Science, Technology & Religion

A interesting short article by Rachel Wagner at Ithaca College.

See SBL Forum: XBox Apocalypse: Video Games and Revelatory Literature

Will add it to the reading list for the Bible and Popular Culture course.

Heidi over at When Religion Meets New Media: CFP on book on Church and New Media has an informative blurb on the call of papers for a new edited book looking at a variety of approaches to religion and the internet.

I’ve cribbed some of it below - but drop by her site for the full details.

Call for Papers for Edited Book on CHURCH AND NEW MEDIA: PERSPECTIVES, PRACTICES AND FUTURES
Editors: Pauline Hope Cheong, Peter Fischer-Nielsen, Stefan Gelfgren and Charles Ess

Background and Rationale
This book brings together, for the first time in five years, a collection of key articles in the area of religion and the Internet, particularly as new media relates to church, mission and interfaith dialogue. In light of the increasing mediation of everyday life in many parts of the world, this book approaches online religion with a fresh perspective, to account for contemporary developments in media and spirituality, with implications for faith and other civic organizations.

Arguably, as institutionalized religions and movements rush to leverage the Web to improve their reach, religious communication on the Internet takes an increasingly significant role alongside more traditional venues for such discourse. It may be, however, that religious use associated with new media problematizes established faith rituals, and religious community building in both its conception and operationalization. Changes in the Church can also
be conceived as intertwined with a range of other forms of social and political developments, such that new media acts as an agent and practice to challenge and transform the influence and authority of the Church. Furthermore, as ³new² media is a moving target, there may be past concepts that are more able to explain the nature of church life (such as evangelical
mission and systematic theology) or new concepts that are being developed that are better able to address the diversity and complexity of contemporary social and religious life (such as the ideas of social networking, viral marketing and church branding).

This edited collection aims to address and inform such issues and debates by offering new empirical, theoretical, and theological insights into how religious life continues to transform and be transformed by these new communication technologies. Current contributors, together with the editors, include Knut Lundby, Heidi Campbell, Mark Johns and Jørgen Straarup.
We hereby invite proposals for additional chapters (particularly in the historical and theological sections as explained below) that will complement and expand upon these contributions.

This looks interesting. A shame that I won’t be able to get to it. Hopefully something similar turns up when I get some sabbatical time.

Theology After Google | Transforming Theology

Heidi Campbell & Mia Løvheim have put out a call for papers for a special issue of Information, Communication & Society on Religion and the Internet: The Online-Offline Connection, which is also linked in with the 2010 Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture in Toronto (on my wish list to get to next year).

In particular this special issues aims to explore the relationship between online and offline forms of religious practice and community. Key questions include:

• What is truly unique about the performance of religion online?
• How is the practice and conception of religion online connected to offline practices, communities and institutions?
• In what ways does religion online reflect trends seen offline in religious culture and practice?
• How do these transformations connect with issues of globalization and glocalization?

You can read the full CFP over at When Religion Meets New Media: CFP: Special Issue on Religion and the Internet: The Online-Offline Connection.

Related link - article seen today - Religion moves online | Stuff.co.nz

Brief video/text article on religion in Second Life. See September 18, 2009 ~ Second Life | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

I’m probably going to pick up a copy of the book Global Perspectives on Science and Spirituality edited by Pranab Das, but am somewhat disappointed by the perception of global in it. While the authors represent a range of non Anglo-American voices, most (all?) the authors are still in a predominantly northern hemisphere axis. Where are the voices from Africa, South East Asia, Oceania and the Pacific, and Latin and South America? Hopefully, when I delve into it I’ll be surprised.

Back in 2006 (Greenflame · e-Monks doing e-Business) the monks with the laser printer supplies business were making a minor splash. Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly pick up the story some three years on from there over at September 11, 2009 ~ Laser Monks | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

A couple of interesting links in the Washington Post relating to the ‘Religion’ field in Facebook profiles. See Facebook’s Religion Question Prompts Soul-Searching - washingtonpost.com and Facing Their Faith - washingtonpost.com.

