|
THE FAR-FUTURE UNIVERSE:
Eschatology From A Cosmic Perspective
7, 8, and 9 November 2000
Rome, Italy
PURPOSE
 |
Galileo
Galilei
Portrait by Leoni Ottavio
|
The
dawn of the twenty-first century, when giant new telescopes are in use
in Hawaii and Chile and powerful spaceprobes orbit the Earth, seems
an appropriate time to gather and concentrate light on questions about
the far-future of the universe. The scientists and theologians meeting
in Rome, under the auspices of the John Templeton Foundation, come together
to explore eschatology from a cosmic perspective. The current theoretical
prejudice is that our universe will still be expanding 100 billion years
from now. But it is not clear whether it will be speeding up or slowing
down. What are the various scenarios for the long-range future? What
are the events on the path towards asymptopia? What would an eternal
universe be like in each era between the present and the final “omega
point”? Could our present space be converted catastrophically, perhaps
by artificial intervention, into a new kind of space governed by different
physical laws? Is there the possibility of influence from extra dimensions?
Another set of questions involve the nature of complexity as a mathematical
concept. What clues are provided by simple models such as “cellular
automata” and “artificial life”? Are there limits to the amount of information
storage in a decelerating as well as an accelerating universe? From
the perspective of biology, we are compelled to ask: How large is the
contingent element in evolution? We know that in about five billion
years, the Sun will swell into a red giant and vaporize all life on
Earth before it settles down into a slowly fading white dwarf. What
are the scenarios and constraints for the future evolution of species
now on Earth? For the development of some exotic form of intelligent
life? And for its spread through the galaxy and beyond even after the
stars have died? It is also important to consider whether we can construct
a theology of the future universe. Can religious eschatology, which
is concerned with the vindication of God’s purposes for all creation,
help draw the threads of these scientific speculations about “last things”
together? What can a theology of hope tell us about the far-future cosmos
that has relevance from a human perspective? Could the “death and raising
of the universe,” as Jürgen Moltmann has written, be “the prelude to
an unexpected new creation of all things”? It seems clear that the lenses
Galileo ground and polished nearly four hundred years ago to improve
upon the Dutch “spyglass” have led us not only to successor optical
instruments with their huge lightweight mirrors but to even more audacious
questions than suggested by his “starry message.”
CHAIR
 |
Astronomer,
Treatise on Astronomy,
14th century manuscript
|
One
of the world’s leading theoretical astrophysicists, Martin
J. Rees, England’s Astronomer Royal, was for many years the
director of Cambridge University’s famed Institute of Astronomy. Since
1992 he has been the Royal Society Research Professor at Cambridge and
an official fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. His contributions to
our understanding of the origin and nature of the universe have been
exceptionally broad-based. Two decades ago, he showed how the anthropic
principle could be used to determine most of the fundamental constants
of physics. He has added to our knowledge about the birth of stars and
galaxies, demonstrated how deep-space quasars, the highly energetic
cores of active galaxies seen through the Hubble Space Telescope, might
be powered by massive black holes, and expounded theories that explain
the mysterious explosions known as gamma-ray “bursters.” A graduate
of Cambridge, where he studied at Trinity College, he took an undergraduate
degree in mathematics and earned a Ph.D. in theoretical astronomy in
1967. He was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, a research fellow
at California Institute of Technology, and a staff member of Cambridge
University’s Institute of Theoretical Astronomy before becoming a professor
of astronomy at the University of Sussex in 1972. He returned to Cambridge
the next year as Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy,
a position from which he resigned in 1991 to devote more time to research
and writing. Dr. Rees has lectured around the world and been a visiting
professor at Caltech, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton, as well as a Regents Visiting Fellow at the Smithsonian
Institution. He has served as president of the International Astronomical
Union’s Commission on High Energy Physics, the Royal Astronomical Society,
and the British Association for the Advancement of Science and is currently
a trustee of the British Museum. A Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow
of the Institute of Physics, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics
and Its Applications, he is a foreign honorary member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign associate of the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences, an officer in the French Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres, a foreign member of the American Philosophical Society, the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Italian Accademia Nazionale
dei Lincei, an honorary fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and
of Jesus College and Trinity College, Cambridge, an honorary member
of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Science
and Letters, and a member of the Accademia Europaea and the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences. Dr. Rees was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in
1992. He has won a dozen major scientific prizes, including, most recently,
the Bower Prize of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, and holds honorary
degrees from ten universities. A member of the editorial boards of a
number of leading scientific journals, he has published some 450 research
papers and three technical books. His first volume for a lay audience,
Before the Beginning (1997), was both an overview of and meditation
on what is known and what is merely conjectured about our universe in
which he suggested that the universe we observe may be part of a “multiverse”–“just
one element in an infinite ensemble: a cosmic archipelago.” In his latest
book, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (Basic
Books, 2000), Dr. Rees further explores the idea that the fundamental
constants in the laws of physics have been finely tuned to allow for
the emergence of complexity and consciousness and shows the profound
and powerful connections between us and everything else.
