Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Denis Alexander

History of the relationships between science and religion

Denis Alexander, Rebuilding the Matrix, Chapter 4, The Bridge to Disenchantment, and Chapter 5, Aristotle’s Ghost. Alexander argues against the widespread notion that science and religion have always been at odds. He goes back through the history of their relationship to prove it. The book tries to wrest control of the religion/science debate away from extremist fundamentalists on both sides and promote a rapprochement, He also breaks lances with many of the great champions of naturalistic explanation, including Richard Dawkins, Michel Foucault, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Weinberg.

See also Douglas O. Linder: Steven Weinberg on Science and Religion.

Peter Lipton

Managing the science/religion relationship

Peter Lipton, Science and Religion: The Immersion Solution. Lipton argues that religious people can keep some of the claims of religion while changing their attitude toward those claims. Being religious goes beyond rote acceptance of every teaching of a religion, and this realization suggests a way out of fundamentalism and its zero-sum conflict with science.

Simon Conway Morris

Evolution, Convergence, and Human Intelligence

Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, Chapter 11, Towards a Theory of Evolution. This controversial and influential book argues, in effect, that intelligent creatures—if not we, then creatures with adaptations that respond to the same pressures—are pretty much inevitable given the prevalence in evolution of convergence, “the recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same 'solution' to a particular 'need.' “ In other words, given the rules of evolution as we know them, human beings seem more or less inevitable. Conway Morris draws some fascinating implications.

Michael Ruse

Evolution and its discontents

Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, especially Evolution and The Kingdom of Darkness. Brilliant, pellucid, courageous. An eminent evolutionary biologist presents an exclusively naturalistic explanation of the evolutionary process, and the ironically interdependent roles of chance and necessity in this process.

Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker. NY: Norton, 1996. Especially Introduction, Preface, and Chapter 1, Explaining the Very Improbable, in which Dawkins stakes out the philosophical case for a totally self-driven evolutionary process in a universe without direction or purpose.

Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Especially Chapters 10–12, which touch on his theory of cultural “memes” and the evolutionary advantages of altruism.

Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain. Especially Section 7, A Prayer for My Daughter. The word “atheist” does not mean “evil person” but rather “a person who does not believe in God.” An attitude of awe and wonder, and an optimistic, forward-looking hopefulness can easily be part of such a belief system.

And also read a father of courageous naturalism: Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship, one of the most influential such statements in 20th-century naturalism, especially the final paragraph.

Gary Wills, Under God. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1990. This book was a prescient attempt to trace the rise of American forms of Christian fundamentalism and their growing impact on American political life. Wills traces the terms and the movement to the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1910, which drew up a list of five defining qualities of “true believers,” which other evangelicals published in a mass-circulation series of books called The Fundamentals (see below). In Wills, see especially Part Eight: Church and State (339–380), a review of the historical roots of this quintessentially American tension.

Chris Hedges, Soldiers of Christ II: Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters. An online version of a 2005 essay that originally appeared in Harper’s. Hedges trenchantly examines “dominion” Christianity and fundamentalist views toward creationism, pornography, Jews, the media, and political power.

To get a taste for the early-20th-century American fundamentalist movement, see The Fundamentals, which is (or will be) an entire online version of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.

Also:

Sam Harris, The End of Faith. NY: Norton, 2004. Especially The Nature of Belief (50–79) and pages 204–227. Harris argues that religion and the mental habits it imposes have been a blight on human history and should be extirpated. He proposes a new way of thinking that not only replaces what used to be called “religion” but also might set into action an improving force in the human world.

Kenneth Miller, Finding Darwin’s God. NY: HarperCollins, 2002. See especially Chapters 6 and 7 (165–219) and Chapter 9 (260–292). In Chapters 6 and 7 Miller objects to what he sees as the excesses of scientists and naturalistic philosophers, a trifle too enthusiastic about claiming that science precludes belief.

Brian Cantwell Smith, God, Approximately, 203–228 in Science and the Spiritual Quest. London: Routledge, 2002. A scientist and philosopher feels that both science and religion have to change if we are ever going to be able to talk about what matters most to us. He sees a new “age of significance” coming in which we may discover new ways to do that. It may not quite be God, but it’s close.

Shankar Vedantam, Eden and Evolution, Washington Post Sunday Magazine. 5 Feb. 2006: 8+.

Philip Clayton, Keith Ward, Fraser Watts

Issues of the Soul, Human Nature, Consciousness

Excellent naturalist considerations of the body/soul question appear in books by Dawkins and Harris, cited above.