Related link: In Google we trust: our new faith | Stuff.co.nz

A few bits and pieces related to science and religion from the net this week:

• Are Public S&R Discussions Irrelevant? - Science and Religion Today
• The Vision Lives On - Science and the Sacred
• Sean Carroll’s Handy Grid - Science and Religion Today

The latest issue of Metanexus’ Global Spiral web publication looks interesting. Articles have been drawn from the annual Metanexus conference on this month including:

• “The Making of a New Biophilia: Evolutionary Governance and the Modern Creation Myth” by Walter Truett Anderson
• ““A Mirror up to Nature”: Cosmos, Nature, and Culture in Shakespeare” by Kenneth W. Davis
• “Why I am Not a Pantheist (Nor a Panentheist): Metaphysics, Totalization, and the Cosmos” by Jonathan Weidenbaum
• “God, Strings, Emergence, and the Future of the World” by Nicola Hoggard Creegan
• “The Idea of Design in Nature: Science or Phenomenology?” by Jakob Wolf
• “Religion, Culture, and the Personification of Non-Human Entities” by Kathryn Johnson and Adam Cohen

More details on the conference can be here.

I like historian Ronald Numbers’ material on the history of science and religion interaction - including the article with NZ historian John Stenhouse entitled ‘Antievolutionism in the Antipodes: From Protesting Evolution to Promoting Creationism in New Zealand’. This latest book by Numbers looks like it will have some interesting pieces in it too. See Harvard University Press: Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion by Ronald L. Numbers. While many people portray science and religion’s relationship as a simple dualism, the historical context is often far more complex than that.

Science & Religion Today: Is This the End Time? has some snippets from different people on eschatological hope from the “Closer to Truth” video episodes “Is This the End Time?“.

Will file it away for the next time I teach on different theological perspectives on the future.

Two new web sites related to Science and Religion hit the net recently.

The first is The BioLogos Foundation, set up by Francis Collins, aims to bring science and religion into harmony.

The second is the International Society for Science and Religion, which has updated its web site to a new site with all sorts of science and religion related material.

Religion and Science: Pathways to Truth is a DVD series that focuses upon the relationships between science and religion in various areas (e.g. genetics, evolution, anthropology). Looks like it might be an interesting resource. A little pricey though.

A copy of Heidi Campbell and Heather Looy’s new book A Science and Religion Primer arrived in the mail this week. Looks good, and I’m hoping my students will make use of the copies our libraries have picked up.

A couple of links from the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.

Firstly, The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion - Multimedia has a bunch of audio and video materials from their seminars.

Secondly, Test of FAITH is a project developing materials on science and faith that are relevant and accessible for churches.

A public lecture on Global Warming: a Christian response

Professor Robert White FRS

Professor of Geophysics, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge

When: 6-7 p.m., Thursday 12 March 2009

Where: Theatre OGGB4, Business School, corner of Symonds Street and Grafton Road, The University of Auckland

(Parking under Owen G Glenn building, $5 flat rate)

Professor Robert White is Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge (since 1989) and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society, and a member of the American Geophysical Union. He leads a research group investigating the Earth’s dynamic crust. His scientific work is published in over 300 articles.

Bob is Associate Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, and a director of the John Ray Initiative, an educational charity that works to develop and communicate a Christian understanding of the environment.

For more details click on the picture or on the links below:

Bob White - Lecture and Symposium - Leaflet.pdf

Bob White - Lecture and Symposium - Poster.pdf

I’m looking for some film titles to list as recommended viewing for students of science, technology and religion. I’ve got a selection already but I’m always interested in seeing what other people have found useful.

Add you suggestions as a comment.

Some of the people involved with the now defunct Science and Religion News magazine and website have put together a new(ish) blog on things relating to science and religion. You can catch it at: Science & Religion Today.

Off to Christchurch to speak at the Theology and the Natural Sciences in Aotearoa (TANSA) Talk this weekend which should be good. Graham and I will talk for a bit and stimulate some discussion, and hopefully we’ll have some sort of panel discussion at the end.

Official details can be found here but here’s the blurb anyway. Feel free to come along if you’re in Christchurch.

