Two of my colleagues, an astrophysicist interested in the history and philosophy of science and a medievalist interested in Catholicism, just finished team-teaching a course on Religion & Science. After months of discussion they decided to make their focus "the explanation of anomalous events." Since I'm interested in team-teaching experiences, and in the science/religion area, I asked them how the experience was. The physicist was the first to respond, and wrote, in part:
For me the most interesting thing about this course, and teaching it with M in particular, is that we never ONCE found a reason to actually DISAGREE about anything during class. (I don't think - at least I can't come up with an occasion where we had any sort of substantive difference of opinion on an issue.)
This is indeed interesting, a downright remarkable achievement for a course on religion and science! They apparently didn't endorse Stephen Jay Gould's convenient "non-overlapping magisteria" view, so I am intrigued. I have no idea what they could have been saying for a whole semester...!
I've never taught science and religion, though another colleague (also a physicist) and I used to talk about trying to do something together. We never got around to it, in part because it's not a subject I thought you could go very many places with. History/philosophy of science and history/philosophy of religion, yes, but that's not what most people take "science and religion" to be about. But now that I've taken my first chemistry class, I'm interested again, and not just in the history/philosophy angle...
