Keynote Speakers and Timetable

 

Public GOWLAND LECTURE Wednesday 28th - FREE & Open to all registration required via form below (leave conference registration & accommodation sections blank if only attending the Gowland you can register to attend onsite or online)

Lecture by Bishop Richard Cheetham (Respondent Dr Muthuraj Swamy)

Science and Religion – a vital engagement, but where next?  Why context, community and communication really matter: Most of the literature on the relationship between science and religion has been produced in a Western context with an emphasis on the Christian religion.  However, there is increasing awareness of the wisdom and insights generated in many different contexts, cultures and religions, including indigenous knowledge.  There is also a growing appreciation that some of the major issues of the 21st century (e.g. AI, genetics, climate change and biodiversity loss etc) require far more than a narrow focus scientific analysis from a predominantly western viewpoint.  In a globalized, hyper-connected world, these issues need to be explored with ethical, philosophical, spiritual and theological lenses.  It is crucially important to pay close attention to the effect of context on how the science and religion relationship is understood. This lecture will explore how such an inter-contextual approach is working in the Equipping Christian Leadership in an Age of Science (ECLAS) project and also in the work of the Anglican Communion Science Commission, and outline some principles for a genuinely fruitful science and religion relationship in the future.

 

​​Thursday 29th

Prof. Bob Bowie, Canterbury Christ Church University; Dr Liam Guilfoyle, University of Oxford; Prof. Michael Reiss, UCL - Round Table: Big Questions in Science-and-Religion Education

In this round table colleagues discuss research programmes exploring issues in Science-and-Religion education and invite colleagues to consider the relevance of the findings for their own education and community settings.

 NICER’s contribution centres on work undertaken with a team from CCCU on two TWCF grants on knowledge of teachers, including and especially science and RE teachers in secondary schools of each others' subjects. One key finding from the national survey is that teachers do not share a common understanding of the aims each others’ subject. Another is that there seems to be little encouragement of the place of achieving overarching understandings of complex problems which require different knowledges. We are now trying to understand more about interdisciplinary dialogue between teachers, and whether that includes a focus on substantive complex issues that clearly require multiple subjects, like climate change education. 

Michael Reiss’ contribution centres on work undertaken with Tamjid Mujtaba on two TWCF grants on the intersection of science, religion and education. A key finding is that students who report that science and religion are compatible have more positive perceptions of science and of their ability in science, are more likely to have future aspirations in science and show more positive attitudes towards science education.

Liam Guilfoyle will offer contributions from the Oxford Argumentation in Religion and Science (OARS) Project, also funded by the TWCF. The OARS Project brought together science teachers and religious education (RE) teachers from the same schools in a professional development community focused on collaboratively improving the teaching of argumentation within and across the subjects of science and RE. Through the project we learned much about the challenges and affordances of such collaborative professional development, as well as understanding more about the nature of students' interdisciplinary/cross-curricular argumentation.

 

Bishop Richard Cheetham & Keynote speakers round table discussion: Continuity & Divergence: how much are past science and religion dialogues likely to shape their future

The science and religion dialogue has been evolving over past decades. Today, the narrative around science and religion is less likely to be one of conflict, than it was in the heyday of New Atheism. New conversations have developed, that look to both science and religion as ways of understanding ourselves and the world, and to provide ethical frameworks for thinking about new technologies. But the question remains: does the narrative of historical animosity between science and religion still influence the dialogue today? And will it continue to do so into the future? In this roundtable, our speakers will consider the historical relationship between science and religion, and how it has changed over time, look at the science & religion relationship in a range of disciplines, exploring areas where there is continuity of development in the narrative and where the science & religion relationship is branching off in new directions.

 

​Friday 30th

Dr Kathryn Pritchard, ECLAS/ Church of England's Faith & Public Life : The Church of England and AI: Building Blocks for DialogueAI and the Church

The Equipping Christian Leadership in an Age of Science (ECLAS) project’s collaboration with the Church of England’s national Faith and Public Life Team has created opportunities for science- and technology-related public policy work, behind-the-scenes consultations with leaders in science, technology, and ethics, as well as conferences and other forms of public engagement (e.g., public educational debates).