PARTICIPANTS
 |
|
Armillary
sphere of 1564, used to map the stars and planets.
|
John
D. Barrow is a research professor of mathematical sciences
at Cambridge University where he leads the Millennium Mathematics Project,
a new initiative to improve public understanding and appreciation of
mathematics and its applications. His research interests are in mathematical
and physical cosmology, the interaction between particle physics and
cosmology, the constants of physics, and theories of gravity. A graduate
of the University of Durham, he took first-class honors in mathematics
and went on to earn a D.Phil. in astrophysics at Oxford University in
1977. He did post-graduate work in astronomy as a Lindemann Fellow at
the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently held a junior
research lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford and in the University’s
department of astrophysics. He returned to Berkeley as a Miller Fellow
before joining the astronomy faculty of the University of Sussex as
a lecturer in 1981. Named a full professor and acting director of the
University’s Astronomy Centre eight years later, Dr. Barrow was appointed
the Centre’s director in 1995, a post he held until taking up his Cambridge
appointment last year. He is the recipient of many awards, including
the Samuel Locker Award in Astronomy and the 1999 Kelvin Medal of the
Royal Glasgow Philosophical Society. While at Sussex, Dr. Barrow held
Nuffield and Leverhulme Fellowships and a five-year Senior Research
Fellowship awarded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council
of the United Kingdom. He has been the Gordon Godfrey Visiting Professor
of Physics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and holds
an honorary degree from the University of Hertfordshire. Among the numerous
named lectures he has delivered are the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow
University, the George Darwin Lecture of the Royal Astronomical Society
(RAS), the Amnesty International Lecture on Science in Oxford, the Spinoza
Lecture at the University of Amsterdam, the Flamsteed Lecture, and the
Royal Society of Arts Christmas Lecture for Children. He also has lectured
at the Venice Film Festival, 10 Downing Street, and Windsor Castle.
Dr. Barrow is a fellow of the RAS and a corresponding member of the
L’Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. A prolific writer,
he has published some 300 scientific articles in cosmology and astrophysics,
edited three books, and is the author or co-author of twelve others
that explore the wider historical, philosophical, and cultural ramifications
of developments in astronomy. His most recent book, The Book of Nothing,
was published by Random House in October.
A
well-known expert on the theory of games,
Steven J. Brams is a professor of politics at New York University.
He has applied his principles for dealing with situations where two
or more players are in competition with one another not only to conflicts
in labor relations, domestic politics, and international affairs, but
also to theological issues. A graduate of Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Dr. Brams received his Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern
University in 1966. He was a research associate at the Institute for
Defense Analysis and an assistant professor at Syracuse University before
joining the NYU faculty in 1973. He has held visiting appointments at
the University of Michigan, the University of Rochester, the Institute
for Advanced Studies in Vienna, the University of California, Irvine,
the University of Haifa, and Yale University. Dr. Bram’s work has been
supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Guggenheim Foundation,
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Public
Choice Society, the Ford Foundation, the United States-Israel Binational
Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the United States Institute
of Peace, the National Science Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
He has published some 200 research papers and is the co-editor of two
books and the author or co-author of 13 others. His most recent book
(with Alan D. Taylor), The Win-Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares
to Everybody (W.W. Norton, 1999), is a blueprint for getting to
“yes” in conflict negotiation.
A.
