This lecture is sponsored by the IUB Department of Religious Studies. We are cancelling our normally scheduled movie night and encouraging everyone to attend this lecture in its stead. It will be at 7:30pm on Thursday (10/22) in Rawles 100.

Dr. John Haught, Distinguished Research Professor and Senior Fellow in Science and Religion at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, is an expert and frequent lecturer on Christian thought and evolution controversies such as intelligent design and creationism.

Professor Haught regards science and religion as two different and noncompeting levels of explanation for natural phenomena. He advocates a theistic form of evolution that avoids the twin pitfalls of excessive materialism or scientism that seeks to “disprove” religion, on the one hand, and religion that seeks to present itself as science, on the other (as with intelligent design). In his view, Darwin’s vision of life, instead of being hostile to religion, actually provides opportunity for mature reflection on ideas about God and cosmic meaning. He thus refers to Darwin’s theory as a “gift” to Christian theology. He also draws conclusions about ecological ethics—how humans should treat the natural world and nonhuman life—from his interpretation of theistic evolution.

John Haught has published numerous works dealing with religion and evolution, including Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution (2003), God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (2000), and Responses to 101 Questions on God and Evolution (2001). In 2005 Haught testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the famous Dover “intelligent design” trial, where he presented arguments that intelligent design is a form of religion, not science. Some of his more recent scholarship, such as God and the New Atheism (2008) presents a detailed rejoinder to the so-called neo-atheist criticisms of religion popularized by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. Haught maintains that these anti-religion arguments contain little that could be considered “new,” and that they display logical inconsistencies and crude caricatures of religious belief.

Professor Haught’s lecture “Evolution and Faith: What Is at Stake?” will address the supposed conflict between religious faith and scientific theory in a way that will appeal to a wide audience.

This Saturday at 10:30pm, SAIU is visiting a Hell House run by The House of Prayer, located in Ellettsville.  A Hell House is a Christian version of a haunted house, intended to present scary scenes from a world of secularism and the Hellish consequences, so to speak.  Tickets are $5.

We will be meeting at the IMU circle at 9:30pm. If you need a ride, please email me at jhughto [at] indiana [dot] edu. You should also email me if you can provide rides.

The Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign, along with the Secular Alliance of IU and the Evangelical Community Church, Bloomington, is sponsoring a debate on the question “Can you be good without God?”. It will take place on October 19, 7:00pm, in Woodburn Hall 100 on the Indiana University, Bloomington campus. The debaters are Dan Waugh and Dan Barker.

Dan Waugh

Dan Waugh currently serves as the Pastor of Adult Ministries at Evangelical Community Church in Bloomington, Indiana. He received his M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is currently working on an advanced degree from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis.

Dan Barker

Co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Dan Barker is a former minister and evangelist and became a freethinker in 1983.  His newest book is Godless: How An Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists.

Event information

Press: Please contact the bus campaign through the form on their website for inquiries.

Parking/Directions: For directions to Woodburn Hall, please visit the IU Campus map.  For parking instructions, please visit IU Parking’s website and scroll down to “Parking Garages.”  The easiest way to park on campus is to use a pay garage…as the website states, they close around midnight or earlier, so if you wait until then you’ll be able to remove your car at no extra cost.  The closest parking is in the Indiana Memorial Union Parking Lot and Jordan Avenue Parking Garage.  You can also find all these locations using Google maps.

The Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign is the group behind the “YOU CAN BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD” ads on Bloomington buses. They’ve also put ads up in South Bend and Chicago and raised thousands of dollars, and the campaign has been an enormous success, but we still need your support. To make your tax-deductible donation today, or for more info, please visit http://INatheistbus.org

Come join us for tea and discussion in the Dogwood room in the IMU this week. Russell’s Tea Parties are SAIU’s periodic general-purpose casual meetups, named after Bertrand Russell’s ‘teapot’ thought experiment, his argument that the burden of proof in supernatural claims lies with the person making the claim.

Come, drink tea, tell us about your religious and non-religious experiences, start a friendly debate, discuss current events, find other members with common interests, start a group project, or even go totally off-topic for a while.

This week’s topic is the exploring the difference between atheism and agnosticism. We’ll be talking about things like whether being completely atheist (meaning 100% certainty that no God exists) is really a logical conclusion that can be made. People tend to have rather strong feelings about things like this so it will be interesting to see what happens. Hope to see you there!

SAIU is volunteering for Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard (MHC).  MHC is a food pantry whose mission is to provide healthful, wholesome foods to people in need, as well as nutrition and gardening education.  They provide our services in ways that build community while enhancing the dignity, respect, and self-care of all involved.

SAIU members go through the pantry, check all the labels on items, and dispose of anything that is past its expiration date.  MHC is located at 1010 S Walnut St, Bloomington IN. We’ll be volunteering from 2PM to 4PM. See you there!

SAIU is volunteering for the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, an all-volunteer effort to encourage self-education among the US prison population by providing free reading materials on request.  The program’s participants are interested in prison serving the purpose of rehabilitation rather than punishment, and also recognize that prison libraries are often understocked and have limited availability.

