To be human is to ask questions. Right?

As playwright Edward Albee sees it, it was the publication of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of the Species” that prompted us to don our thinking caps and ponder what sets us apart from Irish wolfhounds. Maybe he’s right.

What makes us unique in Albee’s mind is art. Not civilization or our immortal souls, but art. And, again, he could be right. But Albee obviously isn’t well acquainted with either “Why Cats Paint” or “Dancing with Cats” by authors Burton Silver and Heather Busch.

More essentially, I think it is our proclivity for questions that puts us in a clubhouse all our own. That and our willingness to spend $2.50 or more for a cup of designer coffee.

Anyone who has raised children ? or anyone who has spent a few minutes around children for that matter ? knows that as soon as they’ve mastered their first few words, questions come to them as naturally as mischief. On the other hand, when was the last time your mutt, or one of Albee’s pedigreed Irish wolfhounds, asked anyone why the sky is blue?

My pound pooch Fielder might answer a question I pose to him. For instance, if I ask him, “Where’s your ball?” he will scamper off and return with it. Yet he’s never tapped me on the shoulder and asked me why cats can’t be more like dogs, or why cats and dogs can’t all just get along.

Of course, Fielder’s language skills fall significantly short of those of a human 2-year-old. So maybe if animals were ever to learn how to talk, we’d find that they, too, have loads of questions. Just as we discovered some have opposable thumbs and a penchant for using tools.

My point is simply this: To be human is to ask questions. How else to explain the success of “Jeopardy”? In life, questions insist on answers every bit as much as answers on “Jeopardy” insist on questions.

Which, to paraphrase Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, brings me to, not the word, but the topic: a series of six short lectures called “Give Me An Answer,” jointly sponsored by Calvary Baptist Church and Evangelical Free Church of Huntington Beach.

One Wednesday night and five Sunday night lectures will tackle as many controversial subjects. The first three lectures of the series, which begin Sunday evening, June 11, at Calvary Baptist Church and continue through July 23, will address the emerging church movement, creation microbiology and the problem of natural evil, and intelligent design.

The last three, at Evangelical Free Church, will look at the nature of Islam, open theism, and the question of whether Jesus was a feminist and what that means for the church today.

Alan Shlemon, a graduate of Cal State Long Beach who is now pursuing a graduate degree at Biola University in La Mirada, will present “A Closer Look at Islam.”

Shlemon teaches theology, Christian apologetics and bioethics for North Coast Church’s North Coast U and for Stand to Reason, a nonprofit organization dedicated to demonstrating that Christianity is a testable faith using archeological evidence, scientific evidence, historical evidence and philosophy.

On Sunday evening, July 9, Shlemon will aim to answer such questions as: Is Islam a peaceful religion? Does the Koran justify war against those who are not Muslim? What is the Islamic view on the roles of men and women?

Last week I had a chance to exchange a few questions and answers with him by e-mail. One of my first questions was about the likelihood for bias in his talk.

Why, I wondered, should anyone expect a lecture on Islam given by a Christian to be anything more than propaganda? Wouldn’t it be better to let a Muslim speak about Islam?

Shlemon pointed out that a lecture by a Muslim on Islam or by a Christian on Christianity could also be purely propaganda.

“To simply show that a person is biased is not sufficient to dismiss their view,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine someone with a religious conviction [who] doesn’t have a bias.” But the important question, he says, is about whether that bias distorts the truth.

“If the concern raised by this question is sustained, then no religious group could say anything about another group without it being dismissed as propaganda,” Shlemon said. Instead, he considers it important ? and possible ? in a civil society to “learn about each other’s views and engage them in a charitable and gracious manner.”

What about the question of whether Islam is a peaceful religion or a religion that legitimizes waging war on those outside the faith? I asked Shlemon why, time and again, I heard the same quotes from the Koran used to argue both sides of the issue.

Shlemon stressed the importance of the method used to interpret a text. “The interpretation of any text, especially one as old as the Koran, requires certain interpretive principles,” he explained. Passages must be weighed within their literary and historical context. It is also helpful to understand how the author or a contemporary of the author understood the text. Apart from these interpretive approaches, an isolated passage can be made to mean almost anything.

I asked Shlemon if there really was such a thing as a unified Islamic view on the roles of men and women, and where responsibility and authority rest. He granted there are variant views on these subjects among representatives of Islam.

“I’m more interested in discovering what the proper sources of Islamic authority say on an issue,” he said. Many Muslims, he says, agree that by looking at the Koran, the hadith and the way Muhammed and his successors lived, it is possible to get “at the core of what Islam is and is not.”

I’ve met a number of Muslims who, seeing Islam in this light, think it’s high time for an Islamic reformation. They hope to modernize faith’s worldview and ethic through a reinterpretation of the Koran and hadith. I was interested in what Shlemon thought about the idea.

Islamic reformation, he said, would mean abandoning “its roots and original teachings [to] create a more palatable Islam.” It would modernize Islam, but he doesn’t see what would be left as being “Islam the way Muhammed and the Koran meant it to be.”

The more questions I asked Shlemon, the more questions I seemed to have. The question I didn’t ask this time is: Why do I find that so hard to envision?

For more information on the “Give Me An Answer” series or for directions to campus locations, visit the Calvary Baptist Church website, www.cbchb.org, or the Evangelical Free Church website, www.efchb.org. Or call (714) 962-6860 or (714) 536-1439. Entrance to each lecture is free.