News & Blog

INSBS Conference Postponed

As you will all be aware, across many countries governments and universities have recently been placing restrictions on people’s travel in response to the COVID 19 epidemic, with many higher education institutions closing completely for an indefinite period. This includes bans on mass gathering over 100 people and incoming international travel in some countries including South Africa. In the UK we have not yet witnessed many restrictions on travel and large gatherings, but it seems…

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3rd May 2016

What’s the best way to think about creationists?

What’s the best way for non-creationists to think about creationists? Some view them, unhelpfully, as inescapably anti-modern, utterly unwilling to face facts. This unwillingness is often supposed to be linked to religion itself, with religious belief understood as diametrically opposed to the scientific process. Science, we are told, is about facing facts, being open to correction, being willing to be wrong. Religion, we are sometimes told, is about none of…

26th April 2016

Tracking Dinosaurs and Finding God

***This post originally appeared on 07 January 2016, on Ted Davis’ blog, Reading the Book of Nature hosted on the BioLogos website*** Giant Birds and Dinosaur Footprints In 1802, a twelve-year-old farm boy named Pliny Moody found an unusual object while plowing a field in South Hadley, Massachusetts—a big, flat stone bearing what appeared to be footprints of large birds, which some…

29th March 2016

‘Most people don’t have the time to be concerned with systems of ideas, because they have day jobs’

John H. Evans offers a sociologists’ view on science and religion debates John H Evans is the author of Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate and Contested Reproduction: Genetic Technologies, Religion and Public Debate. Here, he talks to Tom Kaden, one of the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum team about sociology…

15th March 2016

Reimagining both the peg and the hole in the conversation between Christianity and science

Have you noticed that within many of the current leading classifications of the religion-science relationship (such as those proposed by Ian Barbour, Willem Drees, Philip Hefner, Ted Peters, or John Haught), there is an implicit or explicit goal within the author’s classification? For some, it could be demonstrating the plausibility of a deity. For others, it could be upholding the relevance of Christianity, or the…

1st March 2016

What’s in a name? Does Darwin hinder the acceptance of evolution?

For nearly 35 years, Gallup has polled Americans regarding their views on human evolution using a polling question that gives respondents three options to choose from regarding human origins. Surprisingly, the results of the survey question remained relatively steady over time. Since 1982, the percentage of Americans that believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years has remained relatively stable at just over 40%.

12th February 2016

Darwin Day: Celebrating Without Deifying

Today, Friday February 12th 2016, is the 207th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Celebrated around the world as ‘Darwin Day’, events across 6 continents from Tel-Aviv to Tokyo will commemorate the English naturalist’s work, explore his legacy, and discuss the current state of affairs in the field of Evolutionary Biology and beyond. Whilst the majority of those attending lectures or participating in events today may do so…

2nd February 2016

Talking about science, religion and oneself

Joseph Farman: "Well I mean as Scouts one went to church [...] I don’t think I ever found it very attractive and [...] when you sort of kept saying, ‘You use these three letters together, g-o-d, and I haven’t yet fathomed out what on Earth you mean by it' and then they just say, ‘Well forget all about that, you know, it will come, it will come.’ [Laughs] To which the answer…

8th December 2015

Where is the Evidence? Privileging Science over Religion

When I examine comment sections online in response to stories about religion in Canada, remarks almost inevitably spiral into a religion versus science debate. In my book, The Meaning of Sunday: The Practice of Belief in a Secular Age – based on ninety interviews with those in Canada who identify with a Christian group and attend church weekly (active affiliates), those who identify as Christian and attend services mainly…

25th November 2015

Science and Secularisation

On Wednesday 18th November our new home, the Centre for Science, Knowledge and Belief in Society here at Newman University was launched with an inaugural seminar by the celebrated historian of science, Professor John Hedley-Brooke. Professor Hedley-Brooke, a former Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford, presented a skilful overview of the chequered history of science…

10th November 2015

A Look at the Professional Creationists and Anti-Creationists

***This post originally appeared on 22 October 2015, on Ted Davis' blog, Reading the Book of Nature hosted on the BioLogos website*** Evolution and Religion: The Conflict Narrative in Crisis Recent results of the social scientific research on creationism in the United States raise more questions than they answer, especially with respect to long-held assumptions of what creationism actually is and what motivates people who affirm it.

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