This lecture is part of McDonald Agape Foundation Distinguished Lecture Series.
The conflict between science and religion seems indelible, even eternal. But this is not the case. Our very concepts of science and religion are relatively recent, emerging only in the past three hundred years. It is those very categories, rather than their underlying concepts, that constrain our understanding of how the scientific study of nature relates to the religious life.
In this lecture, Prof. Harrison, a leading historian and philosopher of science, dismantles what we think we know about the two categories, then puts it all back together again in a provocative, productive new way.
Professor Peter Harrison is an Australian Laureate Fellow and the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Before taking this position, he was the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, where he also served as Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and holds a DLitt from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Queensland. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. These lectures were published as the book The Territories of Science and Religion(Chicago, 2015), which was named winner of the Aldersgate Prize.
