Science, Philosophy, and Belief

Anthony Anderson, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

Tony Anderson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He specializes in Intensional Logic, Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language. Most of his publications are in the field of intensional logic but has published on Divine Omnipotence and Gödel’s Ontological Argument. He was visiting professor at Wuhan University, Apr-Jun. 2006.

Kelly James Clark, Calvin College

Kelly James Clark, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College and Program Director of Science, Philosophy & Belief, has been a principal organizer, coordinator, and fund-raiser for many ventures in China. An accomplished philosopher with a focused interest on epistemology and Chinese philosophy, his is the author, editor, or co-author of more than ten books and author of over forty articles; his books include Return to Reason, The Story of Ethics, and 101 Key Philosophical Terms and Their Importance for Theology. Professor Clark has hosted and mentored twenty-five Chinese graduate students at Calvin College, arranged for thousands of books to be shipped to Chinese universities, organized and participated in SCP conferences in China, lectured and taught mini-courses in Chinese universities, helped other colleges set up China exchange programs, and had one of his treatises, Return to Reason, translated and republished by Peking University Press.

Lydia Jaeger, Institut Biblique de Nogent-sur-Marne

After completing postgraduate studies in physics and mathematics — including research in theoretical solid state physics — at the University of Cologne (Germany) and in theology at the Seminary for Evangelical Theology in Vaux-sur-Seine (France), Lydia Jaeger obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy at the Sorbonne on the possible links between the concept of law of nature and religious presuppositions, under the supervision of Michel Bitbol (CNRS, France). She holds a permanent lectureship and is academic dean at the Institut Biblique de Nogent-sur-Marne, an interdenominational Evangelical Bible college near Paris which trains pastors and other Church workers at an undergraduate level, and lay people in extension programs. Since 2000, Lydia has had several short study leaves in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (Great Britain), where she is also an associate member of St. Edmund’s College and of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Since 2005, she holds a four-year research professorship in philosophy of science and contemporary thought, jointly based at the Seminary for Evangelical Theology in Vaux-sur-Seine and the Institut Biblique de Nogent-sur-Marne. She is a member of the Fellowship of European Evangelical Theologians (FEET), the Tyndale Fellowship and of Christians in Science (CiS); she is a founding member of the Société de Philosophie des Sciences. She is the author of five books and several articles on the relation between Christianity and the natural sciences.

Jeffrey Koperski, Saginaw Valley State University

Jeffrey Koperski is Professor of Philosophy at Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan, where he specializes in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religion. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Dayton (1987) and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University (1997). He has published articles on chaos theory, cosmological fine-tuning, scientific modeling, and intelligent design in such journals as Philosophy of Science, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Faith and Philosophy, Zygon, Philosophia Christi, and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Dr. Koperski is a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

Ard Louis, Oxford University

Dr. Ard Louis is a Reader in Theoretical Physics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Oxford University, where he leads an interdisciplinary research group studying problems on the border between physics, chemistry, and biology. Before that, he taught in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University, where he was also director of studies in Natural Sciences at Hughes Hall. He is the International Secretary for Christians in Science, an associate of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion (Cambridge) and on the European board of advisors for the John Templeton Foundation.

Michael Murray, Franklin and Marshall College

Michael Murray is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor in the Humanities and Philosophy at Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA). He received his B.A. at Franklin & Marshall College, and his M.A, and Ph.D at the University of Notre Dame. He has held fellowships from the Institute for Research in the Humanities (Madison, Wisconsin), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion. In addition to a variety of articles in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion, he has published Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (Blackwell, with Eleonore Stump), Reason for the Hope Within (Eerdmans),  Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge, with Michael Rea) and Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Oxford).

