2008-2009 lecture series:
Unless designated otherwise, lectures start at 4:00pm and end between 5:00-5:30pm. Admission is free and you're welcome to bring friends. Below there are links to download the lectures in mp3 format. If you have trouble playing these, we can provide the lectures on Audio-CD as well.

If you would like to added to the GFCF mailing list in order to receive an email when a GFCF event is about to happen, please go to the "Committee/Contacts" page by clicking on the link above.

GFCF's September event will be a pair of lectures on adjacent days by a pair of scholars from California. The lectures by Drs. Brown and Newsome are intended to complement one another. We invite students, faculty, and members of the community to attend both lectures.

Dr. Warren S. Brown, Director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute and Professor of Psychology, Department of Clinical Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary.

Thursday, September 25, 4:00-5:30 PM, Woodward IRC 1

Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Neuroscience, Emergence and Free Will

ABSTRACT
This lecture will summarize the neuroscience research on moral behavior and decision-making, and evaluate its implications for our understanding of free will and moral agency. Are our actions entirely determined bylow-level neural processes? Is body-soul dualism the only answer? Philosophical and theological resolution of these questions depends on our understanding of what is meant by emergence. Professor Brown will argue that the free-will problem is badly framed if it is put in terms of neurobiological determinism (“my neurons made me do it”); the real issue is neurobiological reductionism. Brown will bring together insights from both philosophy and the cognitive neurosciences to challenge various forms of neurobiological reductionism.

BIOGRAPHY
Professor Warren Brown received his PhD from University of Southern California. He presently serves as director of the Travis Research Institute and professor of psychology at Fuller Theological in Pasedena, California where he has been since 1982. He was the recipient of a prestigious National Institute of Mental Health Research Career Development Award. His areas of expertise are Neuropsychology and Psychophysiology, including: study of cognitive deficits associated with pathology of the corpus callosum; child development and adult aging.. Currently, he is most actively involved in studying the cognitive and psychosocial disabilities in a congenital brain malformation called agenesis of the corpus callosum. Brown has also studied callosal function in dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer's disease. Brown has authored or coauthored over 75 scholarly articles in such scientific journals as Neuropsychologia , Psychophysiology , Neurobiology of Aging , Biological Psychiatry , Developmental Neuropsychology , Cortex , and Science . He is also interested in philosophy, neuroscience, and the relationship between science and religious faith: in this vein, he is principal editor and contributor to Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (1998) and wrote (with Nancey Murphy) Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (2007).

Download the lecture here.

Websites: Dr. Brown at Fuller
Implications of Recent Neuroscience Research

Dr. William T. Newsome, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor and Chair Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University.

Friday, September 26, 12-1:30 PM, SUB 2nd floor Party Room.

Concerning neurons and personhood: scientific explanation and interpretive reductionism.

ABSTRACT
At its deepest level, cognitive neuroscience is exerting profound influence on our understanding of who we are as human beings. What are the deepest sources of our behavior? How modifiable is behavior ultimately? How much freedom do we actually have, and to what extent is our freedom limited by the biology of the brain? The central conviction of modern neuroscience is that all of our behavior and all of our mental life—including our sense of a conscious, continuing self—emerges from and is inextricably linked to the biology of the brain.  In daily neuroscientific practice, this belief is overwhelming pursued by seeking lower level, mechanistic explanations for higher level phenomena of mind.  A persistently vexing conclusion of successful interpretive reductionism concerns the subsequent status of this higher-level phenomenon. Such phenomena have been reduced to a mere product of lower level neural mechanisms. If the human mind is ultimately reducible to the biophysics of neurons in the brain, can the mind be regarded as a real entity that exerts causal influence on organismal behavior and thus the world?  In other words, is mind more than an epiphenomenon of brain? Newsome will argue that, on this issue, reductionist neuroscience is  impoverished or lacking in the richest explanation of mind. Reductionist investigations capture only one part of the truth. As a natural scientist, he will explore some tough questions concerning certain emergent properties which transcend neural activity, while respecting the full explanatory power of neuroscience. These emergent properties within complex systems such as the brain include human consciousness and the ability to make free choice or determine one's own behaviour and thereby take responsibility for it. The critical understanding of freedom is one of the most important and troubling issues facing neuroscientists today; their methodology often hits a limiting wall of explanation. Newsome argues that neurologically we are constrained by the laws of physics but not determined by them. He contests that there are profound insights from the field of religion and philosophy which can help us discern a richer explanation of the nature of mind and brain in human beings.