Volunteers receive letters from prisoners, verify a prisoner’s current incarceration status, retrieve books from shelves, pack them, and also keep track of requests and books in the project’s database.  SAIU will be volunteering the first and third Sunday of each month this semester from 2 PM to 5 PM,  Pages to Prisoners is located at 118 S Rogers St, Suite #2, Bloomington IN, 47404, just off Kirkwood. See you there!

Hell House

Come join us in Student Building 150 at 7:30pm for a showing of Hell House, a documentary about “Hell Houses,” which are the (generally) Evangelical Christian response to normal haunted houses. Hell houses are walk-through tours that try to scare people into becoming Christian.

We are planning on taking a trip to a Hell house later this month, so I thought it would be great to see exactly what we’ll be getting ourselves into!

We are also looking for movie suggestions for future movie nights. Please suggest some!

Richard Dawkins

Join us at IU Auditorium on October 12 at 7 PM for a lecture by famed evolutionary biologist, author and atheist Richard Dawkins, entitled The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. The lecture is part of the Fall 2009 Themester, Evolution, Diversity and Change, a series of events and programs concerning the theory of evolution from many different perspectives.  The lecture is co-sponsored by the Secular Alliance of IU and the Indiana Memorial Union Board.

This event is free and open to the public.  There will be no tickets, and we expect the 3200 seat auditorium to be completely filled for the talk, so please arrive early to get a seat.  IU Auditorium is located at 1211 East 7th St on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, IN.  Parking information can be found here.  There will be a free shuttle operating that evening.

Poster for Dawkins lecture

The lecture is also a companion to Dr Dawkins’ new book of the same name. In it, he sifts through fascinating layers of scientific facts and disciplines to build a cast-iron case: from the living examples of natural selection in birds and insects; the ‘time clocks’ of trees and radioactive dating that calibrate a timescale for evolution; the fossil record and the traces of our earliest ancestors; to confirmation from molecular biology and genetics. All of this, and much more, bears witness to the truth of evolution.

The Greatest Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is now flourishing as never before, especially in America. In Britain and elsewhere in the world, teachers witness insidious attempts to undermine the status of science in their classrooms. Richard Dawkins provides unequivocal evidence that boldly and comprehensively rebuts such nonsense. At the same time he shares with us his palpable love of the natural world and the essential role that science plays in its interpretation.

Facebook event.

Media coverage in the IDS.

Come join us for tea and discussion in the Dogwood room in the IMU this week. Russell’s Tea Parties are SAIU’s periodic general-purpose casual meetups, named after Bertrand Russell’s ‘teapot’ thought experiment, his argument that the burden of proof in supernatural claims lies with the person making the claim.

Come, drink tea, tell us about your religious and non-religious experiences, start a friendly debate, discuss current events, find other members with common interests, start a group project, or even go totally off-topic for a while.

This week’s topic is the separation of Church and state. I’m sure that most (if not all of our members) agree that religion should be kept out of laws and politics. It’s in the Constitution, for Pete’s sake. An interesting question is where do we draw that line. Take prayer in public school. Is it wrong if a public high school does not allow prayer during homeroom before classes? According to the First Amendment, it is, but endorsing prayer in school seems to also be against the first amendment since teachers usually promote one religion over another. Either way, it’s an interesting topic and I’d like to know what your opinions on it are.

Today, October 6, is the International Day of Prayer.  Cru (Campus Crusade for Christ) is celebrating the day by (you guessed it!) praying for 24 hours.  Christians certainly have every right to express their faith through prayer, and our group supports their freedom to do this.  However, in an affirmation of science and reason, we posted flyers about the event to encourage those who prefer action over prayer to join SAIU.

For more background on IDOP, here’s what one website has to say about it:

We believe that prayer changes things. Exactly what happens is a mystery of faith. God invites us to present to Him our requests and to pray without ceasing. Persecuted Christians often plead for prayer to help them endure. The most we can do is the least we can do — pray.

IDOP, as far as we can tell, doesn’t seem to be recognized officially by any governments, unlike the National Day of Prayer in the US, which has designated the first Thursday in May as a day when citizens are asked to come together and pray.  However, this celebration of IDOP by Cru seems to encourage our fellow students to wish for good things to happen, and to believe that wishing will have some tangible effect on the outcome of world events.  We hope that students at IU will stand together in action, affirming the belief that “Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.”

SAIU plans on having multiple events throughout the semester which focus on the idea that “you can be good without God.”  Service events in conjunction with Pages to Prisoners and Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard have been planned so that members can reach out to the Bloomington community.

If you would like to join us in our efforts, please click on the “New Members” link to be directed to information about joining our listserv and Facebook groups and finding out about events.  Atheists and non-religious folk have not historically been very community-focused, and SAIU is working to change that.  We hope that you will join us in reaching out to help those in need, showing our non-theistic compassion, and promoting a reason-based worldview.