We’re going to lunch afterwards at a restaurant or café which people are welcome to tag along to too.

TANSA Talk

9.30-12 noon Saturday September 20th
Laidlaw College (previously BCNZ) Christchurch
70 Condell Avenue, Papanui,
Christchurch
(03) 354 4270

1. Science, Theology, and Ethics: An Emerging Alliance. (Graham O’Brien)

Graham O’Brien has a Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology (Canterbury University), 3 years post-doctoral experience in molecular virology (Auckland University), and a Masters degree in Theology (Bible College of New Zealand). Currently Graham is the Vicar of the Picton Anglican Parish, in the Diocese of Nelson. He is also member of the InterChurch Bioethics Council, representing the Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches of Aotearoa, New Zealand on issue relating to bioethics.

2. Thinking theologically about new technologies. (Stephen Garner)

Technology might be considered the environment in which we live, and breathe, and have our being. As such, where does one start to think theologically about the technological environment we find ourselves in? This presentation picks up themes common in bioethics, such as autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice, as helpful conversation starters for thinking theologically about technology.

Stephen Garner lectures in Theology at the University of Auckland. His PhD in Theology looked at the imago Dei in the context of transhumanism, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. His also holds an MSc in Computer Science and is a member of the InterChurch Bioethics Council.

The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley has just released a report based on a survey of different religious (& non-religious) groups responding to whether extra-terrestrial intelligence would precipitate a crisis in their respective traditions. The general consensus from religious groups tended to assert there wouldn’t be, while non-religious groups thought there would be.

The press release is here - CTNS Announces Religious Believers Welcome Potential Interaction with Extraterrestrials.

You can find the main survey page over at Counterbalance Foundation - The Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey including the Full Report Documents and Appendices.

Microclesia alerted me to the death this week of John Templeton, who has been hugely influential in the funding and support of science and religion discussion and dialogue.

Scientific American carries an article on him over at John Templeton, Philanthropist of Science and Religion, Dead at 95: Scientific American.

Related links:

Interesting series of quotes about what it means to be human from various scientists over at What Does It Mean to Be Human? | Wired Science from Wired.com.

Often our attempts to define this tend to be linked to particular understandings of the essential core that defines human beings, sometimes called the locus humanus. Typically, this is denoted by a set of attributes that human beings alone possess, such as the religious concept of an immortal soul, but is often a collection of psychological attributes such as reason, language, consciousness and self consciousness. And indeed, in the quotes in the link above some of these crop up.

Hat tip to Nouslife: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Hat tip to James at Exploring Our Matrix for a link through to an extensive interview How Our Brains are Wired for Belief with Andrew Newberg (hosted by the Pew Forum) on religion and neuroscience (neurotheology). He also notes this link to various related articles by Newberg and others.

See also Greenflame · Search results - Newberg which has some more links in it.

An interesting post about a set of interviews with US scientists about religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. Part of a follow-up to a larger survey and indicate that religious/spiritual inclination might be much higher than is commonly portrayed in a science vs. religion conflict model.

See The Immanent Frame » Blog Archive » Beyond The God Delusion

Related links:

• CTNS–Science and the Spiritual Quest
  • “Science and the Spiritual Quest: New Essays by Leading Scientists” (Phillip Clayton)
  • “Faith in Science: Scientists Search for Truth” (W. Mark Richardson, Gordy Slack)
• Counterbalance : Science and the Spiritual Quest - Interviews

Mary over at Tensegrities points to this visually engaging project - Chris Harrison - Visualizing the Bible.

Beyond Paley: Renewing the Vision for Natural Theology is an interdisciplinary event being held at the University Museum, Oxford in June. The line up of speakers looks engaging, but given my chances of actually getting there as very slim (as in non-existent) I’ll wait for the downloads from the web site.

Related links from the Counterbalance site:

• General Term: Natural Theology
• General Term: Paley, Revd William (1743-1805)
• God, Humanity and the Cosmos Topic: Natural Theology vs Theology of Nature

Interesting articles that popped up on young-earth ‘creationist’ geology, and the problems it causes, not for secular geologists, but rather for old-earth Christian geologists.

