The John Templeton Oxford Seminars on Science and Christianity

Purpose:

The seminar particularly encourages young faculty members to engage in scholarly research in the new field of science and religion, creating opportunity for them to have dialogue with each other and with scholars in Britain to give breadth to their scholarship and to give a context for refining their ideas among other scholars. The daily seminars are accompanied by workshops, discussion groups, and research counseling. Mentors are assigned to the participants based on the goals of their projects, serving as readers of the research and providing feedback to the participants. Participants are mentored in their writing by recognized scholars in science and religion. A new round of seminars will begin at Oxford in the summer of 2003. 

Director Information:

Dr. Alister McGrath is a Biochemist and Reformation Historian and serves as Principal of Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford.

Dr. Stanley Rosenberg is a historian of early Christian Thought and Late-Antique cosmology and culture.  He is an affiliate faculty member at the University of Oxford and is the director of Oxford Projects for the Council.

Dr. Ronald Mahurin, vice president for professional development & research, Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.

Senior Consultant and Administrator:
Dr. John Roche is a Physicist and Historian of Science who is a member of the faculty at Linacre College, University of Oxford.

Overview:

The seminar particularly encourages young to mid-career faculty members to engage in scholarly research in the new field of science and religion, creating opportunity for them to have dialogue with each other and with scholars from around the world to give breadth to their scholarship and to give a context for refining their ideas among other scholars. The daily seminars are accompanied by workshops, discussion groups, and research counseling. Mentors are assigned to the participants based on the goals of their projects, serving as readers of the research and providing feedback to the participants. Participants are mentored in their writing by recognized scholars in science and religion.

This project is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.  In pursuing research at the boundary between science and religion, the John Templeton Foundation seeks to unite credible and rigorous science with the exploration of humanity's basic spiritual and religious quests. Using a rigorous, open-minded and empirically focused methodology, the Foundation draws together talented representatives from a wide spectrum of fields of expertise on topical areas which have spiritual and theological significance ranging across disciplines from cosmology to healthcare. In 2001, the Foundation awarded over $40 million to 246 projects, studies, publications and award programs worldwide. 

This program exemplifies the mission of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities to advance the cause of Christ-centered higher education and to help their institutions transform lives by faithfully relating scholarship and service to biblical truth. In particular, the CCCU seeks to address the contemporary suspicion of science among evangelicals by encouraging among its member colleges a rigorous scholarly study of the relationship between science and religion.

What are the aims of this project?

This seminar will harvest insights of the past in the ongoing debate between religion and science and use them to illuminate current issues of central importance. The project will use an interdisciplinary approach anchored primarily in historical and analytical scholarship in science and religion, in order to encourage a rethinking of goals and methodology, improve the scholarly standing of this area of study, provide a resource for those actively engaged in teaching and research in this field, and disseminate this scholarship to a wide audience. The series is intended to generate significant new attitudes and programs within a major and increasingly influential section of North American Christianity.

Historians now recognize that there have been long periods of harmony and that even the moments of conflict are not always best described as clashes between "Science" and "Religion." Today, however, some of the more public debates between representatives of science and religion--perhaps not always the most scholarly--are adversarial. Even when all participants are scholarly, the language and the world view of the representatives of these two great cultural traditions can reveal elements of triumphalism or can seem incommensurable. The debate between science and religion is enormously beneficial to religion in sharpening the understanding of the natural setting of Revelation and religious experience. It is also beneficial to science through the rational probing which those with a religious perspective on life and nature can offer to its presuppositions. This challenge has frequently been of service to science.

Not every practitioner of science has adequate training in the conceptual analysis of his or her own field to conduct such a debate effectively. Not every religious believer recognizes that a confessional approach may not be the most effective way of dealing with a particular secular critique, or is capable of separating substance from theoretical construction in religious thought, or can distinguish the cognitive categories used in religious thought from those used in science. These seminars will attempt to provide the background knowledge and skills required for productive debate and analysis in this field. They will probe the problems which sometimes arise from a profound misunderstanding of both an individual's personal tradition and the traditions of others. They will construct respectful dialogue in the environment of a commitment to mutual understanding rather than confrontation. The seminars will require a mutual effort to empathize with each other's framework of understanding and an attempt to see the framework of others as intrinsically coherent. This applies as much to scientists as it does to religious believers. A foreclosed approach from either side would make productive dialogue very difficult. The seminars, we anticipate, should not simply deal with conflict but should also celebrate the many successful partnerships between science and religion.

