Acerca de este curso: Philosophy, Science and Religion mark three of the most fundamental modes of thinking about the world and our place in it. Are these modes incompatible? Put another way: is the intellectually responsible thing to do to ‘pick sides’ and identify with one of these approaches at the exclusion of others? Or, are they complementary or mutually supportive? As is typical of questions of such magnitude, the devil is in the details. For example, it is important to work out what is really distinctive about each of these ways of inquiring about the world. In order to gain some clarity here, we’ll be investigating what some of the current leading thinkers in philosophy, science and religion are actually doing. This course, entitled ‘Philosophy and Religion’, is the second of three related courses in our Philosophy, Science and Religion Online series, and in this course we will ask important questions about the age-old debate between science and religion, such as: • What kind of conflicts are there between religion and science? • Does current cognitive science of religion effectively explain away God? • If there is a God who has made us so that we can know him, why do some people not believe? • Is belief in science also a kind of fundamentalism? • What makes us good at getting, giving, or sharing, knowledge? Is this different when it is religious knowledge? The first course in the Philosophy, Science and Religion series, 'Science and Philosophy' was launched early in 2017 and you can sign up to it at any time. The third course —‘Religion and Science’—will be launched early in 2018. Completing all three courses will give you a broader understanding of this fascinating topic. Look for: • Philosophy, Science and Religion I: Science and Philosophy https://www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy-science-religion-1/ • Philosophy, Science and Religion III: Religion and Science Upon successful completion of all three courses, students will: (1) Understand the main parameters at stake in the current debate between science and religion. (2) Have some familiarity with the relevant areas of science that feature in the debate—including cosmology, evolution, and the neurosciences—and will have begun to engage with them conceptually. (3) Have encountered key philosophical approaches to the interface between science and religion, and will have had the opportunity to engage them in practice. (4) Have embarked constructively in cross-disciplinary conversations. (5) Have demonstrated an openness to personal growth through a commitment to dialogue across intellectual and spiritual boundaries. You can also follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/EdiPhilOnline and you can follow the hashtag #psrmooc
Para quién es esta clase: This class can be taken by learners at all levels, and should be easy to understand for 1st and 2nd year undergraduate students. Although passing short quizzes is required to pass the course, those who want to engage further also have the option of receiving peer-feedback on optional short-answer questions. The course is self-contained but can also act as a taster for Edinburgh's online MSc in Philosophy, Science, and Religion: https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees/index.php?r=site/view&id=941
Creada por: The University of Edinburgh
Enseñado por: Dr Orestis Palermos, Research Explorer
School of Philosophy
Enseñado por: Dr Mark Harris, Senior Lecturer in Science and Religion
School of Divinity
Enseñado por: Professor Duncan Pritchard, Professor of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Enseñado por: Dr J Adam Carter, Researcher
Epistemology - Philosphy
Enseñado por: Dr Mog Stapleton
| Nivel | Beginner |
| Compromiso | 6 Modules; 2-3 hours of study per module |
| Idioma | English |
| Cómo aprobar | Aprueba todas las tareas calificadas para completar el curso. |
| Calificaciones del usuario |
Programa
SEMANA 1
Introduction to the course
In this module Professor Duncan Pritchard welcomes you to the course and gives you a preview of our journey together over the next six weeks.
2 videos, 4 readings
- Vídeo: Course overview
- Vídeo: Professor Duncan Pritchard introduces the course
- Leyendo: About this course
- Leyendo: Course assessments and exercises
- Leyendo: Course textbook
- Leyendo: Introductory Reading: Faith and Rationality
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: Get to know your classmates
Mind, Science, and Religion
Dr. Sarah Lane Ritchie starts us off with a tour of the relationship between the various brain sciences and religious belief.
5 videos, 2 readings, 2 practice quizzes
- Vídeo: Lecture 1.1: Introduction
- Vídeo: Lecture 1.2: Religious Belief and Embodiment
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 1.3: Neural Correlates of Religious Belief
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 1.4: Religious Belief and the Cognitive Science of Religion
- Vídeo: Lecture 1.5: Religious Belief Disproved?
- Leyendo: Introductory Reading: Does Contemporary Neuroscience Debunk Religious Belief?