Original NYT article at: Rock of Ages, Ages of Rock by Hanna Rosin (Nov 25, 2007). (Login needed).

Commentary on the article here at Young Earth Creationism Makes Life Difficult for Everyone | Liveblog | Christianity Today.

Related to the post a couple of days ago, here’s an article about religious orders using the Internet to attract people into a religious vocation. See Monasteries enter the Internet Age - New Zealand’s source for technology news on Stuff.co.nz

Well, obviously I think the answer is yes
Anyway, that’s the title that the editors of sPanz (the quarterly magazine of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa-New Zealand) put on the editorial I wrote for this quarter’s issue.

You can read it at Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand // Media: Should we have a theological perspective on technology?.

Two notes:

1. The picture here is of the garden path mentioned in the article
2. sPanz ‘graduated’ me a couple of weeks early. PhD graduation is next week.

ABC radio programme The Spirit of Things - 26August2007 - Space, Genes, Evolution and Religion interviews four thinkers in the area of science and religion: Ted Peters, Martinez Hewlett, Antje Jackelen and Jacques Arnould. It’s a fairly low key engagement with the topic, but worth a listen (and the web page has links to both the audio and other resources).

Related references:

Jackelén, Antje. “The Image of God as Techno Sapiens.” Zygon 37, no. 2 (2002): 289-302.
Jackelén, Antje. “What Is ”Secular“? Techno-Secularism and Spirituality.” Zygon 40, no. 4 (2005): 863-873.

Peters, Ted. Playing God?: Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Peters, Ted. Science, Theology, and Ethics Ashgate Science and Religion Series. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.

Peters, Ted, and Martinez Hewlett. Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003.

The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences
Zygon Center for Religion and Science

A few years back I heard a sermon from a guest preacher that used the example of Jupiter’s presence in the solar system decreasing the number of comets etc. that might hit the Earth catastrophically as a ‘proof’ of the intelligent design (by God) of the solar system (and by implication the whole universe). (For an example of this see: Reasons To Believe: Spokane Chapter Newsletter - June 2006 - Jupiter and Saturn: Miraculous Planets)

As someone who has a passing interest in astronomy (I did a couple of undergraduate papers at university) that example always seemed too neat - surely things were more complicated than that in the celestial mechanics of the solar system? And now, things do appear more complicated over at Is Jupiter a Bodyguard or Troublemaker? — Schilling 2007 (824): 3 — ScienceNOW. I guess it’s time for a sermon retcon for a few preachers.

Melbourne newspaper “The Age” has this brief article on neuroscientists analyzing what the brain does when an person is altruistic - see Warm as charity: why giving feels good.

Related links:

Books and articles by Antonio Damasio including:

• “Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain” (Antonio Damasio)
• “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain” (Antonio Damasio)
• “The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (Theology and the Sciences)” (Eugene G. D’Aquili, Andrew B. Newberg)
• Damasio, Antonio. “Fundamental Feelings.” Nature 413 (2001): 781.

Books and articles by Andrew Newberg

• Metanexus articles by Andrew Newberg
• D’Aquili, Eugene G., and Andrew B. Newberg. “Consciousness and the Machine.” Zygon 31, no. 2 (1996): 235-252.
• D’Aquili, Eugene G., and Andrew B. Newberg. The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.

Counterbalance: Psychology and Neuroscience

A recent essay by theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher, Stuart Kauffman, on the need for a secular spirituality that goes beyond reductionism. See Edge: BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED By Stuart A. Kauffman.

Some interesting points for engagement based on the quick skim I did of it.

No, not a Star Trek reference. A newspaper article about the director of the Church of Scotland’s Science, Technology and Religion Project (Donald Bruce) calling for more critical engagement and oversight of technologies such as nanotechnology.

See Scotsman.com News - Scotland - Kirk seeks ’superman’ technology watchdog to rein in scientists.

Science & Theology News - The Daily Dose: Science blessed by Pope points to Vatican’s ongoing openness to engagement with science. There’s a link there to the original Boston Globe news article, plus adding some comments on it.

