CAT 2: Religion and Technology
Robert Westman
CAT 2: Religion and Technology is a historical examination of the encounter between religion and science. The class asks whether science and religion are inherently at odds or even “at war” with one another, as some nineteenth-century historians and twentieth-century journalists liked to say. Is there a single defining relationship between science and religion, such as Galileo’s dramatic engagement with the Catholic Church in the early seventeenth century or the 1925 “Monkey Trial” of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee? Focusing on these examples, among others, this class shows that these questions—as well as the answers given to them--have their own history.
