Gifford Lectures | Heterodoxology

Religion and Scientific Change: The Case of the New Natural Theologies between the World Wars (2/2)

Today, July 4 2012, Cern announced the likely detection of the elusive Higgs boson – known by the popular press as the “God particle”.

Last installment of my lecture on “Religion and Scientific Change” closed by introducing three levels on which claims about relationships between religion and science should be analysed: the institutional, the socio-cultural, and the individual. I was going to wait a couple of days with releasing the rest, but since news headlines today have been all about the discovery of the “God particle” in the bowels of the Large Hydron Collider at Cern, it seemed highly appropriate to continue. Why is it that such a (truth be told, rather ridiculous) religious pet-name has been put on the elusive boson? Read on, and you might find out. (And: happy Higgs boson day!)

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on July 4, 2012 at 3:15 pm Comments (4)
Tags: Adam Gifford, Bill Clinton, Carl Gustav Jung, Cern, Dick Teresi, discovery enthusiasm, DNA, entelechy, Forman thesis, Francis Collins, Gifford Lectures, God particle, Hans Driesch, Higgs boson, Human Genome Project, Large Hydron Collider, Leon Lederman, Niels Bohr, Paul Forman, uncertainty principle, vitalism, Werner Heisenberg, World War I

Blind Spots of Disenchantment (3/3)

The third and last part of my paper on the “Blind Spots of Disenchantment” focuses on the somewhat neglected concept of Weber’s 1918 “Wissenschaft als Beruf” paper: “the intellectual sacrifice”. It looks particularly at the Scottish Gifford Lectures’ attempt to promote a new “natural theology”, and suggests that this whole attempt defies Weber’s emphasis that science and religion are being/ought to be kept apart in a disenchanted modern world. It also includes the complete bibliography for all three parts.