, I would like some central theory to direct the sequence of problems, with an eye toward how each problem is emotionally impacting the students (because the emotional state of the students has everything to do with what they are capable of learning at any given time in the semester, and some lessons work better immediately following others, enhancing the value of both…but enough platitudes. I will talk about this later).
Anyway, the major problems that we have discussed in Phil-Ril are;
- Relationship of soul/mind to the body.
- Problem of Evil (utilizing Hume, Dostoevsky, Leibniz (I lecture about him without the reading), and Plantinga
- Right to Believe (through William James, William Clifford: James is phenomenal, and Cilfford makes him better, despite Clifford’s boring essay)
- Validity of Religious Pluralism, Exclusivism, Relativism, etc.
- Conflict between Science and Religion, if there is one (Galileo, Dawkins, Gould, Pope John Paul II)
- Evolution and Intelligent Design (Neat, but essays in my book are lopsided– the ID essays are byzantine and/or repetitive…there are good essays to explore ID, but these are not good examples. By the way, I use this conflict not because I think ID to be a valid theory, but the students generally do not have the intellectual justification for rejecting it or accepting it, and I want to teach to their current knowledge level and understanding. That is how you spark curiousity and a sense of self-efficacy in thinking.)
- Cosmological, Ontological, Teleological Arguments for God’s existence. For reasons just listed, I will probably never teach Cosmo and Onto in a community college again. They are so archaic, depending on such outdated modes of thinking (even modern re-runs of it have a distinctive scholastic stench), that they do not incite curiosity or excitement at all. They are only useful as demonstrations about how brilliant minds can be ridiculously stupid if they don’t understand effective modes of thinking.
Natural Causes 