Thank you for your interest in this teleseries. Below you will find the biographical sketches of the amazing (and diverse!) guests who participated in this historic series of conversationsa veritable Whos Who of evolutionary Christian thought and practice. (Click HERE to see them categorized by affiliation.

UPDATE: The entire set of 38 downloadable audios, transcripts, study guides, leaders manual, topical index, and guidelines for reflection and journaling can be found HERE.

Ian Barbour is an American scholar on the relationship between science and religion. He has been credited with creating the contemporary field of science and religion.

He received his B.Sc. in physics from Swarthmore College, his M.Sc. in physics from Duke University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1950. He earned a B.Div. in 1956 from Yale Universitys Divinity School. Barbour taught for many years at Carleton College, with appointments as professor of religion and as Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and Society. He has held emeritus honors there since 1986.

In his 1966 groundbreaking book, Issues in Science and Religion, Barbour laid out a series of well-crafted arguments involving issues in epistemology, language, and methodology. Together, these arguments provided a bridge between science and religion. He has explored these arguments in detail since then.

From the outset, Barbour used the term critical realism to stand for the specific set of arguments he first developed in 1966. Most scholars in the field have adopted the term.

Barbour gave the Gifford lectures from 1989 1991 at the University of Aberdeen. These lectures led to the book,Religion in an Age of Science. In 1999 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, in recognition of his efforts to create a dialogue between the worlds of science and religion.

For videos of interviews with Ian Barbour conducted by Robert Kuhn for PBS, go to: http://www.closertotruth.com and in the Search box on the top right, type Ian Barbour.

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Evolutionary Christianity || Speaker Bios and Topics

Originally published January 10, 2015 at 3:01 PM | Page modified January 10, 2015 at 7:18 PM

SALT LAKE CITY At the push of a button, the gurney holding Auriel Peterson slides slowly into the pale blue glow of a magnetic resonance imaging machine. Soon, all thats visible are the shins of her black track pants and the chartreuse-and-white soles of her running shoes, angled like the fins of a torpedo.

Behind a window in an adjacent room, a splayed-out cauliflower pattern appears on a computer screen in black-and-white. Its Petersons brain. And its probably the last thing about this exercise that will be so simply shaded.

From Petersons perspective, the next hour will be spent in service, like the day she packed donated eyeglasses to send to Zimbabwe. But the ardent Mormon also knows she could be adding to a centuries-old debate about God and science. So she says a silent prayer: I hope they get what they need.

Religious cognition

Other animals have hierarchies, organized behaviors, even a semblance of norms. Only humans have religion and science. And the two have seldom been on civil terms.

Jeff Anderson and Julie Korenberg, neuroscientists at the University of Utah, want to change that. Theyre among a growing number of scientists aiming their fields most sophisticated machinery at religious cognition.

It amazes me how one of the most profound influences on human behavior is virtually completely unstudied, Anderson said. We think about how much this drives peoples behavior, and yet we dont know the first thing about where in the brain thats even registered.

The researchers want to see more than religions registry on the brain. They want to know whether it differs across religions or by intensity of belief. They want to see what genes it activates, what hormones it releases and how it relates to social behaviors. Can the same basic circuitry produce Mother Teresa and Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta? If so, how?

To approach even speculative answers to such questions, the researchers have to capture what goes on in the brain of a believer during a religious moment.

See the rest here:
Scientists seek religious experience in their subjects brains