Graham Cairns-Smith,
honorary senior research fellow at the University of Glasgow, is a chemist
who has devoted much of his professional life to the study of very early
evolution and has written extensively on the origins of life and the
origins of consciousness. He is also a painter. Educated at Kilmarnock
Academy and Fettes College in his native Scotland, he earned a Ph.D.
in synthetic and solid state organic chemistry at the University of
Edinburgh in 1957. Dr. Cairns-Smith then joined the Glasgow faculty
where he taught for forty years. As a reader in chemistry, he not only
gave classes in organic chemistry but also in molecular biology and
the philosophy of science. He has lectured widely in Britain and abroad.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Dr. Cairns-Smith is also
a Fellow of the Institute of Biology and a Fellow of the International
Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. He is the author of numerous
research papers on a variety of scientific topics and has published
six books on science for the general public. The Life Puzzle
(1971) was the first to reflect his ideas on the possibility that clay
crystals were components of the first organisms on Earth. His Genetic
Takeover: And the Mineral Origins of Life (1982) developed further
his radical view of early evolution, which suggests that present biochemical
arrangements were made possible by the evolution of a low-tech precursor.
Evolving the Mind (1998), Dr. Cairns-Smith’s first full-length
study of the origin of consciousness, was widely hailed for its lucidity
in explicating the ingenuity of cellular design and operation. He followed
it with Secrets of the Mind (Springer-Verlag, 1999), his most
recent volume, which considers how conscious states can affect behavior.
Dr. Cairns-Smith is currently completing a new book-length manuscript
on the nature of science, which he calls “Science Magic: Stories about
Science and the Making of Super Human Intelligence.”
Philosopher
Stephen R. L. Clark has had a long-standing
interest in both religion and science fiction. In his 1993 book,
How to Live Forever, he makes the genre sound a lot like theology.
Finding immortality an abiding theme in science fiction, he examines
the ways in which science-fiction writers have imagined it with a view
to showing that important resources can be found in science fiction
for philosophical explorations of the possibilities of unending existence.
“Much of the intelligible universe is quite unintelligible to us,” he
tells readers, and reminds them of William Blake’s observation that
“what is now proved … was once only imagined” and “what is now clearly
imagined was once only a sense of something missing.” A resident of
the Wirral Peninsula near Liverpool, Dr. Clark studied at Balliol College,
Oxford. He took first-class honors in classics, continued his studies
as a fellow of All Souls College, and received a Ph.D. in philosophy
from Oxford in 1973. He was a lecturer in moral philosophy at the University
of Glasgow for nine years, and in 1984, he was appointed professor of
philosophy at the University of Liverpool, where he now chairs the department.
He has been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University and held an
Alan Richardson Fellowship at Durham University. Among many invited
lectures, he has delivered the Gifford Lecture at Glasgow, the Stanton
Lecture at Cambridge, the Wilde Lecture and the Aquinas Lecture at Oxford,
the Read Tuckwell Lecture at Bristol University, the Scott Holland Lecture
at Liverpool, the Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture at Durham University,
and the Aquinas Lecture at the Catholic University of Leuven. He has
been chief editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy since
1990, as well as serving as a member of the editorial board of the Cambridge
University Press series entitled New Studies in Christian Ethics. The
author of more than fifty scholarly articles, he has contributed chapters
to some sixty books in addition to editing one book and writing nine
others. His work on the proper understanding and treatment animals,
most recently Animals and their Moral Standing (1997), and of
the living earth, notably How to Think about the Earth: Models of
Environmental Theology (1993), have brought him international acclaim.
In addition, he is well known for his studies of the significance of
our animal natures for our lives as political and social beings, which
were summarized in The Political Animal (1999), and for his work
on Christian theism and human freedom, particularly God, Religion
and Reality (1998). His most recent book is Biology and Christian
Ethics, which will be published later this year by Cambridge University
Press. Dr. Clark is currently writing about alien intelligence from
the perspective of science fiction and philosophy.
Professor
of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University, Simon
Conway Morris has devoted his research life to the study
of the 520-million-year-old Burgess Shale, found between two peaks in
the Canadian Rockies, and related fossil-rich formations. In his most
recent book, The Crucible of Creation (1998, Oxford University
Press), he re-interprets the soft-body fauna found in fissile rock as
evincing the preeminent role of convergence in evolution. His demonstration
that many of the fantastic Burgess Shale animals are related, albeit
remotely, to modern forms supports the theory that similar solutions
are found to the same kind of environmental challenges in independent
lines and places and impugns as seriously incomplete the reductionist
viewpoint that the present-day world arises as the result of chance
past events. A graduate of the University of Bristol, where he took
first-class honors in geology, Dr. Conway Morris went on to Cambridge
and studied at Churchill College with Harry Whittington, the first re-interpreter
of the Burgess Shale, on a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
Studentship. He was elected a research fellow of St. John’s College
in 1975 and received his Ph.D. in evolutionary paleobiology the next
year. Appointed a lecturer in earth sciences at The Open University
in 1979, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer four years later and
was promoted to his current chair in 1995. Dr. Conway Morris is a fellow
of the Royal Society. He has held research grants from the society as
well as from the Nuffield Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation, the
NERC, National Geographic Society, and the Leverhulme Foundation. He
has delivered numerous invited lectures throughout the United Kingdom,
Europe, Asia, Canada, and the United States and is the author of some
ninety research papers. Dr. Conway Morris has served as editor of five
books. The first version of his study of the Burgess Shale and the rise
of animals, Journey to the Cambrian (1997), was printed in Japanese
and has been re-printed seven times. He contributes frequently to general
magazines and encyclopedias and to radio and television programs on
science.
