By James Riley “Buddhist temple detail Singapore #dailyshoot” by Leshaines123 is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit. Pew Research Center recently released a new report exploring the intersections of science and religion, based on new data from interviews with Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists in Malaysia and Singapore. The report’s authors said: “The discussions reinforced…
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In April 2017 the team from the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project hosted a one day symposium in Birmingham. In this video, project Principal Investigator Professor Fern Elsdon-Baker opens the symposium by introducing and contextualising the research being undertaken by the team.
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By Rebecca Catto The Last Stand - Science vs Superstition ***This original version of this post was published on the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network website on 6th April 2017*** The “conflict thesis” is the label historians of science give to the purported essential and enduring incompatibility or clash between science and religion. However, today this thesis is considered historically inaccurate (Harrison, 2015, Lightman, 2015).
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By Mairead Shanahan As the seriousness of the human impact on a changing global climate becomes evident, many religious movements are developing theological responses to such ecological issues. As one of the fastest growing Christian denominations on the globe, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are now formulating theological positions on anthropogenic climate change. Australian neo-Pentecostal churches such as Hillsong, C3 Church, Planetshakers…
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By James Riley If you can believe what you read, “FAKE NEWS” is everywhere these days. Shot onto the media scene like a lexical gag, the phrase was fired from the mouth of President Donald J. Trump as he confronted CNN reporter Jim Acosta during the then president-elect’s first press conference. Although the words are much older, Trump has certainly made the…
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***This podcast first appeared on The Religious Studies Project on 30 January 2017*** Science and evolution in Muslim societies is a complicated topic. Among members of the public, what does evolution mean? Is there one ‘Muslim view’ on evolution, or are there a great variety of views on evolution in Muslim majority contexts? In this podcast for The Religious Studies Project INSBS's…
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By Sylvia Nickerson Hinton - Tesseract cubes frontispiece In 1884 the English schoolteacher Edwin Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. This book, a social satire, also explores the mathematical concept of dimensionality. Abbott’s characters imagine what it might be like for creatures of one dimension to communicate with creatures of higher or lower dimensions. A major theme is how differently dimensional creatures could perceive…
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By Stephen Pihlaja For the last 10 years, I have been studying interactions between Christians and atheists on YouTube and social media, focusing particularly on how they structure arguments and categories to fit very specific social contexts. One recurring issue in my work, and one that seems particularly prescient as we collectively practice saying the words ‘President Tump’, is how arguments about theology and…
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By Richard Fallon No one could accuse the Reverend Henry Neville Hutchinson (1856-1927) of being close-minded. He belonged to the Geological Society, the Anthropological Institute, the Royal Geographical Society, the Zoological Society, the Folk-Lore Society, the Palæontographical Society, and the…
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By Peter Harrison Map of Universe, 14th Century. Bodleian Library A note from the editor: In a previous article on this site, historian of science Bernard Lightman offered a reflection on the new work of Peter Harrison. Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion, seeks to outline how conceptions of science and religion have changed throughout history, and details the inadequacy of projecting our present categories…
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By Tom Kaden Recently, the conflict between religion and science—or, to be more precise, between a loud religious minority and an important part of modern biology—took the unusual form of a 150-metre-long wooden ship. After about six years of planning and building on July 7, Answers in Genesis, America’s largest creationist organization, opened its Ark Encounter theme park in Northern Kentucky. In a later round of…
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