The What and How of Ultimate Questions – 2011 Conference Blog

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:  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.  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) 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 –  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……