Session 3

What is the nature of human awareness? In seventeenth-century England, a number of writers answered this question by appealing to experiences that most would consider impossible. Deploying remembered or imagined first-person accounts, a variety of philosophers, theologians, and poets discussed how it felt to grow in the womb, what the experience of birth was like, how the world appeared to infants, and what showed up at the birth of human consciousness in the distant past.

Naturalism—the view that everything real is part of the natural world—is a very widely held view among educated people; indeed, it is safe to say that naturalism is the dominant view among the intelligentsia, and has been for a long time. This is a remarkable fact, given that there are no good reasons to accept naturalism, and abundant reasons to reject it.

Anxiety about the depiction of gods in art has permeated religious discourse from antiquity to the present day. Does the presence of artistic objects in places of worship induce idolatry? Are people seduced thereby into worshipping created things rather than the creator? The lecture will consider some highlights in this history and then examine the confrontation of Roman paganism and early Christian critique as a case study.