Religion

Can humans know whether the claim "God exists" is true or not? If so, how? If not, why not? Questions such as these have perplexed humans since the first moment we were capable of asking them. Now in Philosophy of Religion you can explore the questions of divine existence with the tools of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with what we can know.

Stonehenge. Machu Picchu. The Acropolis. The Great Pyramids at Giza. Sites such as these have captivated the world for centuries—even millennia—since their creation. They are works of great beauty whose construction required spectacular feats of engineering, involved the efforts of hundreds of thousands of individuals, and incurred a tremendous financial cost on the civilizations that created them.

What is the meaning of life? Is human existence meaningful or absurd? Is it even worth asking this kind of question? Anyone who has ever pondered these fundamental questions has an extraordinary adventure in store. In 36 inspiring lectures, award-winning Professor of Philosophy Francis J. Ambrosio fields the biggest of the "big" questions, in a boldly revealing inquiry into one of the most fundamental of all human concerns.

Who was Jesus of Nazareth? What was he like? For more than 2,000 years, people and groups of varying convictions have pondered these questions and done their best to answer them. The significance of the subject is apparent. From the late Roman Empire all the way to our own time, no continuously existing institution or belief system has wielded as much influence as Christianity, no figure as much as Jesus.

Western philosophy is a vast intellectual tradition, the product of thousands of years of revolutionary thought built up by a rich collection of brilliant minds. When most of us study philosophy, we're focusing only on the Western intellectual tradition brought about by people such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Nietzsche. But to understand the Western intellectual tradition is to only get half of the story.

In St. Augustine's Confessions , Professors William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman lead a chapter-by-chapter—or, in Augustine's terms, "book-by-book"—analysis of one of history's most significant literary works. Written in the 4th century C.E., the Confessions is an opportunity to explore, in one book, questions that have been addressed in many books—by the likes of Plato, Cicero, Freud, and Einstein—for more than a millennium.

In the first centuries after Christ, there was no "official" New Testament. Instead, early Christians read and fervently followed a wide variety of scriptures—many more than we have today.

Confucius. Buddha. Jesus. Muhammad. Four extraordinary sages who influenced world civilization more deeply than any other human beings in history. As just one measure of their importance, current rankings of the most influential people in history consistently put them at or near the top of the list. Four centuries after the rise of the scientific worldview, their influence in human affairs continues to be fundamental, underscoring issues ranging from questions of ethics and justice to religious and political conflicts to other issues that dominate today's headlines.

The Book of Revelation is the only book of the Bible with a Promise to the reader! Why? What makes this book so special? Revelation is a "lens" that puts the entire Bible into focus. The lens is focused on the person of Jesus Christ, and his destiny is imminent. This is a book of victory: We are overcomers! We are the ultimate winners in the game of life! (I read the ending: we win!)

The early Christian claim that Jesus of Nazareth was God completely changed the course of Western civilization. In fact, without the Christian declaration of Jesus as God, Western history as we know it would have never happened.