Theology and the Natural Sciences

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course aims to equip students with the tools to examine and contribute to contemporary problems in the relationship between Christian beliefs and the natural sciences. This is achieved by allowing students to see those topics as embedded in a long history of theologians engaging the physics, medicine, and natural philosophy of their times. Roughly half the course will be devoted to that history, drawing out three narrative arcs: the sophisticated ways that Christians dealt with apparent conflicts between their beliefs about nature and those of secular authorities; the ways that the contemporary sciences depended on particular theological presuppositions (divine voluntarism and immutability, the regularity and intelligibility of nature); and the contingency of the contemporary sciences. Against this historical backdrop, the second half of the course will consider four classical Christian doctrines that appear to be in conflict with some aspect of contemporary science: the imago Dei in relation to evolution and scientific transhumanism; miracles in relation to the laws of nature; doctrines of the Fall and original sin in relation to population biology; and the doctrine of the soul in relation to neuroscience.