What are we doing here?

By Justin. Lots of y’all have asked about what, more exactly, we are doing in Austria.  And then poor Anna has to explain it.  She finally asked me to do it myself!

William J. Fulbright was a US senator from Arkansas who served in Congress after WWII.  As part of his university experience, he studied abroad at Oxford in the UK.  Can you imagine an Arkansas farm boy going to live in Oxford for a year?  It changed his life.

Well, in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat, American officials were desperate for strategies to avoid World War Three—after all, the horrors of WWII came only a mere generation after the armistice of WWI.  Thinking back to his days as a student at Oxford, Fulbright proposed a worldwide academic exchange program.  It’s hard to fight and hurt people you know, and circulating students and professors around the world would be a way to head conflict off at the pass.  Fulbright’s program was to be run by the State department and funded both by the Federal government and host nations around the world.

And to this day the

Fulbright program (Here is the link to the Fulbright Austria program) sponsors about 8,000 people per year to be involved in the exchange.  About half of these are non-US students who are brought to the States for a year of study at one of our universities.  The other half is composed of US students who study abroad, recent US college graduates who go abroad to teach English at the high school level, and about 1,200 grantees a year are US professors who go abroad to teach and do research.  I’m fortunate enough to be in this latter camp. So for this term I am teaching two graduate courses at the University of Innsbruck (here is the link to the Christian Philosophy department) and doing research for a big project that I want to take on when I get home.  The courses are “Evolutionary Ethics” and “The Origins and Rationality of Religious Belief.”  Both are tied to my research project on the causes of religion.

Some of you reading this blog are very religious.  Some of you are not.  Some of you believe in God.  Some of you do not.  Why?

In the last 25 years or so, scientists have put together a very compelling picture of the causal story behind religious belief and religious practice.  And this picture tells an interesting story of the biological and cultural influences on our religious (or non-religious) orientation.  As a philosopher, I want to know whether these scientific explanations about religion tell us anything interesting about the truth or rationality of religious belief.  Is science poised to explain religion away or is the empirical evidence consistent with the existence of a divine reality?  My goal is to get a clear handle on the science while I’m in Europe and write up my findings in a book when I return to the States.

Back to work!

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