George
V. Coyne, S. J. is the director of the Vatican Observatory.
Long before the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
introduced its Ranger and Apollo programs, he studied the lunar surface,
and his broadly-based research interests also included the birth of
stars. He was one of the pioneers in the use of a special technique,
known as polarimetry, as a powerful tool for astronomical investigation.
He is currently studying cataclysmic variable stars, that is, binary
stars where one super-dense star is capturing matter from its companion,
and searching for protoplanetary disks in the vicinity of young stars.
An abiding and parallel fascination with the interrelationship of science
and religion led him to found a series of studies concerning controversies
about Galileo, entitled Studi Galileiani, and to organize several
conferences around the theme “Scientific Perspectives On Divine Action.”
A graduate of Fordham University, where he majored in mathematics and
earned his licentiate in philosophy, he received his Ph.D. in astronomy
from Georgetown University in 1962 and a licentiate in theology from
Woodstock College in 1966. Dr. Coyne joined the Vatican Observatory
as an astronomer in 1969 and the next year began teaching in the Lunar
and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona. He was named
a senior research fellow at Arizona in 1976 and, in 1977, the director
of its Catalina Observatory and associate director of the Lunar and
Planetary Laboratory. He became associate director of the Arizona Observatories
in 1978, the same year he was appointed to his Vatican Observatory post,
and, in 1979, served as acting director. Dr. Coyne holds honorary degrees
from St. Peter’s University (Jersey City) and Loyola University (Chicago)
in the United States, the University of Padua, and the Pontifical Theological
Academy of Jagellonian University in Cracow. He has published more than
one hundred scientific papers and edited a number of books.
A
British theoretical physicist, based in Australia, Paul
Davies is the author of more than twenty-five books. He obtained
a doctorate from University College, London in 1970 and was a research
fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge until
1972, when he was appointed lecturer in mathematics at King’s College,
London. In 1980, he was offered the chair of theoretical physics at
the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a post that he held until moving
to Australia in 1990, first as professor of mathematical physics at
the University of Adelaide and then as professor of natural philosophy
until 1996. He is currently visiting professor of physics at Imperial
College, London. Dr. Davies’s research has been mainly in the field
of quantum gravity and cosmology, topics on which he has published more
than 100 scientific papers. His books, The Physics of Time Asymmetry
(1974) and Quantum Fields in Curved Space (1981), written with
former student Nicholas Birrell, remain standard texts for researchers.
He has made several important contributions to the theory of black holes
and cosmological models. His interests, however, extend much more widely,
ranging from particle physics to astrobiology to complexity theory.
For many years he has explored the philosophical consequences of the
latest ideas at the forefront of research, work for which he won the
1995 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Dr. Davies has a strong
commitment to bringing science, and its deeper implications, to the
wider public. In addition to research and writing that has led to his
best-selling books, he makes almost daily media appearances and contributes
regularly to newspapers and journals around the world. He was for several
years a columnist for The Economist and The Australian.
He devised and presented a highly successful series of science documentaries
on BBC Radio 3, two of which were published in book form as The Ghost
in the Atom (1986) and Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?
(1988). Recently his two television series, “The Big Questions”
and “More Big Questions”, won critical acclaim when screened on Australia’s
SBS channel. In the UK, Dr. Davies’s Templeton Prize was the subject
of an Equinox documentary on Channel 4, and three years ago an entire
episode of Border Television’s series “The Beatitudes” was devoted to
an interview with him on science and the meaning of life. Dr. Davies
is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Australian Institute of
Physics, The World Economic Forum, and the World Academy of Arts and
Science. He is a consultant to several publishers, as well as a number
of scientific and cultural organizations in the UK and Australia. His
most recent book, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of
Life, was published by The Penguin Press and Simon & Schuster in
1998. In it, he examines the state of our knowledge about information-based
complexity, argues that science also must account for the source of
biological information, and suggests that emergent laws of complexity
offer reasonable hope for better understanding not only of biogenesis
but also of biological evolution.
