Talk Probes the Battle of Science, Religion

Physicist Karl Giberson, a leading scholar in America’s creation-evolution debate, explores the question, “Are Science and Religion at War?” Friday, Feb. 10, at 3:30 p.m. in Westmont’s Adams Center, room 216. The Pascal Lecture, which is sponsored by the office of the Westmont provost, is free and open to the public.

Giberson directs Gordon College’s Science and Religion Forum and teaches a special workshop on writing about science and religion. He has authored or coauthored many books on this topic, including his most recent, “The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions,” which was reviewed in January 2012 in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

He has also written “The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age,” “Species of Origins: America’s Search for a Creation Story” and “Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and believe in Evolution.” His book, “The Wonder of the Universe: Hints of God in Our Fine-Tuned World,” will be published in April. He has contributed more than 150 articles, reviews and essays for websites and journals including Salon.com, Books & Culture and the Huffington Post.

Giberson says popular culture contains a metanarrative about science and religion being at war, recounted in pulpits, or National Public Radio, or “The Simpsons.”

“The story goes like this: Science and religion are mortal enemies and always have been,” Giberson says. “The church has opposed every scientific advance and scientists have been persecuted, tortured and even executed for their discoveries. From the flat earthism of the first millennium, to the persecution of Galileo, to widespread rejection of Darwinism today we see a steady battle between the forces of superstition and enlightenment. This popular picture is wrong, however. It’s driven more by propaganda than history.”

Religion Dispatches Magazine listed Giberson among their Top Ten Peacemakers in the Science-Religion Wars in December 2011. He has lectured at the Vatican, Oxford University, London’s Thomas Moore Institute, the Ettore Majorana center in Sicily, the Venice Institute of Arts and Letters and the University of Navarre in Spain.

Giberson earned two bachelor’s degrees from the Eastern Nazarene College, where he taught from 1984 to 2011. He earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in physics at Rice University.