Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Denis Alexander, Michael Ruse, Russell Stannard, John Polkinghorne

In the beginning… the book of Genesis. Yes, it’s the Bible’s longest book (Deuteronomy just feels longer because it’s so arcane), but it’s the starting point for Jewish and Christian argument, far beyond the two versions of the creation story. Read the King James version for its classic poetry, then buy one of the following, depending on whether you are US or Europe based, for home/office:

• The NIV Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI, Zondervan, 1995) is essential for covering conservative US Protestants. The extensive notes put passages in context, and, particularly in the Hebrew books, are loaded with “spin” showing how Christians see at every turn foreshadowing of Christ. It’s the translation usually quoted by evangelicals, hammering away for the US mid-term-elections bioethics issues. Buy if you’re covering US issues.

• The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NY, Oxford University Press, 2001) may work best for covering England, Europe. Excellent, up-to-date scholarly notes; lucid, graceful New Revised Standard translation. Buy if you’re based abroad.

Check BibleGateway.com for any biblical phrase or quotation, in a dizzying array of translations. Pick the translation most used by the source. Generally this means NIV for US evangelicals such as Southern Baptists; the New American for US Catholics; New Revised Standard version for Episcopalians, mainline Protestants.

Once you’ve read Genesis, try Rev. Ernest Lucas’s May 2004 lecture for the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion (based at St. Edmund’s in Cambridge) Science & the Bible: Are They Incompatible? The Creation Story as a Test Case, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge. A chemist and a Baptist minister (and a Templeton Award winner) finds even Calvin was “green” in his spin on what it means for humans to be given “dominion” over creation and to “subdue the earth.”

They have more great Faraday lectures archived, including several by T–C speakers and others. I was particularly drawn to physicist and theologian Andrew Briggs’s March 2005 lecture on nanotechnology, Grey Goo or Great God.

Tariq Ramadan, Philip Clayton

Judaism: “Beyond science is sanctity,” says Rabbi David Wolpe in Why Be Jewish (NY, Henry Holt, 1995), which zips through the quintessence of Jewish distinctions in elegant prose and in under 100 pages of big type. Wolpe is clearly from the NOMA approach: “To make a commitment to the reality of the unseen is not to redirect science.” The Rabbi states, “The seal of God is truth.”

Islam: For a simple, sound (but not completely satisfying) intro to Islam’s basic theology, The Beliefnet Guide to Islam (NY, Doubleday, 2006) lays down the basics from two experts who write for Beliefnet, an immensely popular online spirituality site. It scoots through creation, evil, and justice in a handful of pages. The book is flawed (no index, so you can’t cut to the science discussion easily; a tendency to description without analysis) but there’s a great glossary. At the very least, you can scan it before interviewing a Muslim expert and have a grip on basic vocabulary and concepts.

Michael Ruse, Philip Clayton

Fundamentalism and American Culture (NY, Oxford University Press, 2006) George Marsden is the go-to guy for understanding the roots and ramifications of genuine “five fundamentals” belief and its impact on US society. You can plow through the whole history in his graceful but academic prose or cut to the critical stuff—contemporary issues, especially science and politics—with the final 40+ pages in the concluding chapters, starting with Fundamentalism as an Intellectual Phenomenon (in which he finds some similarities rarely noted between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow), moving through what’s uniquely American about all this, and on to Marsden’s analysis of the modern era, where he points out that fundamentalism is a moving target. One reason for its continuing appeal, he argues, is that progressive liberalism and science, the two competing alternatives, don’t offer compelling, unifying narratives.

John Barrow, Keith Ward, Fraser Watts, Kevin Dutton

Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars (NY, Random House, 1995) Science journalist Margaret Wertheim’s clear, accessible survey is one of my favorite popular science books for it’s lucid introduction to key concepts, faces, and forces, and some wonderful passages on mathematics v. magic. She’s less interesting and successful on gender issues, but the preponderance of the book is a primer on physics—ideal for people like me who wrote poetry during high school physics lab. Buy.

The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (NY, Norton, 1999) Margaret Wertheim paints a cultural and philosophical history—replete with references to art, architecture, and literature—of “space” as a construct of language and communal negotiation. She starts at the medieval dualistic view of physical and spiritual space to show how this has shifted to a purely physical view in which the intellectual world seems to have squeezed out the ineffable. The concluding chapters on cyberspace feel dated, but there are some lovely ruminations on what it means to be human, particularly Chapter 1, Soul Space, on Dante’s exquisitely ordered worlds, and Chapter 2, Physical Space.

