Doing Dialogue at the AAAS

Growing up on her family's farm in Arkansas, Jennifer Wiseman was "positively exposed" to both science and religion. She never felt any special tension between her Christian faith and an interest in the natural world that eventually led her to degrees at MIT and Harvard. "It all fit well together," she says. Now an astronomer and the head of the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Wiseman was recently named the new director of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Since 1996, DoSER has been supported by several grants from the John Templeton Foundation. The program seeks to establish stronger relationships between the scientific and religious communities and to promote multidisciplinary education and scholarship on the ethical and religious implications of advances in science and technology. It also engages the public on the implications of evolutionary biology, cosmology, and other fields that speak to the place of human beings in the universe.

Jennifer Wiseman

During her time as director, Wiseman hopes to “reach out more to mainstream America.” Clergy often have scant scientific education, she says, so DoSER will work with seminaries to “bring a positive view of science and up-to-date scientific knowledge” to future religious leaders. There are also plans to work with the National Association of Evangelicals to help the Christian laity grapple meaningfully with questions of science and faith. Wiseman believes that there is a great unmet demand for “constructive interaction” among scientists, ethicists, religious leaders, and policymakers, noting that DoSER’s events at AAAS meetings are often among the best-attended.

“There is recognition among scientists and many political and religious leaders that science and technology play some role in nearly every important issue we face in society,” Wiseman says. “But people often feel ill-equipped about how to embrace and employ science in a positive way in keeping with their beliefs and values.” Wiseman will start out in her new role with a special event on June 16 at the AAAS headquarters, featuring panelists William Phillips (Nobel laureate physicist), Howard Smith (astrophysicist and popular speaker on Judaism and cosmology), and David Anderson (pastor and radio talk show host). The discussion will focus on “re-envisioning the science and religion dialogue.”

Michael Murray, the vice president for philosophy and theology at the Templeton Foundation, says that Sir John Templeton was always interested in working with the AAAS, which is “the most important organization for the advocacy of science in the United States, and perhaps in the world.” Murray emphasizes Wiseman's “impeccable scientific credentials,” as well as her role as president of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of Christian scientists. "She has a great deal of credibility with the constituencies she wants to speak to."

NY ♥ Science

The World Science Festival returned to New York City last week, attracting over 100,000 people and international media coverage. Now in its third year, the Festival’s goal is to stimulate and sustain public interest in science and to show how science relates to every sphere of modern life. The John Templeton Foundation, a founding benefactor of the Festival, sponsored five events this year as part of the Big Ideas Series:

"Mind and Machine: The Future of Thinking" brought together experts in cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and computer science to discuss how our thought processes are becoming increasingly interwoven with technology.
"The Limits of Understanding" discussed the implications of the logician Kurt Gödel’s revolutionary theorems, which demonstrateded that there are mathematical truths that cannot be proven. (Video of this event is available here.)
"Back to the Big Bang: Inside the Large Hadron Collider" took the audience inside the world’s biggest physics machine, which just weeks ago began colliding particles at energies unseen since a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
"Faith and Science" explored whether, for all their historical tensions, there is common ground to be found between the domains of religion and science.
"Food 2.0: Feeding a Hungry World" explored how advances in technology can help to increase food production, particularly in developing nations, and whether consensus can be reached by scientists and ethicists on genetically modified foods.

Boundaries of the Knowable


VIDEO

Do human beings have free will? What is beyond the observable universe? How complete is our understanding of matter? These are just a few of the questions that Russell Stannard asks in a new series of videos called Boundaries of the Knowable, now available on the YouTube channel of the Open University (UK), where Stannard is a professor emeritus of physics. The short videos, which were supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation, introduce lay persons to the deepest questions facing fundamental science today—and raise the possibility that some of these questions might never be answered.

The author of a number of physics books for a popular readership, Stannard suggests that fundamental science will end not when we have discovered everything, but rather when we have discovered all that is open to us to understand. He calls this “a celebration of modern science, but also a call for humility.” A book based on the series, titled The End of Discovery, will be published by Oxford University Press in September.