John Polkinghorne, More than a Body?, 134–136 in Russell Stannard, ed., God for the 21st Century. Philadelphia, Templeton, 2000. A physicist and believer declares that the addition of an immortal soul with a special relationship to God means that human beings are indeed more than just physical.

Daniel Dennet, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little Brown, 1991. See 366–368, from the Chapter. Dismantling the Witness Protection Program, in which Dennet denies the reality of the soul (although he acknowledges that it could be a useful fiction).

Nancey Murphy, Nonreductive Physicalism: Philosophical Issues, 127–148 in Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Maloney, eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998. Many people have assumed that Christianity is a “dualist” belief system, that sees a dichotomy between soul and body, two very different, separate things in some uneasy combination. Murphy argues that, because of advances in both science and theology, dualism is no longer tenable. But Christians can be comfortable with a “physicalist” notion of the human person—one in which the soul, however defined, is not a separable entity from the physical body. The thing Christians find untenable is “reductionism,” which sees nothing special or miraculous in the physical nature of human beings. So she posits a nonreductive physicalism.

Joel B. Green, Bodies—That Is, Human Lives, 149–173 in Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Maloney, eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Green reviews Old and New Testament depictions of the human person and finds these traditions a lot less dualist than people might think. In fact, ontological monism—the notion that human beings are a single entity, soul not separable from body, but in a special relationship with the divine—to be closer to the truth.

Steven Pinker. How the Mind Works. NY: Norton, 1999. See The Inquisitive in Pursuit of the Unthinkable, 554–565. Pinker suggests that beliefs and myths about the soul and the spiritual world have been superseded by better explanations in the sciences; but he also suggests that the human mind may not be able to answer every possible question.

V.S. Ramachandran. Do Martians See Red? 246–257 in Sara Blakeslee and V.S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain. NY: Morrow, 1998. An eminent neurobiologist tackles the notion of consciousness.

Philip Clayton

Emergence

Paul Davies. Teleology Without Teleology: Purpose Through Emergent Complexity, 95–108 in Philip Clayton and A.R. Peacocke, eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004.

The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy definition of “emergent properties”.

Exploring Emergence. An active essay from the MIT Laboratory.

Emergence is a concept with implications for everything from theology to artificial intelligence. Here is an interview with Steven Johnson, mainly on applications of emergence to AI, Web-based media, and information technologies.

Russell Stannard

Cosmology; The Anthropic Principle

John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principal. Oxford: U Pr, 1996. See pages 3–15, in which the authors set forth the “weak” and “strong” versions of the anthropic principle.

John D. Barrow. The Constants of Nature. NY: Vintage, 2002. See The Anthropic Principle, 141–176. See also the story of Fred Hoyle and carbon resonance, 150–159. This story shows that the anthropic principle is closely related to the issue of intelligent design.

William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse, eds., Debating Design. Cambridge: U Pr., 2004. See 1–2. See also Michael Ruse, The Argument from Design: A Brief History, 13–31; Michael J. Behe, Irreducible Complexity: An Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution, 351–370; and Kenneth Miller, The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity,’ 81–97.

For Judge John E. Jones’s decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education, known as the “intelligent design case”.

Paul Davies

Multiverses

Paul Davies, What Happened Before the Big Bang? 10–13 in Russell Stannard, ed., God for the 21st Century. Philadelphia, Templeton, 2000.

John D. Barrow. The Constants of Nature. NY: Vintage, 2002. See Multiverses, 275–280.

Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe. NY: Vintage, 2003: 366–370. The articulate champion of string theory discusses the concrete mechanism, proposed by Andrei Linde, that could have led to the existence of billions of other universes.

Barrie Jones

Extraterrestrial life—and extraterrestrial intelligence?

From www.space.com, a 2002 roundtable among prominent voices in the debate over the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. The panel includes Ross and Brownlee, Frank Drake of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (and author of the “Drake hypothesis”), and NASA’s Michael Meyer and Chris McKay. In 5 parts.

Cocconi, G. and P. Morrison, Searching for interstellar communications, Nature 184 (no. 4690): 844–846 (Sept. 19, 1959). A very influential little paper that led to the creation of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Corbally, C.J. Religious Implications from the Possibility of Ancient Martian Life. AAAS dialogue. This essay is just an example of “exotheology,” or the application of theology to the discussion of extraterrestrial intelligence(s).

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe. See Chapter 12, Assessing the Odds, and 13, Messengers from the Stars. War and Brownlee say the universe is actually a pretty hostile place for life. We may be the only intelligent life in our galaxy, and intelligence arose on Earth only by a most astonishing (and possibly singular) concatenation of accidental conditions.