BIOGRAPHY
Professor Newsome received his PhD. in Biology from California Institute of Technology in 1980. He is now chair and professor of neurobiology at Stanford University. Highly respected in the scientific community, he built his career on elegant experiments that have helped explain the neural basis of behavior . Identifying the neural mechanisms that underlie visual perception and vision-based decision-making has been the research focus of Dr. Newsome over the past 30 years. To this end he conducts parallel behavioral and physiological experiments in animals that are trained to perform selected perceptual or eye movement tasks. By recording the activity of cortical neurons during performance of such tasks, he gains initial insights into the relationship of neuronal activity to the animal's behavioral capacities. Computer modelling techniques are then used to develop more refined hypotheses concerning the relationship of brain to behavior that are both rigorous and testable. This combination of behavioral, electrophysiological and computational techniques provides a realistic basis for neurophysiological investigation of cognitive functions such as perception, memory and motor planning. Newsome has numerous publications to his record and several academic prizes such as: Dan David Prize from the Dan David Foundation and Tel Aviv University (2004), and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (2002). He is an esteemed member of the National Academy of Science since 2000.

Download the lecture here.

Website: Dr. Newsome at Stanford

Multiculturalism in Canada: What Are We Talking About?

GFCF's November event will be a single forum during which two Vancouver scholars, Drs. Egerton and Stackhouse, will give short presentations, after which they will engage in dialogue.

George Egerton, Associate Professor of History, UBC

Multiculturalism in Canada: Historical and Socio-cultural Reflections

Thursday, November 13, 4:00-5:30 PM, Woodward IRC 1.

ABSTRACT
Professor Egerton will examine the changing nature and definitions of Canadian pluralism, focusing specifically on whether multiculturalism, after its inauguration in 1971, was able to recognize religion, along with language and ethnicity, as a constituent part of Canadian pluralism. Building on his study of Canadian religion, politics, and constitutional development since 1945, he will address the changing nature and definitions of pluralism in Canadian history (1945-1980s) including the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-1971) and the multiculturalism regimes of the late 1960s-70s. Dr. Egerton will consider whether religion might not need reasonable accommodation within Canadian definitions of pluralism.

BIOGRAPHY
George Egerton is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include the history of international organization; British, American, and Canadian international relations in the modern era; the genre of Political Memoir; and the history of religion and politics in Canada. Author of Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations (1979) and editor of Political Memoir: Essays on the Politics of Memory (1994) and Anglican Essentials (1995), he is presently completing a book on human rights, religion and constitutional politics in Canada since 1945. His recent publications include: 'Trudeau, God and the Canadian Constitution: Religion, Human Rights, and Government Authority in the Making of the 1982 Constitution,' in David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die, eds., Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); 'Between War and Peace: Politics, Religion and Human Rights in Early Cold War Canada 1945-1950,' in Dianne Kirby, ed., Religion and the Cold War (London: Macmillan/ Palgrave, 2003); 'Entering the Age of Human Rights: Politics, Religion, and Canadian Liberalism: 1945-1950,' Canadian Historical Review, LXXXV: 3 (September 2004); and 'Writing the Canadian Bill of Rights: Religion, Politics, and the Challenge of Pluralism, 1957-1960,' Canadian Journal of Law and Society 19:2 (November 2004).

Download Egerton's and Stackhouse's lectures here.

Website: Egerton at UBC

John Stackhouse, Professor of Theology & Culture, Regent College, Vancouver

Multiculturalism in Canada: Historical and Socio-cultural Reflections

(This lecture is the second part of the GFCF forum for Thursday, November 13. See above.)

ABSTRACT
Multiculturalism in Canada, as in other places, has manifested itself in at least three modes, which can be referred to as hegemony, harmony, and anarchy. Dr. Stackhouse's socio-political and philosophical analysis will demonstrate that only two of these modes are coherent, with the third—currently quite popular—being revealed as in fact a version of the first. Furthermore, he will suggest that either form of multiculturalism as a way of dealing with the challenge of religious diversity can be positive or negative toward a particular religion, depending on the kind of hegemony or harmony is in view, and on the qualities of the particular religion in question. Thus he will depict multiculturalism as intrinsically neither benign nor malign toward particular religions or toward religion in general. Multiculturalism, therefore, is not necessarily the road to utopia, as some hope, nor to dystopia, as some fear.

