Erin Cline, Tagliabue Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences, discussed on Mar. 17 her experiences teaching Georgetown University’s signature course, The Problem of God, and her new book exploring faith and spirituality. Cline has spent nearly 20 years studying and teaching about religious belief, drawing from a range of traditions including Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Confucian, and Daoist perspectives.
The Problem of God is a required first-year course at Georgetown that encourages students to examine the religious dimension of human nature and reflect on their own experiences with religion. The class has been taught for over 50 years to approximately 100,000 students. Cline said she believes understanding different faiths is key to understanding cultural and societal differences: “I came to feel that understanding these traditions held the key to understanding cultural differences and more broadly political and societal differences.”
Cline’s new book, The Problem of God: The Challenges of Faith, Religion, and Spirituality Today, introduces readers to concepts covered in her classes. She explained that the book explores traditional arguments for God’s existence—the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments—as well as perspectives from Hindu philosophy such as the Nyaya tradition. “What we try to give our students in The Problem of God is an introduction to the spiritual dimension of human life so they can appreciate not just intellectual life, not just having a body that’s healthy, but having a spirit that is healthy,” Cline said.
In her teaching, Cline addresses how different traditions approach questions about evil and suffering. She noted that while Abrahamic religions grapple with the problem of evil through concepts like theodicy and free will, Hinduism and Buddhism explain suffering through karma across multiple lives. “Most versions of the free will theodicy contend that God creates us to be free because God wants us to choose to freely enter into a relationship with God,” she said.
Cline emphasized respect for diverse beliefs among her students: “I want all my students, no matter where they’re coming from, to develop respect for other people and the way they approach those questions and the reasons why they find meaning in a different set of values and traditions.” She also shared how personal experiences have influenced her perspective over time: “As I’ve been teaching The Problem of God… there have been times over these 17 years that I have responded to some of the fundamental questions that I teach in different ways personally.”
Looking ahead, Cline encourages ongoing reflection on spiritual matters as part of lifelong learning: “I try to encourage my students to see me as someone who’s learning alongside them. I encourage them not to expect that they will have all these things resolved once and for all because our spiritual and faith lives are a part of an ongoing, lifelong journey.”
