Faith and Science
For all their historical tensions, scientists and religious scholars from a wide variety of faiths ponder many similar questions—how did the universe begin? How might it end? What is the origin of matter, energy, and life? The modes of inquiry and standards for judging progress are, to be sure, very different. But is there a common ground to be found? ABC News’ Bill Blakemore moderates a panel that includes evolutionary geneticist Francisco Ayala, astrobiologist Paul Davies, Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels and Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa. These leading thinkers who come at these issues from a range of perspectives address the evolving relationship between science and faith.
Moderator: Bill Blakemore
Called the “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology” by The New York Times, Francisco J. Ayala has made significant and wide-ranging experimental and theoretical contributions to evolution theory.
Bill Blakemore has been a reporter for ABC News for more than 35 years, covering a wide variety of stories. He has spearheaded ABC's coverage of global warming, traveling from the tropics to polar regions to report on the impacts and dangers of climate change, as well as possible solutions for it. Blakemore helped create ABC's new multiplatform exploration of global warming in TV, Internet, podcast, radio and print formats.
Paul Davies is Director of the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University and the co-Director of the ASU Cosmology Initiative. His research interests range from the origin of the universe to the origin of life.
Thupten Jinpa has been the principal English translator to the Dalai Lama for more than 25 years and has translated and edited many of his books, including Ethics for the New Millennium; Transforming the Mind; The Universe in a Single Atom: Convergence of Science and Spiritualit; and the recently published Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions can Come Together.
Elaine Pagels changed the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Church as a unified movement. Her findings were published in the bestselling 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels, an analysis of 52 early Christian manuscripts that were unearthed in Egypt. The book won both the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and the National Book Award and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th Century.This event made possible with the support of
as part of the Big Ideas Series.