Ronald Cole-Turner, Laurie Zoloth

Principles of Bioethical Ethics. (NY, Oxford University Press, 2001) Tom and James Childress were pioneers in modern bioethics with this essential textbook (now in its fifth edition) laying out the fundamental secular principles of ethical decision-making in medical research and treatment. The approach is purely secular (religion is mentioned on three pages in 400+).The first chapter, Moral Norms, serves as an overview but this is a Buy. If you’re covering anything relating health, medicine, medical research, and public policy, most of your sources are either using or opposing the concepts of “principlism” outlined here.

Laurie Zoloth’s essay Born Again: Faith and Yearning in the Cloning Controversy captures the religious resonance of cloning questions, deeply informed both by scripture and by scientific knowledge. A sampling:

It is my contention, then, that the cloning controversy reaches so deeply into the popular imagination because it is not about birth, it is about rather the fear of mortality that lurks always at the corners of birth and fecundity. Job of course, hearing about the death of his children, re-links this for us linguistically: “Naked I was born out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there.” It is not about infertility, which can be more easily managed with other means. It is surely not about children.… Cloning is about the imaged self reborn past death, into the future, a life lived in the imagined thenness, rather than the broken and exilic nowness of the present.

For arguments on “biotechnical experiments,” see physician and biochemist Leon Kass’s essay in the May 21, 2001, issue of The New Republic, Preventing a Brave New World [posted at the Human Life Review archive]. This is an argument by the influential former head of the President’s Council on Bioethics for banning cloning and embryonic stem cell research.

While many bioethics specialists will argue from either the secular principles perspective or a Christian stance, Zoloth brings in Jewish, Buddhist, and mainline Protestant views as well. Her testimony at the 2004 US Senate hearing, Science, Technology, and Space, Embryonic Stem Cell Research: Exploring the Controversy, raises “the core questions of ethics and of biology: How are we human? How will we be free? What must I do about the suffering of the other person?”

For a conservative Catholic bioethics perspective on the legal, moral, and ethical issues involved in stem cell research: Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (New Studies in Christian Ethics), by Lisa Sowle Cahill, professor of theology at Boston College, published by Cambridge University Press. The book is a good, fast read. It goes beyond what you already know (Catholicism says no) and considers the topic in a larger moral context: “…a commitment to improve the moral quality of relationships in the social body.… a corrective to the idea that new biomedical techniques are an unbounded and unassailable force for good.”

For an economic twist: The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (NY, Penguin, 1999) by Jeremy Rifkin. A grizzled Chicago City Hall reporter once told me, “Follow the money. It’s always the story.” Here’s a clear path to understanding the economics of bioethics. “At what price?” asks Rifkin, as he looks at the ways biotechnology, particularly genetics, is steered by religious and ethical forces. Read it all or jump to Chapter 7, Reinventing Nature, and go to the end to mull “the role of commerce in the intimate affairs of biology.” Buy.

Before you can think meaningfully about ways in which life is sacred, you’ve got to agree on the definition of “life” and of “sacred.” The US Catholic bishops’ leading pro-life lobbyist, Richard Doerflinger, lays out the Catholic case (almost always argued as “natural law”) against cloning and therapeutic embryonic stem cell research in an essay drawn from his testimony to Congress, The Many Casualties of Cloning (The New Atlantis, Number 12, Spring 2006, pp. 60-70). He tears into the “utilitarian calculus that relativizes and demeans the worth of individual human lives in the name of research that aims to benefit mankind.”

Paul Davies, Keith Ward

Can there by a physics of ideas? Paul Davies is one you might ask. His introduction to From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2003) is a 16-page primer on the emergence and significance of complexity in science and philosophy, beauty, and love. His own essay, Chapter 5 in the collection, Complexity and the Arrow of Time, makes his case, through physics and biology, for a world of increasing complexity. He concludes with his favorite quote from Freeman Dyson: “In some sense the universe must have known we were coming.”

The Phenomenon of Man (NY, Perennial, Harper Collins) Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist, digs into the possibilities and future of the human mind with this classic. Plow through the whole paperback (a bit dense) or start with Sir Julian Huxley’s elegant introduction and then jump to the chapter Discovery of the Human Object and carry on through the meditation on evil.

Simon Conway Morris, Fraser Watts, Kevin Dutton

The Ethical Brain (NY, The Dana Foundation, 2005) Michael Gazzaniga, director for the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, who has served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, examines the brain from embryonic development to aging, raising provocative points at every stop, such as, What can our synapses tell us about free will? Most relevant is the section The Believing Brain, which includes his own theories and an overview of other perspectives. A sample from that chapter is available. Also fascinating is the concluding chapter, Toward Universal Ethics, which deals with questions such as, Is there a common “human nature”? Is empathy rooted in “mirroring neurons”? Buy if you follow bioethics or neurology.

