May 2026 Blog

The Boyle Lectures and the Brain: Concerns about ISSR’s Public Sphere Claims about Human Minds and Intelligence Michael Spezio, Ph.D., M.Div. Associate Professor, Psychology, Data Science, Neuroscience, Scripps College, Claremont, CA USA Minister of Word and Sacrament, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Presbytery of San Gabriel, Temple City, CA USA The public sphere of pluralistic liberal democracy is in danger of collapse due to sustained attacks on sound, coherent, evidence-based discourse, thinking, and the corrigibility of claims. Anti-vaccine campaigns are reshaping public health. Anti-evolution advocacy is reshaping science education. Climate denial is reshaping energy policy. The institutions themselves are now being directed by commitments that contradict the scientific consensus they were built to apply. None of this is incidental to the work of science and religion. Our field exists, in

By |2026-05-15T23:00:46+01:00May 15th, 2026|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |
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March 2026 Blog

Evolution and Eternity  Rupert Sheldrake   The twentieth-century revolution in cosmology threw science into a slow-moving crisis that is still unfolding. Before the Big Bang theory became orthodox after 1966, physicists used to think that they were studying an eternal universe, governed by timeless mathematical laws, consisting of a fixed amount of matter and energy that was preserved forever according to the principles of conservation of matter and energy. These fundamental realities of physics were not altered by anything that actually happened. The evolution of life on earth made no difference to them, nor would the extinction of all life on our planet. The laws of nature and the total amount of matter and energy would always be the same.   The idea that the universe was born

By |2026-03-15T19:17:47+00:00March 15th, 2026|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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February 2025 Blog

Science and Judaism: Where has the dialogue got to? Daniel Langton    One’s imagination goes off in all sorts of directions when one thinks of Science and Judaism. There is the phenomenon of the contribution of Jewish scientists to modern science and its understanding, such as those of Freud, Franklin, Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, Sagan, and Gould. There is the fascinating question of how an ancient religio-legal system, the halakhah, has been applied to science, from medical ethics to technological solutions for work prohibitions on Shabbat. There is the spooky realm of kabbalah and quantum mysticism, and the spookier story still of the precursor of the morality tale of Frankenstein, the monstrous golem. There is the tragic history of the murderous application of race science during the Nazi genocide.

By |2025-02-15T18:49:36+00:00February 15th, 2025|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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November 2024 Blog

Michael Ruse (1940-2024) by Michael Reiss   With the death of Michael Ruse on 1 November, the field of philosophy of science has lost both an intellectual giant and perhaps its most engaging member.   Michael was born near the beginning of the Second World War, on 21 June 1940, in England and brought up in a Quaker environment. His father was a conscientious objector, which wasn’t easy at the time, and his mother died when Michael was 13, which he unsurprisingly found very tough. Michael attended Bootham School in York, a Quaker school, and then went to the University of Bristol to read philosophy and mathematics. There, he had something of an epiphany when first hearing about Descartes’ Meditations in a lecture. I can remember him telling

By |2024-11-15T19:31:42+00:00November 15th, 2024|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , |
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September 2022 Blog Post

Feeling Science, Thinking Religion Donovan Schaefer On a warm autumn evening at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, a group of scientists, theologians, and philosophers sat down for a candle-lit dinner to discuss the relationship between science and religion. Our speaker was physicist Andrew Briggs, and his topic was “Theory in Science and Faith.” But instead of starting with God, Prof. Briggs began with science; and not science as an institution, as truth, or even as a set of ideas, but as an experience. “I confess,” he told us, “that my engagement with a scientific problem produces an extraordinary cycle of effects in me: until I have understood something to my satisfaction, or solved a problem—or even got an experiment to work—I go through a physical pain which can be

By |2022-09-15T21:07:04+01:00September 15th, 2022|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , |
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ISSR 2019 Summer Conference Website and Call for Papers Now Live

Dear all, As the summer approaches, we are preparing for our 2019 summer conference which will be held from 21-24 July at the Eynsham Hall Hotel just outside of Oxford. This conference, which will be formed in part by the ISSR's Religion and the Social Brain research project, promises to be an engaging event both intellectually and socially. In preparation for the conference, we have launched a new website dedicated to ISSR conferences. On this website you will be able to read about the conference, location, as well as register, submit an abstract, and pay registration fees. We will be emailing out a formal Call for Papers in the coming days, but we wanted to ensure that you had an opportunity to visit the website and begin thinking

By |2019-04-25T17:41:29+01:00April 25th, 2019|Categories: ISSR Statements, News, Science & Religion News|Tags: , , , , , |
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