Professor Paul Braterman will be giving a Darwin Day Lecture at Pond Hotel, Glasgow (Great Western Road, Glasgow G12 0XP, Scotland) at 2pm on Sunday 16 February 2014.
Professor Paul Braterman will be giving a Darwin Day Lecture at Pond Hotel, Glasgow (Great Western Road, Glasgow G12 0XP, Scotland) at 2pm on Sunday 16 February 2014.
Entitled ‘Protecting Science from the New Creationists’, the lecture will examine the new forms of creationist ideology that have developed in recent years, including its close cousin ‘Intelligent Design’.
Paul S. Braterman is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Texas, USA, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He is a committee member for the British Centre for Science Education (BCSE), with which Ekklesia also has links.
Professor Braterman is author of From Stars to Stalagmites: How Everything Connects – How Chemistry Connects Everything.
He will be speaking from a Humanist perspective, but will be “making a strong bid for cooperation on this across the believer-unbeliever boundary,” he emphasises.
Creationism, which rejects evolutionary science on the basis of literalistic readings of religious texts skewed towards fundamentalist world views, has also been strongly and consistently rejected by major Christian denominations and reputable theologians – who argue that it is bad religion as well as non-science.
In 2004, some 13,000 Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and other clergy in the US signed the Clergy Letter Project, which explained why evolution as “a foundational scientific truth” is entirely compatible with thoughtful religious and spiritual convictions.
International Darwin Day is on 12 February each year, with events both preceding and following that date.
* An index to creationist claims: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/
* Rowan Williams against creationism: http://www.faith-theology.com/2006/03/rowan-williams-against-creationism.html
* Professor Paul Braterman: http://paulbraterman.wordpress.com