A year ago most of us probably did not expect that COVID would still be dominating our lives as much as it is. The pandemic continues to have a radical effect on academic life. In some ways, it has been liberating to make the transition to doing so many things on zoom. It simplifies life considerably to travel less. However, many of us find that having minimal in-person contact is somewhat wearisome. COVID is teaching us to value human contact more deeply, and to understand its significance in our lives.
The evidence for the effectiveness of vaccination becomes more compelling all the time, so it becomes increasingly puzzling that there is an entrenched minority of people who remain anti-vaccine. It is always intriguing when people act (or vote) in ways that, from a rational point of view, are not in their best interests, and raises fundamental questions about whether humans are as rational as they want to believe they are.
The last 12 months have also seen a gradual raising of consciousness about the importance of climate change. However, despite the best efforts of many at the COP conference, there is still a long way to go to actually head of the disaster of a significant proportion of the planet becoming uninhabitable, and numerous adverse consequences everywhere. There is increasing rational awareness that things need to change, but it is again noticeable that people often don’t act on what is rationally in their best interests.
The reluctance of a significant minority to be vaccinated against COVID, and the widespread reluctance to make lifestyle changes in response to the known threats of climate change, both indicate in different ways that people’s actual behaviour is not really driven by scientific data. I have long been persuaded that humans have two fundamentally different ways of doing cognition, one rational, and the other intuitive and affective. Humans are capable of rationality but they are not entirely rational.
Science is the finest achievement of one way of thinking, and religion is a hugely influential manifestation of the other. Work on the interface of science and religion is not just a matter of examining the compatibility of the content of two bodies of thought. It is also a highly developed way of examining the interface between two fundamentally different ways of thinking. Those who work on the interface of science and religion have grappled with the problem of connecting rational and intuitive/affective thinking, and their expertise in doing that is potentially of wider significance for the future of humanity.
The last year has been a busy one for ISSR, despite COVID. We have now completed 15 months of our TWCF-funded research project on Understanding Spiritual Intelligence. The research team is quite dispersed geographically so, even without COVID, our interaction would probably have been largely online. However, we hope that the project will be showcased at an ISSR conference on Religion and AI, to be held in the UK in the summer. Details to follow.
We are looking forward to the Boyle lecture, to be given in 2022 by Professor Christopher Southgate. It remains to be seen whether it will be possible to hold it, as scheduled, on 7th February, or whether we will need to defer it until COVID conditions are better. Our Founding President, John Polkinghorne, died during the last year, and we are planning an online discussion of his work, around Easter. Details to follow. The winners for the second year of the ISSR science and religion book prize were announced in October, and we held an online discussion of the winning books, which can be accessed online. We have submitted a full application for a research project on COVID and religion, and are waiting to hear the outcome.
We have recently made significant steps towards ISSR becoming more diverse in its Fellowship, in terms of culture and faith tradition. As discussed in blogs by both myself and Muzaffar Iqbal, work on “science and religion” looks very different in different cultures, as faith traditions vary in what kind of “religion” they are, and in their approach to “science”. I would like to gather together a small group of people to discuss the implications of this for the future direction of ISSR, and would be pleased to hear from anyone who would like to be part of that exploratory conversation.