Various links that have been collecting in my bookmarks

Human Dignity Amendment - Christian Democratic Union - a Christian Democratic party in the US. Would like to see them define the imago Dei in some way and it looks like some idealized human genome becomes sacred. (Hat tip to SubversNZ: Human Dignity Ammendment)

George : Death and the brain. Better Humans posting linking brain function and rationality to personhood. Interestingly having made the claim that rational agency defines personhood he continues to address humans who can’t exercise that agency as “persons”.

Philadelphia Inquirer | 05/07/2006 | Science Anxiety talks about the anxiety generated in the general populace by advances in science and technology.

IST Results - Searching for the soul in the machine is an article contemplating artificial intelligence and the possibility of “computer society” - relational computing, but not as we know it, Jim.

I saw this a while back in the paper edition. On the one hand museums are training staff to deal with religious groups suchs as “six day creationist”, while here those groups are taking their own tours of the same museums with their own guides. See Science & Theology News - Religion around the world - Biblically correct tours find home at museums.

» The great Singularity debate | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com looks at various speakers (for and against).

Covalence, a Lutheran publication reflecting on faith, science and technology recently went online. See Faith, Science, and Technology - Covalence

Continuing their gathering together of related material into mini-portals Science and Theology News have a new section on the concept of emergence and emergent systems. See Science & Theology News - Emergence.

Emergence theorists are not all of one mind, but they do agree that nature’s complex structures — from proteins to cells to brains — are more than simple combinations of their parts. Rather, they “emerged” from lower to higher levels of reality. This means that each level of reality is in some way “richer” than what came before.

This fits in nicely with the previous posting (Greenflame: Emergent systems & the church (revisited)) and might provide some background to the paper linked to there.

Picked up a couple of volumes from ATF Press last week that I had been meaning to get for a while. The one on determinism and reductionism has some essays that will intersect with my research. Being the collector that I am I had to restrain myself from picking up several other (but less immediately relevant) volumes in the same series. It was a shame that they didn’t have “Habitat of Grace” in the sale as I’d quite like to get hold of that to go with the two below and my copy of “God, Life, Intelligence and the Universe“.

IPM/ATF - Creation and Complexity : Interdisciplinary Issues in Science and Religion edited by Stephen Pickard and Christine Ledger.

IPM/ATF - Beyond Determinism and Reductionism : Genetic Science and the Person edited by Roland Chia and Mark Chan.

The entire ATF Science and Theology Series can be found here.

Link here to a recent Reuters article on an approach by US clergy to science and religion that differs from the intelligent design/creationism-type approaches. See US Scientists enlist clergy in evolution battle.

A recent defense of a dualist view of human nature by philosopher Richard Swinburne over at Science & Theology News - Science and the soul.

For a physicalist view - that the body is all there is - see Science & Theology News - Whole people don’t need souls says theologian.

Science and Theology News has an article commenting on the tension between different world views - primarily science and faith - in the TV show “Lost”. Main conclusion is that this tension is played up, rather than looking at how different views can complement or assist each other. Also the quest for meaning is a regular theme. I don’t watch “Lost” myself but here’s the link - Science & Theology News - Science and faith a TV regular on “Lost” as well as another related link - Science & Theology News - TV takes a leap of faith.

A reflection on science and religion by by Gordon Atkinson at The Christian Century: The lion and the lamb.

I’ve been reading bits from Gregory Peterson’s Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences today. It’s very readable and covers a range of interesting things - from human dignity, ethical considerations towards other creatures, intelligent design and artificial intelligence. You can find a review of it here: Science & Theology News - Peterson’s scope and deep research make “Minding” solid by William M. Struthers.

It’s part of the Fortress Press “Theology and the Sciences” series that I hope to own in its entirety at some point.

From the recent essay Metanexus Institute - Evolution and Intelligent Design by Sjoerd L. Bonting:

The basic fallacy of the ID proponents is that they fail to distinguish between the questions that can and should be answered by science (how-questions) and by theology (why-questions). If scientists would have to conclude that certain complex systems cannot have originated by a traditional evolutionary scenario, then it is up to them to find out how they did originate without appealing to a transcendent cause. Theologians must ask themselves why the Creator made these systems develop, regardless of the exact mechanism by which they arose. In a dialogue between scientists and theologians it will then be possible to reach a deeper and comprehensive understanding of their respective findings.