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: Religious belief and the brain
- Leyendo: Find out more...!
Calificado: Module Quiz
SEMANA 2
Science and Religion in the Public Realm
In this series of lectures, Professor John Evans describes a sociological approach to the question of religion and science that focuses on contemporary society. Using debates about fact claims and morality of human evolution as his continuing example, and with a focus on the relationship with science that religious and other citizens have with science, he describes three types of conflict. Unlike the philosophical and theological debate that focuses upon conflict over knowledge claims about the physical world, Evans shows how the contemporary debate for citizens is more likely to be about morality.
5 videos, 1 reading, 4 practice quizzes
- Vídeo: Lecture 2.1 - Overview
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 2.2 - Possible conflict between religion and science
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: Are religion and science incompatible ways of knowing about the world?
- Vídeo: Lecture 2.3 - Official Christian stances on the conflict
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 2.4 - Views on human origins
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 2.5 - Is the religious public in moral conflict with science?
- Leyendo: Religion and Science: Beyond the Epistemological Conflict Narrative
Calificado: Module Quiz
Calificado: Assess the reading critically
SEMANA 3
Religious Disagreement and Friendly Theism/Atheism
In this series of lectures Professor John Greco discusses the topic of religious disagreement. Part One considers two problems that we find in the epistemology of religion: The Problem of Evil (or Suffering) and The Problem of Divine Hiddenness. In these contexts, theists and atheists often accuse each other of irrationality. Even worse, each party of the debate explains that irrationality by positing some moral or intellectual flaw in the other. The basic idea is this: If you don’t see things the way I do, that must be due to some intellectual or moral flaw in you. Part Two introduces resources in social epistemology that help us to understand what is going on here. The main idea is that social location affects epistemic position-- that social location matters, epistemically speaking. This is a central lesson of contemporary social epistemology, and one that can be fruitfully adopted by religious epistemology as well. Part Three explores some further implications of a “social religious epistemology.” Most importantly, we see how moral and practical aspects of the social environment can have epistemic consequences.
4 videos, 3 readings, 2 practice quizzes
- Vídeo: Lecture 3.1 - Two problems in the epistemology of religion
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding!
- Vídeo: Lecture 3.2 - Social epistemology
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding!
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: Which epistemic communities are you a member of?
- Vídeo: Lecture 3.3 - Implications for religious epistemology
- Vídeo: Lecture 3.4 - Conclusion
- Leyendo: Introductory Reading: Are Theism and Atheism Totally Opposed?
- Leyendo: Further reading
- Leyendo: Testimony and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge
Calificado: Module Quiz
Calificado: Assess the reading critically
SEMANA 4
The Hiddenness Argument and the Contribution of Philosophy
In this series of lectures, Professor John Schellenberg introduces and explains a new argument for atheism known as the hiddenness argument. He highlights the self-imposed limitations of this way of reasoning, which is aimed at ruling out just one candidate for the status of a divine reality, the notion of a personal divine. He then clarifies the relations between this approach to the question of God's existence and other features of the contemporary landscape in philosophy and science – including the philosophical problem of evil, certain results of the cognitive science of religion, and recent moral changes suggesting cultural evolution.
5 videos, 2 readings, 3 practice quizzes
- Vídeo: Lecture 4.1 - What is the hiddenness argument?
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 4.2 - Main objections to the argument
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 4.3 - Responses to the objections
- Leyendo: Introductory Reading: Is God Hidden, Or Does God Simply Not Exist?
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: Must God be Perfectly Loving?
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: Our relationship with God
- Vídeo: Lecture 4.4 - The relationship between religion and science
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: A fully developed religion?
- Vídeo: Lecture 4.5 - Philosophy's contribution to the theism debates
- Revisión por el compañero: Optional Essay Question
- Leyendo: Divine Hiddenness and Human Philosophy
Calificado: Module Quiz
Calificado: Assess the reading critically
SEMANA 5
Religious and Scientific Fundamentalism
In this series of lectures Dr. Rik Peels considers religious and scientific fundamentalism. Scientism is the currently popular thesis that only natural science gives rational belief or, alternatively, that there are no principled limits to science. In this lecture, I give several examples of scientism, such as scientism about free will. After that, I present seven reasons that have been given for scientism. Subsequently, I outline three arguments against it. Finally, I explain some crucial similarities and differences between scientism on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other. I argue that, even though some varieties of scientism resemble fundamentalism, most of them are more similar to religions or worldviews.
