Archived GFCF Lectures:

1991-2003 || 03-04 || 04-05 || 05-06 || 06-07 || 07-08 || 08-09 ||

09-10 || 10-11

Note: For some lectures, there is no audio-file available. We can provide the lecture on Audio-CD as well. Please contact Guillaume Badinier.

JENNIFER WISEMAN
APS Congressional Science Fellow and Visiting Scientist, Johns Hopkins University

Wednesday, October 18th, 4-6PM, in BUCH A104.

“A Magnificent Universe: Newest Discoveries in Astronomy, and Implications for Human Significance in the Cosmos”

ABSTRACT:
The heavens have fascinated human beings since the dawn of our existence and have fueled our contemplations of identity, philosophy, theology, and God. Yet within the last few decades we have learned more about the universe than in all other centuries combined, and what we have seen speaks of immensity, power, and beauty far beyond what was previously ever imagined. How have these discoveries affected our view of ourselves and our faith? I will present some of the most fascinating recent detections in astronomy, including planets around other stars, new stars in formation, the most powerful explosions in the universe, remnant light from the Big Bang, evidence from billions of years past that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, and theories that our universe may be one of many. While science addresses only the natural physical realm, we will discuss how these discoveries might inform our understanding of the character of God and our own significance in the universe.

BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman is an astronomer who has studied star-forming regions of our galaxy using radio, optical, and infrared telescopes. She studied physics at MIT for her bachelor’s degree, discovering comet Wiseman-Skiff in 1987. She then earned a Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard University in 1995. She accomplished subsequent research as a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and as a Hubble Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University. In addition to research, Dr. Wiseman is also interested in public science policy. She was selected as the 2001-2002 Congressional Science Fellow of the American Physical Society, and served on the staff of the Science Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. She is now the Program Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. Dr. Wiseman is a Fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation, a professional organization for Christians in the sciences. She is an adult Sunday school teacher and lay speaker at her church, and she has authored several book chapters addressing the relationship of astronomy and Christian faith.

Download this lecture here and the photos in pdf format here.

PAUL WILLIAMS
David J Brown Family Associate Professor of Marketplace Theology and Leadership, Regent College

Tuesday November 21st, 4PM, in the Buchanan Penthouse.

"Humanizing Capital: an anthropological critique of ideologies of Globalization."

ABSTRACT:
Global capitalism has been the subject of academic and popular critique yet current debates on globalization have tended to focus on the various negative outcomes of global capitalism whilst failing to address the core anthropological presuppositions upon which these theories rest. In t his lecture, I will identify specific understandings of human nature foundational to modern capitalist ideologies and argue that these perspectives lead directly to the active undermining of the social and moral capital upon which the modern economic order depends. I will argue further that successful redress of the negative effects of globalization at an economic, political and cultural level requires a renewed attention to anthropology and a re-centering of personhood over and above the subservience of human being and relations to the market.

BIOGRAPHY:
Paul Williams was appointed to the David J Brown Family Chair of Marketplace Theology and Leadership at Regent College in August 2005. He is also a Director and Economic Advisor to DTZ plc, a multinational real estate consulting and investment banking group headquartered in London, UK. Paul trained as an economist at Oxford University and worked in economic consulting for several years before undertaking theological training at Regent. He then returned to the marketplace, working as an economic advisor for the British Labour Party, the BBC, UK Government’s Department of Trade and Industry, JP Morgan, Citibank, and Prudential. He was appointed expert advisor to the European Commission (DGXVI) on sustainable development. His research interests include globalization, capitalism and sustainable development, the role of religion in social and economic development, social capital and workplace spirituality, participatory economics and the theology of the public square.

Download this lecture here
Download the Q&A time with Paul Williams here

DENNIS DANIELSON
Professor of English, The University of British Columbia

Tuesday January 23, 2007, 4PM, in Woodward IRC 6

"Why Copernicus Matters"

ABSTRACT:
The astronomer Copernicus is rightly seen as a pioneer of modern science. This lecture will explore not only how Copernicus made his contribution, but also how subsequent historians, mathematicians, and myth-makers have contested or controlled "Copernicus" as a site or symbol of particular meanings beyond those directly connected with the claim that the earth revolves around the sun. In particular, Danielson will scrutinize and challenge modernist appropriations of Copernicus and suggest how scientists and others might work toward a better appreciation and application of the Copernican achievement.

BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Danielson did undergraduate work in English and philosophy at the University of Victoria and completed an MA in intellectual history at the University of Sussex. He pursued further research at Oxford and completed his PhD at Stanford. After teaching at the University of Ottawa he moved to UBC in 1986. Until the mid-1990s his main field was seventeenth-century English literature, with an emphasis on Milton, about whom he published one monograph and one companion (Milton's Good God, 1982, and The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 1989 and 1999, both with Cambridge University Press). In 2000 he published The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking (Basic Books), which was named to Amazon.com's Editor's Choice list of Top Ten Science Books for that year. His intellectual biography of Copernicus's only student and "apostle," Georg Joachim Rheticus, The First Copernican, is scheduled for publication by Walker & Co. in November of 2006.

Download this lecture here

Website: Dennis Danielson The First Copernican
"The Great Copernican Cliché" in American Journal of Physics 69 (10)

BERT CAMERON
Professor Emeritus, Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology, The University of British Columbia

Tuesday February 27, 2007, 4PM, in Woodward IRC 6

“The Role of Christianity in the Development and Prospect of Western Medicine”

ABSTRACT:
Descriptions of the development of Western Medicine frequently emphasize its roots in Greco Roman empiricism and flourishing through enlightenment rationalism and scientific progress. This review will 1) describe the important contribution of Judeo Christian thought and institutions to development of the compassionate health care that has been a notable feature of Western Medicine, 2) discuss the current situation as medical science advances in the context of a society that is diverging from its Christian foundation and 3) propose that the influence of Christian principles remains integral to the ongoing provision of compassionate health care to individuals and society.

BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Bert Cameron obtained his MD from UBC in 1963 and a Canadian Fellowship in Internal Medicine in 1969. He joined the Departments of Medicine and Physiology and was Head of the Division of Nephrology from 1995 to 2004. His research interests and publications related largely to calcium and bone metabolism; he was involved in the discovery of the calcium regulating hormone Calcitonin and conducted research into the treatment of osteoporosis and bone disease in kidney failure. He was actively involved in undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum development in the UBC Medical School and is currently Professionalism Theme Director for the MD Undergraduate Program. Dr. Cameron has had a longstanding interest in the relationship of religion, ethics, medical science and health care and has been involved in studies of ethical issues in the management of chronic kidney disease and end of life care.

Download this lecture here

DENIS ALEXANDER
Director, The Faraday Institute, St. Edmund's College, Cambridge.
Chairman of Molecular Immunology, Babraham Institute

Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 4PM, in Woodward IRC 6

Transcending Dawkins' God: Renewing the Positive Interface between Science and Faith

ABSTRACT:
Many people think that science and religion are in outright opposition or,
at the least, live in separate compartments. This view is currently being
strongly promoted in the public domain by atheistic scientists who wish to invest science with their own particular ideologies. In the "separate
compartment" view, science and faith have nothing to say to each other.
Indeed they live at opposite poles: science is objective, rational,
clinical, universal, while religion is subjective, emotional, personal,
unprovable. Yet when one talks to people with religious beliefs within the
scientific community, they will generally deny this, arguing that they
experience no cognitive dissonance between their life as a scientist and
their life of faith. This lecture will investigate the reasons for these
affinities, exploring how far it is possible to make analogies between
scientific and religious ways of thinking, with a particular focus on
recent advances in the biological sciences. Perhaps scientific and
religious knowledge are not so different after all. The answers to that
question tend to call into question the more simplistic confrontational
attitudes that characterise some of the current science-religion debate on both sides of the Atlantic.

BIOGRAPHY:
Dr Denis Alexander is the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, UK. Dr Alexander is also a Senior Affiliated Scientist at The Babraham Institute, Cambridge, where he supervises a research group in cancer and immunology, and where for many years he was Chairman of the Molecular Immunology Programme and Head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signalling and Development. Dr Alexander was previously at the Imperial Cancer Research Laboratories in London (now Cancer Research UK), and prior to that spent 15 years developing university departments and laboratories overseas, latterly as Associate Professor of Biochemistry in the Medical Faculty of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Dr Alexander was initially an Open Scholar at Oxford reading Biochemistry, before obtaining a PhD in Neurochemistry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

Dr Alexander writes, lectures and broadcasts widely in the field of science and religion. Since 1992 he has been Editor of the journal Science & Christian Belief, and currently serves on the UK Committee of Christians in Science and as one of the founding fellows of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is the author of Rebuilding the Matrix - Science and Faith in the 21st Century (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 2001), which provides a general overview of the science-religion debate, and of Can we be sure about anything? Science, faith, and postmodernism.

Download this lecture here.
Download "A Christian Response to Dawkins," a lecture Dr Alexander gave at Regent College on March 22, here.