Some interesting comments in his two-worlds approach (science = “how”, religion = “why”) on deficiencies in the ID approach.

Brief article from PBS’s Religion and Ethics sites about the Jesuit Arizona Observatory, part of the Vatican Observatory programme.

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . FEATURE . Jesuit Arizona Observatory . June 3, 2005 | PBS:

Science and Theology News have put together a variety of mini-sites on various topics on the past few months. The latest one is a collection of pieces on intelligent design from a variety of perspectives.

See: Science & Theology News - Intelligent Design.

Science & Theology News have a new email newsletter out that delivers links to science and religion articles on a daily basis. You can also subscribe to their weekly wrap up, job news and book reviews on the same page.

See: Science & Theology News - Newsletter.

Paul said (grumped?) that he’d been looking for the D’Aquili and Newberg book but couldn’t find it on sale. So to make his day happier here’s a link to Metanexus’ collection of articles by Andrew Newberg.

Andrew Newburg mini-bio here.

Science and Theology news has a good selection of links this week covering stem cells, cloning, artificial consciousness and a great article about Sister William Julie Hurley.

See: Science & Theology News : The Daily Dose: June 17, 2005

Metanexus Institute - Visual Explorations : Earth’s City Lights.

This image of Earth’s city lights was created with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS). Originally designed to view clouds by moonlight, the OLS is also used to map the locations of permanent lights on the Earth’s surface.

From the technology section of Adbusters The Big Ideas 2005 comes the article Adbusters : Make peace with your biology. Lots of interesting quotes like,

What do you lose when your life becomes more valuable than any other life in history? When your death is something you can’t accept? When pain makes you cower in fear? You lose what every human before you aspired to: the selfless desire to sacrifice for a future generation.

Which is a good point. How much of what we do, the placing of a protective layer of technology between ourselves and the world, is motivated out of fear of suffering, fear of death, fear of discomfort that paralyses us from taking up our cross each day?

Thanks to Jonny Baker for the link to the Adbusters issue.

If you’re looking to investigate the relationships between science and religion in general you’d be hard pressed to go past the book God for the 21st Century. The library managed to interloan me a copy from the Christchurch public library so I’ve been skimming through it.

It’s a collection of 50 short opinion pieces and essays from writers around the world and from different religious perspectives. The essays are brief, easy to read (no footnotes) and cover a good range of positions. The ones of mind and personhood were useful in alterting me to writers to follow up later. A good introduction to some of the current issues in the field.

From the Visual Explorations section of Metanexus is a movie entitled “Motion” with a series of images of nature in motion in Iceland.

Part of their ongoing series based on art being a bridge between science and religion. The comment that “beautiful images from the sciences can also transform our vision of ourselves and the universe.”

(The movie is about 4MB so it takes a while to load)

A brief editorial pondering the US debates over origins, separation of church and state, and spiritual question asking in schools.

Science & Theology News - Editorial: Questions we cannot ask.

It raises a good point - where are the safe places for people to ask questions about faith, science and other stuff?

How odd. Somehow I never thought I’d come across Rick Warren while reading a science and religion editorial. See: Science & Theology News - Editorial: The universe, and our lives, on purpose. So far the most surprising thing today.

Science & Theology News - News: Dembski to head seminary’s faith-and-science center

The man who has become both figurehead and lightning rod for the intelligent design movement in America recently agreed to direct a science-and-religion center at one of the nation’s most conservative Protestant seminaries.

William Dembski, a philosopher of science, was hired in September to head Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s new Center for Science and Theology. Dembski’s appointment will begin when the center opens June 1 at the Louisville, Ky., school.

Should be interesting. Dembski ruffled a few feathers at Baylor and, I imagine, will do the same here.

For those of you who don’t know what Dembski and co propose as “Intelligent Design” have a look here: (Intelligent Design Topic : Introduction and History Topic : Intelligence Design. One of the most common places to see ID is in the Focus on the Family video Unlocking the Mystery of Life.