Ryan Nichols, University of Kansas

Ryan Nichols specializes in the history of philosophy, which involves an understanding how theories and ideas develop and are transmitted. He has extensively researched the remarkable period of the Scottish Enlightenment, which culminated in his recent book, Thomas Reid (Oxford, 2007). In addition to that book, he has written a number of papers that focus on the emergent relationship between science and religion and the limits of what was then called “natural philosophy” in the work of luminaries like David Hume, Adam Smith and Reid. More recently he has redirected his interest in natural philosophy to a study of the foundations of morality—emotions, social conventions, etc.—as a natural phenomenon. This new research interest has led to the study of Early Confucianism. While at this conference, he hopes to dialogue with other scholars of Early Confucianism about issues including: the role of shame in the Mengzi and the Analects; the content and scope of filial piety; ethics and gender; social hierarchies and The Dream of the Red Chamber（紅樓夢）.

Del Ratzsch, Calvin College

Del Ratzsch is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI.). He received his BA from Western Washington, and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. His work has been supported by grants from NEH, the Pugh Foundation, and various other agencies. He has published work in the philosophy of science, the history of science, logic, and in the area of science and religion issues. His work includes Science and its Limits (InterVarsity), The Battle of Beginnings (InterVarsity), and Nature, Design and Science (in the State University of New York “Philosophy and Biology” series). His work has been translated into a number of languages including Chinese and Korean.

Jeff Schloss, Westmont College

Jeffrey P. Schloss is Distinguished Professor of Biology and Director, Center for Faith, Ethics & the Life Sciences at Westmont College. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Wheaton College and doctoral training in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from University of Michigan and Washington University. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan, Wheaton College, and the Global Stewardship Study Program. He has been a Danforth Fellow, an American Scientific Affiliation Fellow, and a Senior Fellow of the Center for Law & Religion at Emory University. His twofold research interests involve the ecophysiology of poikilohydric regulation and the evolutionary accounts of altruism and religion. He writes and speaks widely on topics related to science and religion; recent projects include Altruism and Altruistic Love (Oxford, 2002) Evolution & Ethics (Eerdmans, 2004) and The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives on the Nature of Religion (forthcoming from Oxford).

David Tien, National University of Singapore

David W. Tien is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. His Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan. He has studied at the University of Toronto, the Toronto Baptist Seminary, and McGill University. His research interests include Asian religious philosophy, comparative philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. Among his publications is “Metaphysics and the Basis of Morality in the Philosophy of Wang Yangming” in the forthcoming Springer volume, NeoConfucian Philosophy.

Kevin Timpe, University of San Diego

Kevin Timpe is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. He earned his PhD from Saint Louis University, and has been a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives (Continuum) and the editor of Arguing about Religion (Routledge) and Metaphysics and God (Routledge). He has published a number of articles on free will, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion; he also serves as the philosophy of religion section editor for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Steve Wykstra, Calvin College

After a B.A. from Hope College in philosophy and physics, Professor Steve Wykstra went on to the University of Pittsburgh, getting his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science under Larry Laudan. His areas of research and publication are philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and epistemology. His hobbies include cooking, windsurfing, playing chess, and playing blues harmonica.

Dean Zimmerman, Rutgers University

Dean Zimmerman grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, where he remained for his undergraduate years at Mankato State University (now Minnesota State University), majoring in Philosophy, English, and French. After earning a Ph.D. at Brown University, Zimmerman taught at the University of Notre Dame, Syracuse University, and Rutgers University, where he is now a professor in the department of philosophy. Zimmerman is founding editor of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, and has co-edited several other volumes: The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Metaphysics: The Big Questions (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998; 2nd ed., 2007), Persons: Human and Divine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), and Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007). His publications include over thirty articles in scholarly journals and books, in addition to encyclopedia entries, introductions, and book reviews for journals and literary supplements. Zimmerman’s current research includes an exploration of the metaphysics of human persons, emphasizing the difficulties confronting the more flatfootedly materialistic accounts of our nature; and the defense of an “A-theory” of time (according to which there is a “privileged present”), with special attention to God’s relationship to the temporal order.