The New Atheists, superstars of the scientific age, want spirituality without God. Is religion now to be discarded as nothing more than a failed ‘hypothesis’, as Dawkins insisted? Can we be ‘spiritual but not religious’?

In these deeply personal lectures, John Cottingham makes a heartfelt case for the necessity and value of a broadly religious outlook. While celebrating the success and significance of science, he nevertheless claims that atheism is a kind of scientistic hubris which leaves us bereft of meaning or purpose. With wide-ranging erudition and sensitivity, he draws on philosophy and literature to argue that moral, aesthetic and spiritual experience points to something beyond the merely physical - to the transcendent and the divine.

By the end of this course you will have explored:

Part 1 - Science and Religion

How religion and science are compatible

Why religion is not an explanatory hypothesis

How religion is not irrational but requires a different kind of evidence

How religion provides an interpretive framework for scientific knowledge

How mathematical and moral truths are problematic for scientific explanation

Part 2 – Spirituality and Spiritual Experience

How spiritual experiences involve feeling part of a greater whole, of meaning beyond our making.

How spirituality is morally transformative

How contemporary art is cut adrift from moral concerns unable to replace religious

How experiences of the transcendent and the numinous cannot be granted meaning in a materialist worldview

How even atheists are responding to the divine, without realising