6 videos, 4 readings, 4 practice quizzes
- Vídeo: Lecture 5.1 - What is scientism?
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 5.2 - Varieties of scientism
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 5.3 - Arguments for scientism
- Vídeo: Lecture 5.4 - Arguments for scientism (continued)
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 5.5 - Arguments against scientism
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 5.6 - Scientism, religious belief, and fundamentalism
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: Is scientism a religion?
- Leyendo: The Folly of Scientism
- Leyendo: Is Fundamentalism Just a Problem for Religious People?
- Leyendo: The Fundamental Argument Against Scientism
- Leyendo: A Conceptual Map of Scientism
Calificado: Module quiz
Calificado: Honours Track Assignment on Scientism
SEMANA 6
Epistemic Virtues and Vices in Science and Religion
In this lecture, Professor Mark Alfano discusses the role of epistemic virtues and vices in science and religion. The lecture has three main sections. First, Alfano distinguishes four types of epistemic virtues and vices. Source virtues such as honesty make someone an excellent primary source of knowledge. Receiver virtues such as intellectual humility make someone an excellent recipient of knowledge provided by sources. Conduit virtues make someone an excellent conveyor of the knowledge they receive from others to third parties; these dispositions might include a willingness to gossip carefully in order to protect others from a sexual predator, as well as the virtues that journalists try to embody. Echo virtues make someone an excellent sounding board for others. Along the way, Alfano mentions various vices that can attach to people in the role of source, receiver, conduit, and echo. In the second part of the lecture, Alfano uses the notions of source, receiver, conduit, and echo virtues to make sense of scientific collaborations and trust in science by laypeople. In section three, he shows that unless we have unreasonably high credence in very long chains of conduit virtues, we should not accept testimony in favour of miracles or divine revelation.
6 videos, 1 reading, 3 practice quizzes
- Vídeo: Lecture 6.1 - Overview of the lecture
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 6.2 - Introduction to epistemic virtues and vices
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 6.3 - Case studies from science: scientific collaborations
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: What kind of problems are presented by massive collaborations in science?
- Vídeo: Lecture 6.4 - Case studies from science: trust and distrust of science by laypeople
- Cuestionario de práctica: Test your understanding
- Vídeo: Lecture 6.5 - Case studies from religion: miracles
- Vídeo: Lecture 6.6 - Case studies from religion: transmission of revelation
- Cuadro de aviso de la discusión: Getting knowledge of Science and Relgion
- Leyendo: Further reading: Virtues For Agents in Directed Social Networks
Calificado: Module quiz
Preguntas Frecuentes
Cómo funciona
Trabajo del curso
Cada curso es como un libro de texto interactivo, con videos pregrabados, cuestionarios y proyectos.
Ayuda de tus compañeros
Conéctate con miles de estudiantes y debate ideas y materiales del curso, y obtén ayuda para dominar los conceptos.
Certificados
Obtén reconocimiento oficial por tu trabajo y comparte tu éxito con amigos, compañeros y empleadores.
Creadores
The University of Edinburgh
Influencing the world since 1583, The University of Edinburgh is consistently ranked as one of the world's top 50 universities. Today, we are an established and global leader in online learning, providing degree-level education to 3,000 online students in addition to 36,000 students on-campus. We also offer a wide range of free online courses in a variety of subjects. To find out more about studying for one of our online degrees, search for ‘Edinburgh online’ or visit www.ed.ac.uk
Calificaciones y revisiones
Thanks Coursera for providing this wonderful course
Very informative and easy to follow and keep up with.
kind of liked the format. Only a few questions at a time: not too much gets thrown at a person on a quiz. The instructors seemed also to impart info so that I could understand, as demonstrated by an immediate short quiz. It's interesting stuff.
Coursera brinda acceso universal a la mejor educación del mundo, al asociarse con las mejores universidades y organizaciones, para ofrecer cursos en línea.
© 2018 Coursera Inc. Todos los derechos reservados.
AJ
It was a great and interesting course