BIOGRAPHY
John Stackhouse is a graduate of Queen's University, the Wheaton College Graduate School, and the University of Chicago where he received his PhD. Formerly a professor of religion at the University of Manitoba, he is now the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College and also an adjunct professor in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at UBC. He is the editor of four books and the author of seven, including Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil (2000), Church: An Insider's Look at How We Do It (2003), Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion (2003), and Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender (2005). His writings range over the history, sociology and philosophy of modern religion, as well as Christian theology, and his work has been featured in media as diverse as The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Reader's Digest, and ABC television news.

Download Egerton's and Stackhouse's lectures here.

Website: Dr. Stackhouse's published books, Dr. Stackhouse's blog

Simon Conway Morris, Paleontology, Cambridge University

If Humans are Inevitable, What Are the Theological Implications?

Thursday, January 22, 2009, 4:00-5:30PM, Hennings 202.

ABSTRACT
That evolution is a fact is as secure a truth as the existence of the Periodic Table or the mass of an electron. Yet we are in the curious position of not only understanding all three, but finding ourselves in a Universe that not only is curiously fit for purpose but one which at many levels ignites our capacity for imagination. Thus humans are products of evolution, but transcend it. In this lecture, Professor Conway Morris will explore the implications that not only is evolution forced to navigate what is effectively a pre-existing landscape of possibilities (a view guaranteed to rattle most pious neo-Darwinians who are still wedded to randomness), but can be seen as being analogous to a search engine, an engine that just happens to stumble not only on science but other truths.

BIOGRAPHY
Simon Conway Morris, Fellow of the Royal Society, has been Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge since 1983. In 1995, he was elected to an ad hominem Chair in Evolutionary Palaeobiology and is renowned for his insights into early evolution. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1976, and made his reputation with his work on the Cambrian "explosion." This work contained a very detailed and careful study of the Burgess Shale fossils in China and Greenland, an exploit celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life. (Conway Morris' own book on this subject, The Crucible of Creation, is somewhat critical of Gould's presentation and interpretation.) His thinking on the significance of the Burgess Shale has developed, and his current interest in evolutionary convergence and its wider significance — the topic of his 2007 Gifford Lectures – was in part spurred by Gould's arguments for the importance of contingency in the history of life.

Conway Morris is a former student of Harry Blackmore Whittington. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society 1990 at 39, was awarded the Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987, and the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1998. In recent years, he has been investigating the phenomenon of evolutionary convergence, which is explained in his book, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Currently he is involved in a major project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, to investigate both the scientific ramifications of convergence and also to establish a web-site (Map of Life) that aims to provide an easily accessible introduction to the thousands of known examples of convergence.

Download this lecture here.

Websites: Conway Morris at Cambridge Life's Solution by Conway Morris

Grappling with Evil and Suffering: A Dialogue

Dennis Danielson, Professor & Department Head, English UBC

Karl Persson, PhD student, English, UBC

Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 4:00-5:30 PM, Woodward IRC 4

ABSTRACT
Evil and suffering are truly interdisciplinary problems. Whether a
scientist agonizing over the role of science in the invention of the atomic
bomb, or a humanities scholar pondering how the arts can be used
oppressively to misrepresent the "other," it remains a human imperative to
face and comprehend evil and suffering. The issues are of concern to both the historian and the contemporary sociologist, as relevant to the scholar in Canadian studies or Rwandan culture. Surprisingly, however, the increased specialization of our departments has cut us off from broader discussions concerning suffering and evil, so that pressing concerns in society are the least discussed in the academy.

In response to this, Dennis Danielson and Karl Persson will seek to open a
dialogic space where academics can talk openly and honestly about evil and suffering. Drawing on their areas of research, they will take up two
perspectives within the Christian tradition that are, if not contradictory,
at least in tension with each other. Professor Danielson's contributions
will be informed by his work in classical formulations of theodicy, the
philosophical question "If God is good and all-powerful, then why does he
permit evil and suffering to occur?" Persson will speak out of his research
on biblical wisdom literature (Job and Ecclesiastes), which arguably
rejects abstract philosophical responses to evil, and instead proposes
concrete community as the site where evil and suffering are effectively if
mysteriously comprehended and answered. By offering these differing points of view, they hope to stimulate discussion that moves beyond the trite and easy answers that both Christians and the academy often adopt.

BIOGRAPHY
Dennis Danielson is professor and head, Department of English, UBC and
author of Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge
University Press, 1982 & 2009). More recently his interests in intellectual history have taken him into the realms of literary cosmology.

Karl Persson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at UBC. His research concerns the literary reception of the biblical wisdom books,and he is currently studying Old English wisdom literature and elegies.