Personally, I don’t think ID in it’s best case scenario goes beyond asserting theism (or even deism in some cases) - a form of general revelation. In fact, it can become another system tainted by “God of the gaps” thinking.

When Dembski was in NZ a year or two back I asked him what could sit under ID - was it exclusively a 6-day creation type position? Basically he said anything theistic can sit under it - theistic evolutionism, progressive creationist as well as the creation science (6-day) crowd.

Following up on the post from the other week (Greenflame: Emergent systems & the church) here’s a primer on emergence written by Philip Clayton - Science & Theology News - Features: Emergence. In it he looks at some of the different views on emergence, science and religion.

(And for those of you who were looking for an online version of the David Wollert’s paper “Complexity Theory as Model and Metaphor for the Church” there doesn’t appear to be one yet. However Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (ASA) do publish stuff online but several months (years?) after the paper copy comes out. Maybe contact them direct and see when it’ll be online.)

Always nice to find someone else who’s thinking about the same questions as you. In his paper “Science, Technology and Mission” Ronald Cole-Turner writes,

Can theology � that communal process by which the church�s faith seeks to understand � can theology aim at understanding technology? Can we put the words God and technology together in any kind of meaningful sentence? Can theology guess what God is doing in today�s technology? Or by our silence do we leave it utterly godless? Can we have a theology of technology that comprehends, gives meaning to, dares to influence the direction and set limits to this explosion of new powers?

See: Cole-Turner, Ronald. “Science, Technology and Mission.” In The Local Church in a Global Era: Reflections for a New Century, ed. Max L. Stackhouse, Tim Dearborn and Scott Paeth, 100-112. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.

I’ve been reading (and reading) about different people’s models or descriptions of science-religion interaction over the past few months. In the last week I was following up some of Willem B. Drees’ work and came across this poetic creation story he wrote to introduce his book Creation: From Nothing Until Now. It ends like this,

In us
    our heritage,
    matter,
    information,
    and a box
    full of stories.
Between
    hope and fear
    our neighbors
    life
    here on Earth,
between
    hope and fear
    the great project
    of thought
    and compassion
on a road
    of freedom.

The full text is here: A creation story.
I like the idea of humans comprising, in part, stories.

Doing some surfing around the science and religion web sites on the net and came across this recent article by Paul Davies posted at Metanexus: Metanexus Institute: Into the 21st Century.

It’s an interesting (and quite readable) opinion piece on science and religion interaction as we move into the next century. It’s worth a read if you’re interesting in this sort of thing (or even if you’re not).

Religion faces extraordinary challenges in the 21st century. Dazzling advances in science and technology have transformed our world view and produced dramatic changes in lifestyle and material wellbeing. But this enormous progress has left religion behind. Few theologians have kept up with the revolutionary developments at the forefront of astronomy, physics, molecular biology or genetics. Churches and other religious institutions seem ill-equipped to deal with the brave new world of big bang cosmology, quantum reality, genetic engineering and nanotechnology. As a result, many people see religion on the defensive against the onslaught of scientific progress. They think of science as undermining or displacing religion.

Interesting article from Newsweek that I saw linked to from the Science & Theology News web site that comments on the increasing discussion over the place of spirituality and religion in the health sector.

Modern medicine, of course, still demands scientific proof on top of anecdotal evidence. So over the past decade, researchers have been conducting hundreds of studies, trying to scientifically measure the effects of faith and spirituality on health. Can religion slow cancer? Reduce depression? Speed recovery from surgery? Lower blood pressure? Can belief in God delay death? While the research results have been mixed, the studies inevitably run up against the difficulty of using scientific methods to answer what are, essentially, existential questions. How do you measure the power of prayer? Can one person’s prayer be stronger - and more effective - than another’s? How do you separate the health benefits of going to church or synagogue from the fact that people who attend religious services tend to smoke less and be less depressed than those who don’t?

