What are the ‘Ultimate Questions’ that you explore in the classroom with your students?
How do you engage them in the questioning process?
These are two of the key questions delegates will explore together at the 2011 DAN Conference (18-20 April, Newington College, Stanmore).
We’ll be presenting a ‘Making it Happen’ workshop at the Conference: Â The Religion & Science Conversation in the Middle and Senior School Classroom. Two units of work and associated resources will be shared, and there will be an opportunity to question and discuss teaching practice in this interesting area of Philosophy & Religious Studies.
We’d like to get the conversation started before the Conference, and give both delegates and the wider DAN audience an opportunity to join in.
We have posted a few questions to get you started. Â Comment on our questions, or post your own…
For each of the questions you could suggest ways of getting students involved in thinking them through. What strategies do you use? What resources would you suggest? Or would you rephrase the question?
We hope that this blog will be accessed before, during, and after the conference, and become a practical resource that is easily shared.
Simon Bennett (St Michael’s Collegiate School, Tasmania)Â and Eleanor O’Donnell (Melbourne Grammar School)
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Questions:
- What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and does this have anything to do with the nature of reality?
- Are there different ways of knowing things, or is the only knowledge ‘scientific knowledge’? If so, what questions cannot be answered meaningfully?
- What is ‘scientific method’ and ‘scientific proof’?
- How true is a ‘true metaphor’?
- Is it an exercise in futility to seek to ‘describe the indescribable’, or ‘know the unknowable’?
- Does religion have anything to say about how to live if we put aside the question of what happens when you die?
- If you take an atheist to the point of accepting the idea of transcendence – but one inconsistent with a Christian worldview – Â is this something to celebrate, or is it a sell-out?
- Does it make any sense at all to ask questions ‘within time, space and causation’ about matters that are ‘beyond time, space and causation’?
- Kant thought that ‘our sense of duty’, although far from proving God, pointed toward God existing. Other philosophers have suggested that ‘the problem of good’ is as much a problem for atheists as the problem of evil is for theists! Have you carefully read and understood the accounts of sociologists and evolutionary biologists as to why people are ‘good to one another’? Are these accounts convincing?
- Does a discussion of science and religion tend us toward Deism?
- Religion often claims that it is ‘true’ because it speaks to subjective truths that dominate our lives – ‘moral truths’ ‘virtues’ ‘flourishing’ and ‘becoming fully human’ and various other truths that are ‘non-verifiable’. Does it speak to these well enough to be considered truer than its non-religious rival world views or does history show that it falls short of what it promises?
Join the conversation by adding a comment below……
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I think the following question is one that young people will be struggling with at the moment.
In the light of the political upheaval being experienced in many parts of the world, and of the many natural disasters that have occurred in recent months, how do young people find hope in a positive future? Can religions offer any light in dark times?
thanks, Marguerite
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I have Religious Studies students undertaking a semester unit entitled Search for Meaning. One of the things we have explored is the relationship between the fundamental assumptions of world views and the claimed commitments in terms of ontology, epistemology, axiology, teleology and how change occurs. One of the outcomes is an awareness that ideas like hope are directly linked to ontological and epistemoligical commitments. So rather than asking if a religion offers hope, we ask what world views are capable of sustaining the idea of hope.
Cheers, Patrick