John Charlton Polkinghorne, is an English theoretical physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996.
The Boyle Lectures are named after Robert Boyle, a prominent natural philosopher of the 17th century and son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. Under the terms of his Will, Robert Boyle endowed a series of lectures or sermons which were to consider the relationship between Christianity and the new natural philosophy then emerging in European society.
The Michael Polanyi Center(MPC) at Baylor University, Texas, was the first center at a research university exclusively dedicated to the principle of intelligent design, primarily to host William Dembski, its director, and Bruce L. Gordon, its assistant director. It was founded in 1999 by Baylor president Robert B. Sloan "with the primary aim of advancing the understanding of the sciences" in a religious context and was named for Michael Polanyi. It was aligned with the Discovery Institute's wedge strategy, and was funded in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation via the Discovery Institute. All of the center's research investigated the subject of intelligent design. It hosted a conference in April 2000 that brought the center to the attention of the broader Baylor community as well as the rest of the scholarly world.
Alister Edgar McGrath is a Northern Irish theologian, priest, intellectual historian, scientist, Christian apologist, and public intellectual. He currently holds the Andreas Idreos Professorship in Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, and is a fellow of Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford, and is Professor of Divinity at Gresham College. He was previously Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education at King's College London and Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture, Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Oxford, and was principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, until 2005. He is an Anglican priest.
"Teach the Controversy" is a campaign, conducted by the Discovery Institute, to promote the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design, a variant of traditional creationism, while attempting to discredit the teaching of evolution in United States public high school science courses. The campaign claims that fairness and equal time require educating students with a 'critical analysis of evolution' where "the full range of scientific views", evolution's "unresolved issues", and the "scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory" will be presented and evaluated alongside intelligent design concepts like irreducible complexity presented as a scientific argument against evolution through oblique references to books by design proponents listed in the bibliography of the Institute-proposed "Critical Analysis of Evolution" lesson plans.
Early contributions to biology were made by Catholic scientists such as the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel. Since the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, the attitude of the Catholic Church on the theory of evolution has slowly been refined. For nearly a century, the papacy offered no authoritative pronouncement on Darwin's theories. In the 1950 encyclical Humani generis, Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that God created all things and that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces. Today, the Church supports theistic evolution(ism), also known as evolutionary creation, although Catholics are free not to believe in any part of evolutionary theory.
Arthur Robert Peacocke (1924–2006) was an English Anglican theologian and biochemist.
John F. Haught is an American theologian. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at Georgetown University. He specializes in Roman Catholic systematic theology, with a particular interest in issues pertaining to physical cosmology, evolutionary biology, geology, and Christianity.
Christians in Science (CiS) is a British organisation of scientists, philosophers, theologians, ministers, teachers, and science students, predominantly evangelical Christians, concerned with the dialogue between Christianity and science. The organisation was started in the 1940s as one of the professional groups of IVF, and was known as the Research Scientists' Christian Fellowship from 1950 until it adopted the current name in 1988.
Guillermo Gonzalez is an astrophysicist, a proponent of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design, and an assistant professor at Ball State University, a public research university, in Muncie, Indiana. He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, considered the hub of the intelligent design movement, and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, which also promotes intelligent design.
Nancey Murphy is an American philosopher and theologian who is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the B.A. from Creighton University in 1973, the Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1980, and the Th.D. from the Graduate Theological Union (theology) in 1987.
Karl Willard Giberson is a physicist, scholar, and author specializing in the creation-evolution debate. He has held a teaching post since 1984, written several books, and been a member of various academic and scientific organizations. He formerly served as vice president of the BioLogos Foundation.
Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design is a 2004 book by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross on the origins of intelligent design, specifically the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture and its wedge strategy. The authors are highly critical of what they refer to as intelligent design creationism, and document the intelligent design movement's fundamentalist Christian origins and funding.
John Hedley Brooke is a British historian of science specialising in the relationship between science and religion.
The Discovery Institute has conducted a series of related public relations campaigns which seek to promote intelligent design while attempting to discredit evolutionary biology, which the Institute terms "Darwinism." The Discovery Institute promotes the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement and is represented by Creative Response Concepts, a public relations firm.
Jay Wesley Richards is an American analytic theologian and intelligent design and free market advocate, and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. He serves as the Assistant Research Professor in the School of Business and Economics at the Catholic University of America and the executive editor of The Stream. A former Presbyterian, Richards is now a Catholic.
Questions of Truth is a book by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale which offers their responses to 51 questions about science and religion. The foreword is contributed by Antony Hewish.
