I listened to a second "Great Course" during my commute to and from Windsor. "Science and Religion" was OK, but it seemed to me that the author was taking too great a step to make sure neither side "won".
It is interesting to see that science and religion were more intertwined in times past, particularly since higher education schools were typically religious institutions and there was a need to pledge allegiance to god in order to be in good standing (not a point stressed in the course). However, there was much less dogmatic reliance on the biblical text, more on the interpretation, which didn't cause as much tension between the two.
They did go into the more modern, U.S.-based "intelligent design" debates. Overall, I didn't find the discussion to be very even-handed - Galileo was under house arrest for violation of the biblical interpretation of genesis - has any religious figure been arrested by "science" for their beliefs? Scientists may argue issues and differences, but there has not been opportunity, or desire to imprison "believers" on scientific grounds.
I did find the topic of Galileo interesting - the purely "scientific" community was not entirely convinced he had a good model. The current thinking had a much smaller entire universe, so there should have been evidence of parallax with stars that could be seen from Earth as it revolves around the sun - something that couldn't be adequately explained given the state of knowledge at that time. Even the philosophic analysis of Newton's gravity was interesting - the label "gravity" was not much better than "God did it" given the explanatory power of the times - there was no "substance" of gravity, nor a great explanation of how it worked at a distance. Newton's laws of gravity could easily have been considered an explanation of how God chose to handle planetary motion.
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