Darwin Lecture Series - Evolution and Faith: What Is at Stake? - Year of the Sciences - 2008-2009

The Darwin Lecture Series celebrates the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth (February 12, 1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. The events will highlight the benefits of scientific knowledge acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity and ways that knowledge contributes to the advancement of humanity. A set of diverse public lectures will highlight evolution: the intersection of science and religion, evolution in the public, and the nature of science.

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Darwin Lecture Series - Evolution and Faith: What Is at Stake?

Date/Time/Location Event Description CLP?
Tues., Feb. 17, 2009, 7:30pm
Patrick Lecture Hall
Townes Science Center Darwin Lecture Series: "Evolution and Faith:
What Is at Stake?"
Speaker: John Haught
(Refreshments will be served, starting at 7pm) Yes

Darwinian theory seems to challenge religious trust in a providential God who purposefully creates, influences and eternally cares for the world. Traditionally, Christians, Jews and Muslimes had no knowledge of biological evolution, although people were certainly aware of the suffering of humans and other living beings. Evolutionary science vastly extends the story of life and life's suffering (and creativity as well) beyond those of traditional religious awareness. After Darwin, then, can believers come to an understanding of God that is consistent with their traditions and at the same time fully open to the findings of evolutionary biology?


John Haught

Dr. John (Jack) F. Haught is the Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology at Georgetown University. His area of expertise is systematic theology, with a special interest in issues of science, cosmology, ecology, and reconciling evolution and religion. He graduated from St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore and subsequently received his PhD in theology from The Catholic University of America in 1970, and was the winner of the 2002 Owen Garrigan Award in Science and Religion and the 2004 Sophia Award for Theological Excellence. He was the chair of Georgetown's theology department between 1990 and 1995.

Haught, who established the Georgetown Center for the Study of Science and Religion, is the author of several important books on the creation-evolution controversy, including Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, and Science & Religion: From Conflict to Conversation, 1995. A Roman Catholic theologian and theistic evolutionist, Haught views science and religion as two different and noncompeting levels of explanation, asserting "Science and religion cannot logically stand in a competitive relationship with each other."

He testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. His opinion was that the effect of the intelligent design policy adopted by the Dover School board would "be to compel public school science teachers to present their students in biology class information that is inherently religious, not scientific in nature." He also testified that materialism, the philosophy that only matter exists, is "a belief system, no less a belief system than is intelligent design. And as such, it has absolutely no place in the classroom, and teachers of evolution should not lead their students craftily or explicitly to ... feel that they have to embrace a materialistic world-view in order to make sense of evolution."

Haught's most recent book is God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, critiques recent bestselling New Atheist works that disparaged all religion as the cause for many of the world's problems. Haught criticizes the arguments made by authors Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens as recyclings of centuries old antireligious arguments. To Haught, the arguments of the New Atheists are logically and philosophically inadequate and he contrasts them to those of philosophical atheists Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre who considered as well the negative consequences such as nihilism that potentially result from the absence of diety.

For more information, see http://web.mac.com/haughtj1/Site/Welcome.html.