John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principal. Oxford: U Pr, 1996. See pages 576–577, in which the authors explain the “space travel argument” against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

John Barrow

Strings and other theories

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. NY: Vintage, 2003. See The Universe at Its Smallest: What We Know About Matter, 7–20. Outlines string theory and tells us to hold on tight for a Theory of Everything. Also: General Relativity vs. Quantum Mechanics, 117–134, discusses the issues involved in reconciling these two apparently incompatible visions of reality. Chapter 12, Beyond Strings: In Search of M-Theory (283–319) and Prospects (373–387) present a lucid and hopeful case for solving some of the problems now dogging string theory.

Owen Gingerich

Intelligent Design vs. intelligent design

Gingerich, Owen. Dare a Scientist Believe in Design? 21–32 in Evidence of Purpose: Scientists Discover the Creator, edited by John M. Templeton. NY: Continuum, 1994.

Ronald Cole-Turner, Laurie Zoloth

Technological Innovations and Religious/Ethical Values

As Fraser Watts has said, religion had much to say to science early in their relationship, but it’s been pretty much a one-way conversation recently (from science to religion). There are, however, many points of public policy in which science and religious/ethical values do come to bear together: stem-cell research, end-of-life care, human genomics and genetic screening; the coming neurobiology, care of the environment, ethics of animal treatment, reproductive technologies, nuclear technology, vaccine development and distribution, drug development, and so on.

Brent Waters and Ronald Cole-Turner, eds., God and the Embryo. Georgetown: U Pr, 2003. Cole-Turner’s essay, Principles and Politics: Beyond the Impasse over the Embryo (88–97), tries to imagine a workable and ethical civic-consensus approach to this vexed issue. The book also contains a very useful series of official documents, statements from various churches on the issue.

Meilaender, G. A Case Against Cloning, 77–83 in Ronald Cole-Turner, ed., Beyond Cloning: Religion and the Remaking of Humanity. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International; 2001. In the same book, Donald M. Bruce, Ethics Keeping Pace with Technology (34–49), says ethics had better keep pace or we’re in trouble. And Cole-Turner, in Toward a Theology in an Age of Biotechnology (137–150), suggests some guidelines.

Ian Barbour. Ethics in an Age of Technology. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991. This is an omnibus tour of the ethical, religious, and social-justice issues coming to the fore more and more frequently as technological innovation accelerates. See especially The Social Construction of Technology (20–25), Human Values (26–56), and Redirecting Technology (231–239).

The Ecology

Rachel Carson. Silent Spring. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Once voted (1992) the most influential book of the previous half-century, this is still a vivid statement of a particular awareness of the hazards of pollution. See chapters entitled And No Birds Sing (103–128), The Human Price (187–198), and The Other Road (277–300).

An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation, 17–22 in R.J. Berry, ed., The Care of Creation. Leicester: InterVarsity, 2000. This document sets forth the case that Christians should consider themselves bound to preserve and enhance the environment, as a direct, central task of their faith. In Berry, ed., Care of Creation, R. Bauckham, Stewardship and Relationship (99–106) Berry sets forth a central definition for the “stewardship” movement.

Ian Barbour, Environmental Values, 57–82 in Ethics in an Age of Technology. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991.

Jared Diamond. Collapse. NY: Viking, 2005. Diamond argues (1) that civilizations often collapse because of environmental catastrophes, and that (2) as the title suggests, there’s often an element of choice involved. See especially, Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? (419–441) and The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today? (486–525).

Tariq Ramadan

Islamic perspectives on science

Guido Guiderdoni. Interview and Essay: The Islamic Worldview and Modern Cosmology, 117–136 in W.M. Richardson, et al., eds., Science and the Spiritual Quest. London: Routledge, 2002.

Margaret Boden

Artificial intelligence

If you can write a program that incorporates many aspects of human intelligence, why couldn’t you “write in” religious experience? Boden says you can. She also has said, famously, that there is no necessary conflict between the notion of artificial intelligence and that of free will.

Margaret Boden. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. 2nd ed, London: Routledge, 2004. In a Nutshell (1–24), Boden considers and answers questions about creativity; she doesn’t feel we lose that much in demystifying it. She also declares that computational psychology (the construction of artificial psychologies by computational means) can help us understand creativity in human beings. Computers (even if they cannot be “really” creative) can do and recognize things that appear to be creative. In Humans and Hoverflies (277–304), Boden argues that we don’t need inspirationist or romantic notions to explain—or fully honor—creativity. In this she resembles Dawkins, Dennett, and others who say that doing away with old notions of soul and spirit will enhance, not harm, our appreciation of our world and ourselves.