George
F. Rayner Ellis is as widely respected for his anti-apartheid
Quaker activism as for his contributions to cosmology. Born in Johannesburg,
South Africa and educated in Natal and Cape Town, he received his Ph.D.
in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge University
in 1964 and has taught in both fields on three continents. For the past
decade, he has been a professor of applied mathematics at the University
of Cape Town while lecturing throughout the world. Dr. Ellis has served
as president of the Royal Society of South Africa and of the International
Society of General Relativity and Gravitation. His scientific work on
the mathematical foundations of general relativity and cosmology is
recognized for its depth, originality, and wit. He studies fundamental
questions like the geometrical structure of the universe and is not
afraid to challenge conventional assumptions about how our universe
began and is built. In his alternative model to the violent Big Bang,
the Whimper model, all starts with Quaker gentleness. In the bleak South
Africa of the 1970’s and 1980’s, Dr. Ellis used knowledge both as a
weapon and a shield against violence and injustice. During the past
decade, he has been deeply involved in race relations, housing policy,
and the future of the scientific enterprise of his country. He is a
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Mathematics
and its Applications, and among the prizes he has won are the Herschel
Medal of the Royal Society of South Africa, the Claude Harris Leon Foundation
Achievement Award, the Gold Medal of the South African Association for
the Advancement of Science, and the Star of South Africa Medal, which
was presented to him in 1999 by President Nelson Mandela. Dr. Ellis
holds an honorary degree from Haverford College. Co-author with Stephen
W. Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space Time (1973),
his more than 200 scientific papers and eight major books reflect the
rigor of his mind and the depth of his moral understanding. His latest
studies are (with Peter Coles) Is the Universe Open or Closed? The
Density of Matter in the Universe (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
and (with Nancey Murphy) On the Moral Nature of the Universe
(Fortress Press, 1996).
A
professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow,
Poland, Michael Heller is an adjunct
member of the Vatican Observatory staff. He also serves as a lecturer
in the philosophy of science and logic at the Theological Institute
in Tarnow. A Roman Catholic priest, Dr. Heller was ordained in 1959.
He was graduated from the University of Lublin where he earned a master’s
degree in philosophy in 1965 and a Ph.D. in cosmology in 1966. After
beginning his teaching career at Tarnow, he joined the faculty of the
Pontifical Academy of Theology in 1972 and was appointed to a full professorship
in 1985. The recipient of an honorary degree from the Technical University
in Cracow, he has been a visiting professor at the Catholic University
of Louvain in Belgium and a visiting scientist at Belgium’s Liège University,
Oxford University, Leicester University, Ruhr University in Germany,
The Catholic University of America, and the University of Arizona among
others. Dr. Heller is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
His current research is concerned with the singularity problem in relativistic
cosmology and the use of noncommutative geometry in seeking the unification
of general relativity and quantum mechanics. He has published nearly
200 scientific papers not only in general relativity and relativistic
cosmology but also in philosophy and the history of science and science
and theology and is the author of more than 20 books. In his most recent
volume, Is Physics an Art? (Biblos, 1998), he writes about mathematics
as the language of science and also explores such humanistic issues
as beauty as a criterion of truth, creativity, and transcendence.
Lawrence
M. Krauss,
no biographical information available.
A
twenty-year old prisoner of war interned in England when he began his
study of theology and philosophy, Jürgen Moltmann
has become one of the most respected theologians of our time. For the
past thirty years, he has been engaged in a profound exploration of
the meaning of divine suffering and the unique role of the Cross in
disclosing the nature of God. His work draws not only on the great theological
tradition of Luther and Barth, but also on his experience as a pastor
in post-war Germany. After completing his doctorate in theology at Göttingen
University in 1952, he served the Protestant Church in Bremen for five
years. In 1958, he became a professor of theology in a Protestant seminary
in the Rhineland city of Wuppertal, and in 1963 he accepted the chairmanship
of the department of systematic theology and social ethics at the University
of Bonn. Named professor of systematic theology on the Protestant Faculty
of the University of Tübingen in 1967, Dr. Moltmann became professor
emeritus in 1994. As a visiting professor, he has taught all over the
world. He is the recipient of prizes in literature, philosophy, and
theology and holds honorary degrees from Raday College in Budapest,
St. Andrews University, the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium,
and the University of Iasi in Rumania, as well as Emory University,
Duke University, Bethlehem Theological Seminary, and Kalamazoo College
in the United States. In addition to his monumental study, The Crucified
God (1974), Dr. Moltmann’s most influential works include his reflections
on eschatology (Theology of Hope, 1967) and on a Trinity deeply
involved in and affected by the world (The Trinity and the Kingdom
of God, 1981). His latest book is The Coming of God (Augsburg
Fortress, 1997).