 Artificial intelligence (AI) has presented a significant opportunity for Church of England public discourse and, since 2017, AI and related technologies have been one of the core strands of ECLAS’s work in this context.  ECLAS has facilitated consultations, conferences, and seminars that both inform about latest developments in the field of AI and serve as sources of research data. 

 This presentation outlines the components of effective Church engagement with AI—both at a broad strategic level and within specific dialogical settings. Drawing on case studies from ECLAS events, it will explore the types of dialogue that emerge, the themes that surface, and the theological and institutional pre-commitments that enable these interactions. While these events are clearly shaped by a specific context, the presentation will also reflect on lessons with potential for broader application.

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Dr Lisa Stenmark, Emeritus San Jose State University: Fences on the Epistemological Prairie: A Settler Colonial Approach to Religion and Science

Peter Harrison, and others, have described “religion” and “science” as maps that we use to navigate intellectual territory. Like maps of physical territory, maps of intellectual territory—epistemological maps— reflect the worldviews and interests of the map makers, emerging in a particular time and a particular place. Western epistemological maps, for example, have distinctive characteristics, including the distinction between religion and science itself, and the tendency to think of religion and science in terms of truth claims (Evans, Stenmark); two ideas that are central to the religion and science discourse. As long as the conversation has been among Western scholars, this has not been a problem. We share the same general maps and exploring the strengths and weaknesses of those maps has been fruitful, although it does run the risk that we will forget these are maps, and begin to confuse the maps with the territory. This becomes problematic when we engage in conversations with people who do not share our maps, because it leads us to impose our maps on the conversation. This problem is compounded by the fact that these maps have been—and continue to be—colonial maps.
While I have elsewhere advocated narrative approaches as a way to think around the categories of religion and science and to engage in more open discourse, this lecture will focus on more concrete barriers to thinking outside the limitations of our epistemological maps. Comparing maps of intellectual and physical territory—specifically, the Wyoming Prairie—I use a settler colonial analysis to examine how maps and various tools of control been used to appropriate both land and epistemological territory. While maps conceptualize the territory, fences enforce those ideas on the territory itself; they do not merely restrict access to parts of the prairie (land and knowledge), they restrict movement on the prairie itself. Because they are legally and historically connected to technologies of settler colonial appropriation of land—including terra nullius and land patents— patents and intellectual property are excellent examples of the connection between land and epistemological territory, and show what epistemological decolonization can look like in practice.
 

Saturday 31st​

​Dr Nathan Bossoh, University of Southampton: Science, religion, and the material turn: exploring global potentials through museum colonial collections

Over the last few decades the history of science discipline has shifted – with noticeable progress – from Western-focused narratives towards more globalised histories of science. In comparison, however, the subdiscipline ‘history of science and religion’ has, only in the last decade, begun to make this shift beyond Christian-focused Eurocentric boundaries.
In their 2011 book Science and Religion Around the World, John Brooke and Ronald Numbers attempted to map out a viable approach to globalising histories of science and religion, yet the work highlighted more issues than it solved. One reason these issues have prevailed, I suggest, remains due to approaches and methodologies. Whilst historians have paid much attention to the various intellectual and social contexts of science and religion in history, they have paid less attention to the material contexts.
In this talk therefore, utilising the results from my previous research into the ‘Wellcome African materials’ held by the London Science Museum, I explore a currently underutilised, yet fruitful, mode of investigation. By incorporating indigenous narratives embedded in colonial museum collections into histories of science and religion, I argue that material histories can enrich current scholarship.
Furthermore, in bringing the history of science and religion more firmly into contact with museum studies, my research sits alongside emerging trends within the field which increasingly seek to position the history of science and religion as a more public-facing arena of research that can speak directly to key contemporary social, political, national, and international discussions and debates.