What are the major project themes?

This list is provisional; final choices will be guided by the varied expertise of the Steering Committee.

Year 1. Creative Tensions: The Relevance of Christianity to the Rise of Modern Science

Themes and methodology

• Grand themes in the relationship between science and religion.
• Research methodology and issues worth exploring for the Middle Ages.
• Research methodology and themes worth examining for the Renaissance and Early Modern Period.
• Research methodology and themes worth exploring from the eighteenth century to the present.
• An examination of current issues and approaches.

Issues and Episodes in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

• The study of natural philosophy: harmful to faith, vain curiosity about nature, tracing the footsteps of God in nature or giving glory to God: a survey of Christian responses.
• Biblical cosmology and Greek cosmology from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.
• Credo ut intelligam: faith as an interpretative principle of nature.
• The reception of Aristotle's natural philosophy in theological faculties in the Middle Ages.
• Scientific research within a framework of faith: Christian rationalism and Christian naturalism in the High Middle Ages.
• Christianity and the Cosmos from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period
• Motor intelligences and angels: the evolution of the medieval concept of heaven.
• How intimately was scholastic natural philosophy tied to 16th century theology
• Reactions of churchmen to Copernicus in the 16th and 17th centuries.
• Natural philosophy and Biblical hermeneutics in the 17th century.
• The impact of the condemnation of Galileo on science in Roman Catholic countries.

Aspects of Modern science and Christianity

• Christian responses to a mechanistic interpretation of nature.
• Science and miracles in the Enlightenment.
• Sociological theory and Christianity.
• Freud's interpretation of religion.
• The perspectives of anthropology on Christianity.

Year 2. Scientific Achievements within a Christian World View

Natural theology

• Natural theology from Aquinas to the 17th century.
• The vision of science as redemptive from Bacon to the nineteenth century.
• Science cooperating with faith: the new natural theologies in the seventeenth century.
• The argument from design in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
• The anthropic principle: a perplexing persuasiveness.

Christian roots of some sciences

• Roots of concepts: natural law; the principle of economy in nature; the principle of least action; the Great Chain of Being.
• Theories of the origins of language.
• Scholarship stimulated by biblical research: the study of Hebrew; the science of translation; philology.
• Genesis and geology.
• Christian opposition to astrology, alchemy and magic.

Christian influences on the content and practice of science

• Protestant thought and natural science.
• Christian atomism in the seventeenth century.
• Newton's concept of absolute space and time.
• The structure and age of the universe.
• The Church and medical research.

Refining methodology

• A creative tension: science and modern biblical hermeneutics.
• Scripture and tradition: Roman Catholic responses to modern science.
• Recent attempts to demarcate religion and science.
• The style of the debate this century: a study of approaches.
• The concepts of modern physics: do they begin to transcend materialism?

Year 3. Evolution

• History of evolution from antiquity to the early nineteenth century.
• Christianity and theories of the origins of life from antiquity to Darwin.
• Fossil evidence and the age of the earth.
• Darwin's strategy.
• The reception of Darwin.
• Early debates within Christianity concerning evolution.
• Adversarial episodes.
• Evolution and hermeneutics.
• Secular prophets of evolution.
• Christian evolutionary philosophies.
• Models and analogies in science and religion.
• The goals, methodology and commitments of evolutionary science.
• The use of concepts of chance by evolutionary theorists.
• Distinguishing historical evidence from hypothesis in evolutionary theory.
• Defining the methodology and goals of the Christian critique of evolution.
• The conduct of the debate between evolution and religion.
• The rational critique of evolution by the American Scientific Affiliation.
• The phenomenon of creationism.
• A welcome probing or a threat to the naturalist agenda: the present status of the Christian critique of the theory of evolution.
• The future goals of research in the relationship between science and religion.

In the third year, more than in the others, an input from practicing scientists who have the sophistication to examine scientific concepts and methods rigorously and dispassionately, and also from philosophers of science, was required. A similar sympathy for science was required by those with religious commitments. The goal was to assess the present status of the debate and to gather and refine the best arguments from all perspectives.