An undergraduate at Caltech can actually sign up for a New Testament class this semester. And at this intensive science institute in Pasadena, religion courses can have an odd appeal: "One student said he enrolled because he kept losing at 'Jeopardy!'," says Jack Miles, a visiting professor teaching courses in the Bible and world religions.
Miles' bestselling book "God: A Biography" (Alfred Knopf, 1995) won a Pulitzer Prize, and his career has spanned book publishing, newspaper editing and editorial writing (at the Los Angeles Times), college administrating and teaching--he is currently on leave from the Claremont Graduate University to write a book about Jesus as a literary character, the protagonist in the New Testament. Still, at Caltech, the catalog is dense with cosmo-chemistry, geobiology and radio astronomy courses, and a book about God is not the most likely credential.
"Science tends to be patronizing toward religion," observes Miles, whose rapid speech never fails to access the precise word. "When dialogue occurs, it seems to come from the religious side."
Miles spent a number of years as a Jesuit and studied Near Eastern languages at Harvard University. Still, belief in God or adherence to religion is not a prerequisite for his Caltech courses. His world-survey class looks at religion as culture, and the syllabus includes a textbook by religion historian Huston Smith.
The first lecture in Miles' New Testament class concentrated on the geography and social history of the area around Jerusalem, where Jesus was born. Miles described his own take on the material in a handout to the class.
"The course will be neither an historical nor a theological introduction to the New Testament," he explained, "but a literary appreciation of it."
Miles' students admit to feeling the usual frustrations that scientists equate with religion.
"The language of the Bible is very vague," says Shane Ross, a 22-year-old physics major in Miles' New Testament class. "What do they mean by miracle?"
Yet, Ross has enrolled in two of Miles' classes this year and attends a Bible study group led by students as well as Sunday services at two churches near campus.
"Toward the end of high school, I was craving meaning," he says. "I started shopping around, wondering, 'Where is the truth?' That is the scientific question."
Even so, it is a rare event for God to have any official business at Caltech.