Hubert
Reeves
is a director of research at the Centre National de la Researche Scientifique
in Paris. Specializing in nuclear astrophysics, he is an expert on the
origins of light elements and a well-known science educator who appears
frequently on French television. Dr. Reeves is also highly regarded
for his environmental work and has written extensively on ecological
issues. A native of Canada, he is a graduate of Jean-de-Brébeuf College
and the University of Montreal. He began his graduate work at McGill
University, where he took a master of science degree in 1955, and went
on to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics at Cornell in 1960. He returned to
the University of Montreal as a member of the physics faculty and was,
at the same time, a scientific advisor to National Aeronautics and Space
Administration in the United States. In 1964, he went to Belgium as
a visiting professor at the University of Brussels, and in 1965, he
was named research director of France’s national center for scientific
research and an affiliate of the French Atomic Energy Commission in
Saclay. For the past thirty-five years, Dr. Reeves has continued to
teach cosmology for a month each year at the University of Montreal,
where he is an associate professor of physics. The French government
has honored him for his successful popularization of science by naming
him a chevalier of the Order of Merit. He is also a chevalier of the
French Legion of Honor, an officer of the Order of Canada, and a recipient
of the Prix de la Fondation de France. The author of some 100 scientific
papers, Dr. Reeves has published more than ten books, including the
bestsellers Atoms of Silence (1985), The Hour of Our Delight
(1990), and, most recently, Origins: Speculations on the Cosmos,
Earth, and Mankind, which was published by Arcade (New York) in
1997 and brought out in a paperback edition last year.
The
founding director of The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences
(CTNS) in Berkeley, California, Robert J. Russell
is a professor of theology and science in residence at The Graduate
Theological Union in Berkeley. He is an ordained minister in the United
Church of Christ and has been a leader in the enterprise of promoting
dialogue between scientists and theologians for the past several decades.
A graduate of Stanford University, he holds a master’s degree in physics
from the University of California, Los Angeles, a bachelor of divinity
degree, magna cum laude, and a master of theology degree, both
from The Graduate Theological Union. He received a Ph.D. in physics
from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1978. Dr. Russell began
his teaching career as an assistant professor of physics at Carleton
College where he was also a pastoral associate. He returned to California
as an adjunct visiting professor at The Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley,
in 1981, the year he founded CTNS. Appointed an assistant professor
at The Graduate Theological Union in 1982, he became a professor in
residence nine years later. Dr. Russell also serves as an associate
of the Chicago Center for Religion and Science. He has delivered numerous
invited lectures and organized some twenty-five national and international
symposia on the subject of science and religion. He recently served
as a judge for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. The founding
editor of the CTNS Bulletin, he previously served as book review
editor of Zygon and currently serves as general editor of Scientific
Perspectives on Divine Action, a series published jointly by CTNS and
the Vatican Observatory. He is a member of the Zygon editorial
advisory board and the board of editorial advisors of the Fortress Press
series, Theology and the Sciences, as well as a consultant to the Committee
on Technology and Values of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The author of a dozen physics papers published in scientific journals
and nearly thirty articles on science and religion, Dr. Russell is the
co-editor of six books, including Chaos and Complexity (1995),
which won a Templeton Prize for Outstanding Books in Theology and Science.
He has contributed some twenty chapters to collected volumes and with
the support of a Templeton research grant is currently preparing a book-length
manuscript entitled “Time in Eternity: Eschatology and Cosmology in
Mutual Interaction.”