Full article at: MSNBC - Faith & Healing

Just started reading Nancey Murphy’s book Reconciling Theology and Science: A Radical Reformation Perspective and I’ve been enjoying it so far. I notice that in the section on Theology and the Social Sciences there is a section on the New Zealand experience of Restorative Justice. Quite unusual for a US book to notice something down here in Godzone.

Most science & religion books are pretty esoteric, dealing with issues at a theoretical level, but this one seems grounded in the reality of having to live in this world. Murphy claims that

Christianity has primarily to do with real life, here and now. It is only secondarily about life in the hereafter; it is more about changing the world than interpreting its “meaning.” Doctrine is important in that it constitutes presuppositions of the way we live.

She works to bring themes such as anti-violence from the Anabaptist and other radical reformation traditions into dialogue with the science and theology debate. Should be an interesting read.

Just whipped through John Polkinghorne’s little book Traffic in Truth: Exchanges between Science and Theology which, like the Darwin book I blogged about earlier, provides an easy entrance to thinking about the relationship between science and religion. It reads like the combination of an introduction and conclusion from one of his other more lengthy books - at 54 pages it’s small enough to skim through in an single sitting. In his overview of the roles of chance and necessity in the universe he says,

Evolving fruitfulness seems to require a compromise between reliability and change. Too reliable a world would be so rigid that nothing new took place; too changeable a world would be in such a state of flux that nothing would ever persist in it.

When I read it I instinctively thought of the church - those that are too reliable and never venture into new things unless they are certainties and those that refuse to hold onto traditions and structures that are life-giving and are always looking for the next-best-thing. An emerging or reforming church need both chance (life-giving novelty) and reliability (life-giving traditions).

There is an official web site for John Polkinghorne with information about him, his work and talks and with links to science & religion resources.

Just read Darwin and Fundamentalism by Merryl Wyn Davies. It’s a short book in the Icon series “Postmodern Encounters”. If you’re looking for a brief (80 pages) introduction on the subject of Darwin, Darwinism, religious responses (positive and negative) and scientific engagement (again postive and negative responses) then this provides a good entry point. It’s footnoted so you can follow things up. Davies notes that fundamentalism occurs both in religious and scientific arenas and that the issues thrown up are more that a dualistic split between “materialistic, atheistic evolutionism” and “fundamentalist, literalist creationism”. Briefly she argues that

A true appreciation of the historic context of Darwin, the socially constructed nature of science, and theological and historically informed understanding of religion, which is much more that simply Christian fundamentalism, suggests that we are being hijacked by two extremist positions.

Well worth borrowing from the library to read for a day or so on the train into work just to get the mental juices percolating (even if you don’t agree with all her conclusions).

A related link is Evolution: Library: Emi & Nathan: Personal Testimonies at PBS which has a video clip of the following:

As science majors at a conservative Christian college, Emi and Nathan have both struggled with the creation/evolution debate for themselves. For them, as for many people, evolution and religion seem to contradict each other. In this interview excerpt from Evolution: “What about God?”, Emi and Nathan share their own experiences and their strategies for tackling the issue through further education.

Trying to finish a paper for a conference in about a weeks time (4-5 Dec) on the spiritual nature of technology and in particular the spiritual narratives that are found in technological agendas. Here’s the abstract.

This paper focuses on the religious and spiritual narratives that are interacting with emergent technologies and in particular with the concept of cyberspace. Rather than being “spiritually-neutral”? evidence can be found for technologists being motivated by religious concepts from Christianity, Gnosticism, Eastern religions and neo-Paganism in their desire to create and use these technologies. On one hand these concepts produce new versions of the gospel complete with apocalyptic “technoraptures”?, while on the other existing religious stories are used as analogies and inspiration for technological developments. As a result the emergence of new technologies provides both challenges and opportunities for theological dialogue with wider Western techno-culture.

Hopefully in a couple of days time the paper will be finished. (It had better be)

I’m giving a lecture on science, technology and faith in the contemporary world at BCNZ in a few weeks time and I’ve added the bibliography I’m giving to the class to the web site. Like all these things it started off small and grew (and is still very incomplete) - hence the “Quick Start” section at the top to get them up and going.

See Technology and faith