Jesuit Explores God, Religion and Science in Ignatian Seminar

Jesuit Father David Collins has always been ?fascinated by God and religion.? ?At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., he explores the relationship between religion and science in an Ignatius Seminar course he created two years ago.

Fr.? Collins says that he?s always had a theological curiosity, and as an undergraduate he began to investigate his own relationship with God. As a senior, he applied to join the Society of Jesus.

?Even during a highly skeptical phase in my life, I found the big questions that theology poses intriguing and important as in no other discipline,? Fr. ?Collins says. ?But the decision to enter religious life and pursue the priesthood had much more to do with an awareness of God in my heart than with any theological proposition or school of thought.?

In the classroom, Fr. Collins channels his interests into his popular seminar,??Science and Religion in the West: Historical Perspectives.? The course begins with Latin theologian St. Augustine and the dominant question of his time ? should Christians study science, as the pagan Greeks do? ? and ends with modern American debates about evolution.

For Fr. Collins, the most rewarding aspect of his Ignatius Seminar is that it goes against the popular Western narrative that science and religion are enemies. History, he says, shows that these two institutions work well together and that their cooperation often leads to good things for civilization.

?America?s religiously inspired hostility to evolution is the exception, not the rule, in the history of the West. It?s enjoyable to watch students? jaws hit the floor when they see that, despite some newspaper polemic, Western scientific discovery has recurrently advanced thanks to religious insights and religious commitment of resources,? Fr. Collins says.

?The actual history of the relationship between science and religion in the West is so much more interesting than the sound bites of culture warriors on the left or the right.?

Read the full story at the Georgetown University website.

Source: http://www.jesuit.org/blog/index.php/2013/02/jesuit-explores-god-religion-and-science-in-ignatian-seminar/

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