philosophy Archives - International Society for Science & Religion (ISSR)

March 2026 Blog

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 Rupert Sheldrake|2026-03-15T19:17:47+00:00March 15th, 2026|Categories: Blog|Tags: Big Bang, biology, Change, Charles Darwin, Cosmic Pessimism, Cosmology, Creation Story, Entropy, Eternity, evolution, Evolutionary Cosmology, Existential Anguish, Fixed Laws, Heat Death, Laws of Nature, metaphysics, Modern Synthesis, Neo-Darwinian Theory, philosophy, physics, Primal Unity, Rupert Sheldrake, Science, Spiritualisation of Matter, Teilhard de Chardin, theology|

November 2024 Blog

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 Michael Reiss|2024-11-15T19:31:42+00:00November 15th, 2024|Categories: Blog|Tags: biology, christianity, darwin, evolution, michael ruse, philosophy, religion, Science|

August 2024 Blog

August 2024 Blog

A Landscape of Consciousness Robert Lawrence Kuhn “Explanations of consciousness abound and the radical diversity of theories is telling. Explanations, or theories, are said to work at astonishingly divergent orders of magnitude and putative realms of reality.” That’s how I begin “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a “Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications” [“Landscape”] — my review of theories of consciousness published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (Volume 190, August 2024, Pages 28-169). The print PDF can be viewed or downloaded on the ScienceDirect page, upper left, Open Access — though online easier to read and navigate. Landscape is the product of a lifetime. My PhD was in neurophysiology at UCLA’s Brain Research Institute (1968). I am creator and host of Closer To Truth, the long-running (25

By Robert Lawrence Kuhn|2024-08-16T23:20:56+01:00August 15th, 2024|Categories: Blog|Tags: AI Consciousness, Closer To Truth, Consciousness, Dualism, Idealism, Materialism, meaning, Mind-Body Problem, neuroscience, phd, philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Quantum Consciousness, religion, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Science, Science and Philosophy, Theories of Consciousness, Ultimate Questions|

ISSR 2023 Summer Conference Call for Papers

ISSR 2023 Summer Conference Call for Papers

By Anthony K Nairn|2022-12-15T23:25:23+00:00December 15th, 2022|Categories: ISSR Statements, Science & Religion News|Tags: AI, anthropology, artificial intelligence, call for papers, cfp, history, intelligence, media studies, philosophy, religion, Science, social science, spiritual, STS, theology|

December 2022 Blog

December 2022 Blog

Wentzel van Huyssteen (1942-2022) in memoriam Niels Henrik Gregersen, University of Copenhagen The prominent member of ISSR, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, sadly died February 18 this year, a few months before his 80th birthday. At the 2022 Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver, the ISSR arranged a session on “The Legacy of J Wentzel van Huyssteen: Commemoration and Critiques” on November 19 with panelists including Danie Veldsman, Nancy Howell, Kirk Wechter-McNelly, Andrew Rick-Miller, and myself. The point of the session was to take stock of van Huyssteen’s work up from his early career to his mature work, epitomized in his Gifford Lectures, Alone in the World? From 2006. The session turned out to be moving by including also personal reflections from the panelists and

By Anthony K Nairn|2022-12-15T22:33:14+00:00December 15th, 2022|Categories: Blog|Tags: AAR, Alone in the World?, American Academy of Religion, Andrew Rick-Miller, Arthur Peacocke, Critical Realism, Danie Veldsman, Dutch Reformed Church, Epistemic Convictions, Ernan McMullin, Free University of Amsterdam, Gifford Lectures, god, Huguenot Colle, Ian Barbour, ISSR, James J. McCord Professor in science and theology, john polkinghorne, Kenneth A. Reynhout, Kirk Wechter-McNelly, Nancy Howell, Niels Henrik Gregersen, philosophy, princeton, Princeton Theological Seminary, Professor, religion, Religious Studies, sciences, South Africa, The Shaping of Rationality: Towards Interdisciplinarity in Theology and Science, theology, Theology and the Justification of Faith: Constructing Theories in Systematic Theology, University of Copenhagen, University of Port Elizabeth, Wentzel van Huyssteeen, Wolfhart Pannenberg|