“Genes shape our mental lives,” argues NYU psychology professor Gary Marcus in his highly readable The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought (NY, Basic Books, 2004). You can get the gist from the opening chapter and there’s a terrific glossary of brain terminology in the back. What’s missing? Any discussion of where or how, whether or why, spirituality or belief arises. If he thinks we’ve got God genes, he’s not saying.

Watch online lectures by experts in social sciences and neuroscience from the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion. Two outstanding choices: Pascal Boyer, who has the delicious title of professor of individual and collective memory at Washington University in St. Louis, gives one of the Princeton Lectures in Cognition and Religion titled Why Do People Perform Rituals? Another choice: Ethics, Freedom, and the Death of Rationalism: What Cognitive Science Tells Us About the Culture Wars, by George Lakoff, professor of linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, looks at why cognitive science is essential to the social sciences: “Concepts are physically embodied in our brains,” in mirror neurons (see Gazzaniga). If empathy is physical, what does this say about religion?

Margaret Boden

Is science a religion? Is a baby a person? To whom should moral decision-making be extended? The editors of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society are very unhappy with Gazzaniga and go after The Ethical Brain with a hatchet in this editorial.

There are more great lecture texts on AI in Volume 4.2 of Stanford Electronic Humanities Review. One short but challenging read is The Soul Gained and Lost: Artificial Intelligence as a Philosophical Project, by Philip E. Agre. It discusses the AI strategy to reduce the soul’s infinite choices to finite mechanical means. He argues, “AI properly understood ought to be able to participate in a constructive symbiosis with humanistic analyses of ideas.”

Kate Loewenthal

So shoot me, I admit it: I bought A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Imposter Poodles to Purple Numbers (NY, Pi Press, 2004) by V.S. Ramachandran because the title knocked me out. But this is a sprightly book (if neuro-psychology can be sprightly) that’s particularly good in presenting neuroscience as “the new philosophy” (Chapter 5), with fascinating questions raised on how far we can go with brain scanning. Do you know what you know if you don’t know you know it? While most of the book is devoted to mental illness and brain mechanisms, there are nuggets at every turn. Buy.

Religion/Ethics Resources

National Bioethics Library at Georgetown University is well worth a day or two for reading and a $10 investment in a copier card. Great services to know about: bibliographies on hot topics in case you want to quickly find readings on, say, genome mapping, and a service to do a custom bibliography.

Religion Newswriters Association (folks who cover religion/spirituality/ethics for secular media) offers an online library of resources and a service called Religionlink that provides an extensive guide to sources by phone and email relevant to major newsy topics. Here’s a recent one on bioethics listing many of my favorite sources: A guide to bioethics experts.

US Religion Statistics

The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey is the single best source of statistics because it uses self-identification, not numbers provided by congregations or religious leaders, which are generally inflated (Baptists) or never updated (Catholic) or wishful thinking (Muslims). Researchers asked, “What is your religious identity, if any?” and some follow-up questions of 50,000 Americans, so it stands as a massive source of trend data. You can look at the raw data, but you can also rely on a new book analyzing the study by two of the lead ARIS researchers, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, (both now at Trinity College in Hartford, CT). Their new book, Religion in a Free Market, Religious and Non-Religious Americans: Who, What, Why, and Where (Paramount Books, 2006) discusses points such as the falling share of the US population that calls itself Christian (down from 86.2 percent in 1990 to 76.5 percent in 2001) and rising number of people who say they have no religion (up from 8% in 1990 to 14% by 2001.)

Still want congregational data? The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 2006) is published annually by the National Council of Churches. This is where denominational and congregational leadership sent their numbers. Good essays by expert religion trend watchers. Good sources for contacts.

Still trying to estimate the number of “evangelicals”? There really is no right number for these folks because no one agrees on a definition. Everyone uses this term, from true fundamentalists who want to hide from the pejorative connotations of the “F word” to social justice lefty Christians such as Jim Wallis. Two ways to do this: Get the latest major survey such as Gallup or Harris, and look for how many people identify themselves as Protestant AND as theologically conservative. Or call a Christian pollster with years of trend data and analysis at the Barna Research Group, based in California. Barna himself is hard to reach, but his research director, David Kinnamon, will point you toward relevant studies or reports.