Faith and Doubt -- Last Call

Our inquiry into the status of religious belief has very much arrived in the present, with our reflections on 9/11 and its aftermath, and discussion of the book by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. We find ourselves in a strange time: the public discourse about religion is often radically polarized, and this discourse certainly manifests a deeply divided culture. On one side we have the "New Atheists," who are churning out bestsellers. On the other, there is the massive "faith-based" community (as opposed to "reality-based," an infamous distinction that emerged from the Bush White House), who couldn't be more diametrically opposed. And then there is a significant, confused in-between: permanent and temporary agnostics, present day ambivalentists, and seekers picking and choosing what they need to get by from religion and elsewhere. It's a strange time.

This state of affairs was the matrix for the theme, Faith and Doubt. And it led me to pose the guiding questions of this course, which I'll pose again, for anyone to comment on: Does religious belief remain a valid, well founded, and perhaps necessary aspect of human experience? Or have the events of the last century (or the last decade) shattered its possibility beyond repair?

Looking back at the comments from this semester, there have already been so many eloquent attempts to address these questions, in specific contexts, on this blog. Now feel free to step back and say what you will...