Ian G. Barbour, one of the founding figures in the academic discipline that studies the relationship between science and religion and winner of the Templeton Prize in 1999, died December 24, 2013, at the age of 90. “[He] probably did more for the creation of the field than anyone else,” remarked 2010 Templeton Prize winner Francisco J. Ayala in an obituary published in the New York Times. Peter Hess, Director of Outreach to Religious Communities at the National Center for Science Education, called him “a towering figure, one of the truly great interdisciplinary thinkers of the 20th century.”
The Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) has announced two five-day residential workshops for 2014 that will cover subjects in the fields of evolution and human nature, and religious experience and moral identity. Participating scholars include theologians Celia Deane-Drummond and Stephen Pope, anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, philosopher Robert Roberts, and psychologist Michael Spezio.
This year, 2013, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sir John Templeton. To commemorate that milestone, a new documentary film about the life and legacy of Sir John,CONTRARIAN, is being released this month.
It is a common thought that the worldviews of science and religion are very different and are best not mixed. This is one way to summarize the “non-overlapping magisteria” view of the relationship between these two great quests for understanding, associated with the late American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. But is this assessment accurate?
