Registration remains open during the conference.
Note if you register once the conference has started they may be a slight delay in getting the joining link to you, but this will be sent asap.
The "Foundations" Conference is The Forum's dedicated space for early‑career researchers exploring the rich, complex intersections between scientific inquiry and religious thought. This event provides an intellectually supportive environment where emerging scholars can develop foundational skills, exchange ideas, and engage critically with the theoretical and practical dimensions of the field. This conference explores the dynamic and sometimes contested borders between scientific understanding and religious interpretation, asking how these two influential domains shape— and are shaped by— one another in contemporary thought and practice.
As scientific knowledge expands and religious traditions continue to evolve, questions emerge about where boundaries should be drawn, how they shift, and what happens when they overlap. This conference examines these issues through interdisciplinary lenses, bringing together voices from theology, philosophy, history, the natural and social sciences, and professional practice. By focusing on the boundaries of theory and practice, this event aims not only to map the current landscape of science and religion studies but also to empower the next generation of scholars to shape its future.
Keynote Speakers:
Monday 21st September 11:30am: “Through Relationship and Likeness”: Relationality, Nature, and the Dialogue between Science and Theology: Professor Luca Settimo, University of Nottingham
This contribution proposes relationality as a fundamental category for fostering a constructive dialogue between the natural sciences and Christian theology while preserving the proper methods and claims of each discipline. It proceeds in three stages. First, it examines the pervasive character of relationality in the natural world. From the fundamental interactions described by physics to the complex networks of biochemical interactions underlying living organisms, created nature can be understood as a web of relationships in which different entities are interdependent and, in many cases, tend towards forms of unity. I will then consider relationality from a theological perspective, drawing on different Christian thinkers including Thomas Aquinas. I will argue that relation is not merely accidental to being but is intrinsic to both created and divine reality. In Trinitarian theology, the divine Persons are constituted by their relations, while in Christology the incarnation establishes a profound relational unity between divinity and humanity. My contribution further suggests that certain forms of self-donation and self-sacrifice observable in the natural world may be understood analogically as reflections of the relational and self-giving character revealed supremely in Christ. Relationality may therefore provide a shared conceptual horizon for dialogue between scientific and theological accounts of reality. Finally, I will consider the consonance of this proposal with Origen of Alexandria’s interpretation of Romans 1:20, particularly his understanding of the relationship and likeness between visible and invisible realities.
Tuesday 22nd September 11:15 am: Whether and Where: Daoist and Confucian Boundaries with Science: Dr Jacob Chengwei Feng, Fuller Theological Seminary
Drawing on Eastern, non-Christian sources on science & religion, I argue that the question of where a tradition’s boundary with science falls can be corrected: rather, the claim should be that what a tradition’s practitioners do determines whether and where that boundary lies. The field of science and religion has already recognized that its categories are Western and its framing is largely epistemic (Harrison; Smedes; Miller); what it has not done is to change the unit of analysis: as a direct consequence, the term “religion” has stayed generic. In addition, deification has been Orthodoxy’s signature doctrine; its Protestant reception made an embodied practice “an intellectual exercise” (Feng), which shows that the epistemic framing diagnosed here operates inside Christianity too, not only across the East–West line.
Qi 气 (air, breath, pneuma) is the case where the answer to “whether” is no: porosity isn’t a degree, it’s the medium. To use religious Daoism as an example, at the end of the Tang Dynasty the Daoists began to turn their practices from waidan to neidan. Jiang and Tang call that turn a loss of scientific spirit. The question worth probing is: whose yardstick is that? Compared with waidan, neidan keeps, rather than abandons, the elixir and the equipment for compounding it — furnace, tripod, fire — moving them inside the body (Pregadio). Qi is regarded as one continuous medium in which cosmos and body are the same workshop. Waidan was poisoning the ruling class. If we measure it against the goal Daoist practitioners actually held, external alchemy failed at its own purpose, indicating that the inward turn answers the evidence rather than retreating from it. The “decline” is produced by the imported boundary. The frame is not a Western imposition on passive Chinese material: Jiang and Tang apply that yardstick themselves.
According to the Daxue (Great Learning), a Confucian classic, gewu 格物 (investigation of things), as one of the eight items in a chain ending in 治国 and 平天下, is oriented toward governance through self-cultivation (Legge). It differs from the neidan practitioner’s aim in its scope: orderliness and wellness in the family and the state rather than one’s own health. That gewu zhizhi was retrofitted in the late Qing to mean natural studies, then modern science (Bai), is evidence for my thesis. Fung grants “no disagreement among scholars about the epistemic role of gewu” while arguing that zhizhi is not epistemic, which indicates that the Confucian sequence begins in something like inquiry and does not end in knowledge (Fung). While in Daoism the test is whether the body lasts, in Neo-Confucianism it is whether one acts (Zhu Xi). Both boundaries fall outside the epistemic register, but in different loci — the body, and conduct in the social order — because both are tested by outcome rather than warrant. The field cannot decide whether Ru 儒 is a party to the question at all — the same failure, one level up.