Lee
Smolin
is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to
the search for a quantum theory of gravity. A professor of physics at
the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State
University and, currently, a visiting professor at Imperial College,
London, he is one of a small number of scientists actively seeking to
reconcile–or “unify”–general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity,
and quantum mechanics, the prevailing theory of matter and motion developed
in the 1920’s. Among his most fruitful ideas is the loop formation of
quantum gravity, which he developed with Carlo Rovelli and other physicists.
It led to the prediction that space has a certain discrete or atomic
structure at very small distances. He also has worked on cosmology and,
in particular, proposed a hypothesis called “cosmological natural selection,”
in which Darwinian principles of evolution are applied to the universe,
providing a possible explanation for some of the properties of the elementary
particles and forces. His conjecture is that our universe forms part
of an infinite chain of self-reproducing universes whose physical laws
evolve through natural processes of self-organization. The black holes
created by collapsing stars lead to the creation of new regions of space
and time. These events resemble the big bang, and, indeed, the big bang
in our past is assumed to be one such event. Dr. Smolin has hypothesized
that the daughter worlds that emerge from “dark stars” may differ in
small, random ways from their parents. But if, and to the extent, that
changes of even the slightest degree affected the production of black
holes, evolutionary pressure would favor universes with many of them.
Dr. Smolin began his studies in physics at Hampshire College, where
he majored in natural philosophy, and then went on to Harvard University,
where he earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1979. After post-doctoral
work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Institute
for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
and the University of Chicago, he joined the Yale faculty as an assistant
professor of physics in 1984, and in 1988, he became an associate and
then a full professor of physics at Syracuse University before accepting
his current position at Penn State five years ago. He has been a visiting
scientist at more than a dozen universities and institutes and given
some fifty invited lectures to scientific audiences. Much of Dr. Smolin’s
research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation,
and he also has won awards from Syracuse and the Gravity Research Foundation
in addition to a number of travel fellowships. The author of more than
eighty scientific papers, he attracted widespread public attention for
The Life of the Cosmos (1997) in which he used arguments, drawn from
both science and philosophy, to examine the consequences of his proposal
that the laws of nature are, in part, the result of processes analogous
to natural selection. His latest book, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
(Basic Books and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), reports on recent progress
towards a quantum theory of gravity.
Regius
Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, Keith
Ward is one of Britain’s foremost writers on Christian belief
and doctrine in the light of modern scientific discoveries and in the
context of other faith traditions. He has explored the tensions between
the classical tradition of natural theology, with its atemporal and
self-sufficient God, and the Biblical idea of a creative and responsive
God, critically examined recent secular theories of human nature that
have led to what he perceives as a subtly misconceived attack on the
idea of the soul, compared the place of revelation and concept of creation
in the major world religions, and sketched a revised Christian vision
that looks to a convergent global spirituality. A graduate of the University
of Wales, where he took a first-class honors degree in 1962, he holds
a B. Litt. from Oxford and an M.A. and doctorate in divinity from both
Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He has been a lecturer at the University
of Glasgow, St. Andrews University, and King’s College, London. Elected
a fellow and named dean and director of studies in philosophy and in
theology at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1976, he was appointed F. D.
Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology at the University of
London in 1986 and subsequently professor of the history and philosophy
of religion, a position he held for five years before returning to Oxford
in 1991. He has been a visiting professor at Drake University and at
the Claremont Graduate School and lectured in India and New Zealand
as well as throughout the United Kingdom. Ordained a priest in the Church
of England in 1972, he has been canon of Christ Church, Oxford, for
the past seven years and is a member of the Council of the Institute
of Philosophy and of the Academic Advisory Board of the Oxford Centre
for Islamic Studies. Professor Ward formerly served as joint editor
of Religious Studies. The author of numerous works on theology and philosophy,
he has just completed a four-volume comparative theology, the final
volume of which is Religion and Community (Clarendon Press, 2000).
|
|
Armillary
sphere of 1564, used to map the stars and planets.
|
The
telescope is “more precious than any scepter”.
—Johannes Kepler
“I
want [young men sent through universities] to see that just as Nature
has given to them,
as well as to philosophers, eyes with which to see her works,
so she has also given them brains capable of penetrating and understanding
them.”
—Galileo Galilei
“It
would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the Divine
power and wisdom to some particular fancy of his own.”
—Galileo Galilei
The
Humble Approach Initiative
Contact Mary ann Meyers, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
A
Program of the John Templeton Foundation
300 Conshohocken State Road, Suite 500
West Conshohocken, PA 19428
610.941.2828 Fax 610.825.1730
Top
of Page
|