January 2025 Blog

Who is Working on Science and Religion? Changes in the Last 20 Years Fraser Watts The field of science and religion looks very different now from how it looked when ISSR was founded in 2002. For one thing, there is less interest in harmonising science and religion, or in defending religious convictions against scientific objections. Instead, there is increasing interest in the converging contributions of science and religion to challenges in human flourishing, such as ecology and the environmental crisis, about which ISSR is holding a conference in the summer. This shift is also flagged up in the title of this year’s Boyle Lecture, to be given by Antje Jackelén, “Science, Technology, Theology and Spirituality – A Necessary Partnership”?   Many of us have become more sceptical about

June 2024 Blog

A New ISSR Research Grant from TWCF Fraser Watts   ISSR has received a large grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF 2023-32537) as part of the TWCF initiative on The Science of Religious and Spiritual Exercises (SORSE). Religious and spiritual traditions contain repositories of ancient practical wisdom about how to live well, and they often prescribe practices that help people to foster deeper connections with themselves, with other people, with the world around them, and with the transcendent.    Such practices are often recommended simply because they are proper, rather than because of their effects, but there is increasing evidence that religious and spiritual exercises have considerable well-being benefits. The overall SORSE program has three main objectives: Focus on expanding our understanding of the science of

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October 2022 Blog

Understanding Spiritual Intelligence: A Progress Report on an ISSR Research Project   Fraser Watts We are just over two years into the ISSR research project on Understanding Spiritual Intelligence, funded by TWCF. I posted a blog at the start about what we intended to do. This is an update on where we have got to. We had to do quite a bit of hard conceptual work on what we mean by “spiritual intelligence”. We do not assume that there is a “God spot” in the brain, or a module for spiritual intelligence in the cognitive architecture. We assume that when humans are operating in spiritual mode, that they are using the same mental resources as they use for everything else. We also do not assume that spiritual intelligence is

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