Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Denis Alexander

One of Alexander’s main themes—that modern science grew from Christian roots—came up several times during the seminars, and I later discovered an especially good explication of the argument in Chapter 2, God’s Handiwork, of Rodney Stark’s book For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the End of Slavery. Alexander also took on the Galileo myth, trying to cast the Vatican in a more sympathetic light. For another take on this, I recommend Part IV of Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. The entire book, a history of cosmology written by a humanist, is magnificent.

Peter Lipton

A quick way to get up to speed on the relationship between science and religion is to peruse the short pieces posted at the Meta Library, a useful resource with a fairly dilute religious bias. Click on the theme, The Relation of Science & Religion, and go from there. Articles posted at a site called the Secular Web give a different perspective.

There is also interesting material on Robert Wright’s website, meaningoflife.tv. His book Three Scientists and Their Gods is one of the best things I’ve ever read.

Simon Conway Morris

Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life (another all-time favorite) made the inspiring argument that human existence is a fluke. Richard Dawkins disagrees—there are physical constraints shaping evolution, he says—but Conway Morris goes much further, insisting that some supernatural force must be involved. I found a summary of his position at the Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive: the introductory chapter of Conway Morris’s book The Crucible of Creation.

If you pick up his other work, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, you may want to read the last chapter, Towards a Theology of Evolution?, first. The standoff between Conway Morris and the late Dr. Gould is captured in a short online debate.

Richard Dawkins

Though Dawkins no longer recommends it, more objective readers consider his early book, The Selfish Gene, to be a masterpiece, and the short chapter, called Memes: the New Replicators, gives a quick take on his ideas about how religion and other social phenomena can be understood in terms of cultural DNA. Here is a more recent version of the story: “Viruses of the Mind”.

To review Dawkins’s points on the harmfulness of religion, I later read some of his short pieces like, Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder and Is Science a Religion? published in The Humanist.

I realized during all this that I had forgotten much of whatever I once knew about the doctrinal differences between Dawkins and Gould on evolution. A quick way to get up to speed was, again, the library at The Unofficial Gould Archive where there are articles on both sides of the controversy and a variety of material on science and religion.

During the weeks at Cambridge, Dawkins took on most of the burden of representing atheism. Another articulate defender of the faithless is Daniel Dennett, whose new book, Breaking the Spell, was excoriated by Leon Wieseltier in a review resembling an attack by a wild ferret. I reviewed the book more favorably in the January issue of Scientific American.

Nancey Murphy (Keith Ward)

Nancey Murphy asked, Whatever happened to the soul? and a lot of scientists would say that it died of natural causes, replaced by the question of what consciousness is. For a quick overview of the contending schools—computationalists, teleological functionalists, neural Darwinists, New Mysterians, etc.—I recommend chapter 8, Consciousness, of Owen Flanagan’s book The Science of Mind.

Russell Stannard

Cosmology and the anthropic principle

The anthropic principle is one of those ideas that, depending on your mood, seems either silly or deeply profound. John Barrow and Frank Tipler wrote the definitive (and extremely difficult) book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, but to get a feel for the idea you might try John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version, in which a young fundamentalist computer hacker convinces himself that the patterns he perceives in physics are the fingerprints of God.

Alan Lightman, an astronomer turned novelist, wrote a compact, nonfiction overview of cosmology, Ancient Light: Our Changing View of the Universe.

Barrie Jones

Probably the most important and readable book about astrobiology is Rare Earth, in which a paleontologist and an astronomer argue that Carl Sagan was wrong: while bacteria may be ubiquitous in the universe, the odds of animal life, especially humanoid, are vanishingly slim. Their position is summarized in the book’s preface, which is available on Amazon.com.

A crash course in extraterrestrial biology—extremophiles, panspermia, SETI, space physiology, and so forth—is there for the taking at The Astrobiology Web.

Margaret Boden

For a quick overview of artificial intelligence, Flanagan comes to the rescue again with Chapter 6, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical Assumptions and Implications, of The Science of Mind.

For a rebuttal to the possibility that computers could think, read about the philosopher John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy or Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

My favorite writer about A.I. is Douglas Hofstadter. If his Gödel, Escher, Bach seems daunting, you might sample his essays in Metamagical Themas. He and Dennett collected and commented on some of the best things written about the computational view of consciousness in their anthology, The Mind’s I.

Michael Ruse

Even some of the more sophisticated pseudoscientific arguments championing Intelligent Design date back at least as far as John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris’s musty 1960 tome, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. This is where the memes got their start.

I only recently dipped into Edward Larson’s Summer for the Gods, a well-written and surprising look at the Scopes Monkey trial. I recommend reading it after watching, for the 13th time, Spencer Tracy doing Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind.

John Polkinghorne

Law-governed nature and divine action

A shelf of books has been written by scientist/theologians giving slightly different twists on the same basic argument: science does not—cannot—exclude the idea of God, so why not suppose that a Deity is hovering in the background, undetectably nudging the universe along? If you read just one example of this genre, I’d recommend Ian Barbour’s When Science Meets Religion, which summarizes the various positions. Polkinghorne’s Belief in God in an Age of Science and Keith Ward’s God, Chance & Necessity, also get the point across. If you are having trouble telling deism from theism, the Meta Library is again a good source.

Ron Cole-Turner

As I listened to this talk, I realized how far behind I had fallen in understanding the basics of the latest genetic and reproductive/technologies. I wish I had known about a primer on the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and an online brochure from the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. Genome mapping, bioinformatics, cloning, stem cells—all are summarized. National Lampoon’s Cloning Primer is also pretty good.

John Barrow

Some scientists find it theologically significant that the universe can be described with mathematical equations and that it seems to be fine-tuned not just to support life but to encourage it. The first of these issues, the “pi in the sky” problem, was famously described by the physicist Eugene Wigner in a classic essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

I’d already written about this and another of the puzzles Barrow talked about —how complex structures arise from randomness. But if I were starting from scratch, I’d reread James Gleick’s book Chaos, Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity, or a chapter, Tesuque Interlude: The Riddle of the Camel, in my own book, Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, in which I try to evoke the basic ideas during a visit to an Indian bingo parlor. Another good starting point is a short, clear article, called Chaos, by Jim Crutchfield, Doyne Farmer, Norman Packard, and Robert Shaw, which appeared in December 1986 in Scientific American. A copy of the article on Crutchfield’s website has been removed, but it is currently cached on Google.

Fraser Watts

Dr. Watts is the opposite of a self-promoter, so he probably won’t tell you that his web page, includes an impressive list of publications on the psychology of religion.