Let There Be Light: religion and science square off on how we got here…

Big Bang and Fiat Lux, Evolution and Revelation. The scientific and religious communities of late have been weighing in a good deal on the relations between their respective disciplines.

Some, like Richard Dawkins (in The God Delusion), have attempted to use ‘objective’ scientific evidence to disprove the existence of God once and for all. Others like Daniel Dennett (in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) have considered how the instinct for religion and religious faith is itself an evolutionary phenomenon that can be explained (perhaps even explained away?) in scientific terms.

On the other side of the divide are thinkers who run the gamut from hardcore defenders of the Creationist perspective, to those who see the confidence of scientists as presumptuous, evidence of a type of new fall into knowledge of good and evil that will leave us once again banished from the threatened “greenhouse” of our proper home, without sufficient guidance or orientation.

Still others, like Gerald Schroeder (author of The Science of God), have attempted to show how science and religion in essence articulate the same problem. Not a small part of these debates is our collective anxiety about how we got here, and the hope that the details of our mysterious advent, if better understood, might help predict or anticipate destinies as yet unknown to us.

LEADER

Jeffery Donaldson has been with Toronto Pursuits almost since its origin (though he is none the wiser on whether it evolved or came about as a Big Bang...). He considers himself a “Jerk of all trades,” but is currently writing a book on language and the evolution of spiritual consciousness. He teaches poetry and problem-based learning at McMaster University, and his third book of poems, Palilalia, was published by McGill-Queen’s in 2008.

BOOKS

A compendium of excerpts from the aforementioned readings will be posted on the website for download in January 2009.