The mission of the Templeton Research Lectures is to multiply knowledge by transcending the limitations of individual academic specialties in science, religion and the humanities.

t’s been 64 years since C.P. Snow delivered his now famous lecture, “The Two Cultures” at Cambridge. In it Snow elucidated a simple distinction. It wasn’t that scientists and literary intellectuals had nothing in common. It was that they had ceased communicating about what they did have in common, what they disagreed about, and more importantly, where they could push each other toward new understandings.

In an age of paradox, it is especially frustrating that with each new specialized scientific advance we often fail to engage the larger questions these very advances demand of us. William Grassie, Executive Director of the Metanexus Institute, puts it this way, “Today in medical school there are departments of medical humanities and medical ethics. Students learn about the discipline’s history, the philosophy, and how the field relates to other dimensions of religious life. That’s not the case in physics today. The result is a generation of graduates who are narrowly trained with great expertise, but who don’t have a broad knowledge of other issues.”

The Templeton Research Lectures solution to the problem of specialization is simple: to encourage a broad range of disciplines from neuroscience to philosophy, from evolutionary palaeobiologists to theologians to speak to each other in an informed way that creates a unique and durable catalyst for original research and progress around the world. The Templeton Research Lectures is funded through 2008 and represent one of our most popular university-based programs. What follows are three examples of the global reach of this lecture series.
www.metanexus.net/lectures

UNIVERSITY OF FRANKFURT
It is one of sciences last great frontiers. For the first time in human history neuroscience has given us a tantalizing glimpse of how the brain works. But attached to these astonishing scientific insights come profound, new questions about our identity, our behavior and what it means to be human.

The Templeton Research Lectures at the University of Frankfurt is taking these questions head on with an ambitious three-year program that will explore how to interpret religion in a scientific age.

After arriving for a teaching post at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, theologian Michael Parker was excited to realize that a group at the university had already been talking about science and religion. “This proved to be a good core group to get around the Templeton Research Lectures proposal,” says Parker. Frankfurt has long been a seat of major intellectual accomplishment, with 19 Nobel Prizes, including philosopher Walter Benjamin and theologian Paul Tillich.

Dr. Thomas M. Schmidt, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, notes with pride that Frankfurt is the first European city chosen to host this lecture series. The first Templeton Research Lecture addressed one of the most visible philosophical questions of the last 200 years: Free Will vs. Determinism.

“Free Will vs. Determinism is a classic question of German philosophy of the 19th century,” says Parker. “More recently, it has become a burning issue again. This year in Germany there has been a series of stories in the Frankfurt newspaper asking philosophers, neuroscientists, legal theorists, theologians and psychologists to address this fundamental debate in light of our new understanding of how the brain works. It really is a great example of philosophy in the public square.”

It’s hard to imagine an area of modern life that wouldn’t be impacted by a new understanding of the relationship between free will and determinism. Our entire social and legal system is built on the premise that people are responsible for their actions. “We wanted to look at this classic philosophical question based on neuroscience and neurobiology. What do these new fields tell us about our traditional understanding of the human person? Is it a threat? Free will seems to underlie Judeo Christian faith. Or is it a new promise that offers a science of religion? We’ve hit it at a perfect time. There is a great deal of interest in this topic,” says Parker.

The first University of Frankfurt Templeton Research Lecture featured leading neuroscientist Wolf Singer, philosopher Jürgen Habermas and Templeton Research Fellow Philip Clayton.

www.metanexus.net/lectures/winners/frankfurt.asp