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PURPOSE
 Science
fiction is a twentieth-century invention. In it writers and readers
try to imagine life in a context wider than our present — perhaps requiring
as great a leap as members of a hunter-gatherer clan would have to make
to comprehend a global, technological culture like our own. If science
fiction is the literary exploration of the larger universe, religion
is the body of beliefs and rituals that help to link the familiar worlds
of human meaning and experience to that more sweeping and mysterious
cosmos. Religion demands commitment to particular sets of stories about
that world. Science fiction calls for a more self-conscious or ironic
suspension of belief. The cause of religion has been served by great
artists and saints (as well as villains); science fiction, so far, by
rather few. Occasionally the two coalesce: what Manichaeism was, Scientology
now is — deliberate fantastic structures devised by single artists and
seized by the wider populace as devices to clear or cloud their heads.
Other sects and cults arise by happenstance and the unforced agreement
of many romantic minds gnosticism in the first century or the religion
of Star Trek today. To consider the broader issues raised by science
fiction and to explore, in particular, the relation of the genre to
science and to theology, ten scholars, scientists, and writers gather
in London on the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Last
and First Men (1930), the first novel of the late writer and philosopher
Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), and a book often regarded as one of the
finest works of science fiction. As the Year 2000 is also the fiftieth
anniversary of Stapledon’s death, the conclave becomes an occasion to
celebrate the author’s life. A question to be explored in both private
conversation and in a public discussion is the impact of the existence
of the universe in which science fiction attempts to find a place for
humankind, a world immensely older and at once grander and more forbidding
than we usually care to contemplate, on traditional religion. Other
matters of inquiry include whether the genre sometimes known as “possibility
writing” has given us useful clues to what it will mean to be human
in the next millennium, how science fiction and the experience of working
scientists may affect each other, what sort of challenge the search
for the holy, which science fiction writers often locate in the alien,
may pose to familiar religious preoccupations with right behavior or
secular interest in peace and prosperity, whether science fiction can,
in any useful sense, prepare us for an eventual meeting with other sentient
beings — and the relative value of technological gadgets and moral systems
in pursuing dialogue with them. Alternately, what if all the searches
for life beyond the borders of Earth ultimately fail? What implications
might that have for theology? The probe for answers in the conversation
in London takes place under the aegis of the John Templeton Foundation.
CHAIR
 The
philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark
is a speculative thinker who uses reason to understand religion. He
has long been a science fiction fan, and he makes the genre sound a
lot like theology in his 1993 book, How to Live Forever. Finding
immortality an abiding theme in science fiction, he examines the ways
in which science fiction writers have imagined it with a view to showing
that important resources can be found in science fiction for philosophical
explorations of the possibilities of unending existence. “Much of the
intelligible universe is quite unintelligible to us,” he tells readers,
and reminds them of William Blake’s observation that “what is now proved
... was once only imagined” and “what is now clearly imagined was once
only a sense of something missing.” A resident of the Wirral peninsula
near Liverpool, where Olaf Stapledon was also born, Dr. Clark studied
at Balliol College, Oxford. He took first-class honors in classics,
continued his studies as a fellow of All Souls College, and received
a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford in 1973. He was a lecturer in moral
philosophy at the University of Glasgow for nine years, and in 1984,
he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Liverpool.
He has been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University and held an
Alan Richardson Fellowship at Durham University.
Among many invited lectures, he has delivered the Gifford Lecture at
Glasgow, the Stanton Lecture at Cambridge, the Wilde Lecture and the
Aquinas Lecture at Oxford, the Read Tuckwell Lecture at Bristol University,
the Scott Holland Lecture at Liverpool, the Royal Institute of Philosophy
Lecture at Durham University, and the Aquinas Lecture at the Catholic
University of Leuven. He
has been chief editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy since 1990,
as well as serving as a member of the editorial board of the Cambridge
University Press series entitled New Studies in Christian Ethics. The
author of more than fifty scholarly articles, he has contributed chapters
to some sixty books in addition to editing one book and writing nine
others. His work on the proper understanding and treatment of animals,
most recently Animals and their Moral Standing (1997), and of
the living earth, notably How to Think about the Earth: Models of
Environmental Theology (1993), have brought him international acclaim.
In addition, he is well known for his studies of the significance of
our animal natures for our lives as political and social beings, which
were summarized in The Political Animal (1999), and for his work
on Christian theism and human freedom, particularly God, Religion
and Reality (1998). His most recent book is Biology and Christian
Ethics, which will be published later this year by Cambridge University
Press. Dr. Clark is currently writing about alien intelligence from
the perspective of science fiction and philosophy.
PARTICIPANTS
 Gregory
Benford is a working scientist who has written twenty-three
critically acclaimed science fiction novels. A professor of physics
at the University of California, Irvine, he specializes in plasma physics
theory and was presented with the Lord Prize in 1995 for achievements
in the sciences. Over the years, he has been an advisor to the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States Department of
Energy, and the White House Council on Space Policy. Dr. Benford has
received two Nebula awards for science fiction. His first, won in 1975,
was for a novelette written with Gordon Eklund, “If the Stars Are Gods;”
his second was for the novel, Timescape (1980). It also won the
John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, and The
British Science Fiction Association Award. In 1992, Dr. Benford received
the United Nations Medal in Literature. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of
the University of Oklahoma, he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the University
of California, Irvine where he earned a Ph.D. in physics in 1967. He
was subsequently a post-doctoral fellow and then a research physicist
at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory before joining the Irvine faculty
in 1971. He is the author of nearly 130 research papers in his field.
His first book-length work of non-fiction, Deep Time (1999),
examines the consequences of sending messages across vast reaches of
space and time from a broad humanistic and scientific perspective. Dr.
Benford has edited a number of anthologies of science fiction and collaborated
with several well-known writers, including Sir Arthur Clarke. Questions
about creation, human destiny, and the nature of godhood are posed in
his most recent novel, Cosm (Eos, 1999), in which a young Irvine
physicist discovers a wormhole that leads to an entirely new universe.
In the forthcoming Eater, he explores a visitation by an entity
that resembles the Old Testament God and discusses the imagined mechanism
of its appearance–all grounded in scrupulously exact physics.
An
emphasis on right conduct, among other underlying tenets of the Mormon
faith, infuse the science fiction of prize-winning author Orson
Scott Card. Born and raised in the American West, he spent
two years as a missionary in Brazil before completing an undergraduate
degree in theater at Brigham Young University. He earned an M.A. in
English at the University of Utah in 1981 and has taught writing at
several universities and summer workshops. Mr. Card began his literary
career writing short plays for audiences made up mostly of fellow members
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. His first published
story, “Ender’s Game,” was nominated for a Hugo Award and served as
the germ for his Ender saga, a serious moral tale set among the stars.
The first book in the series, Ender’s Game (1985), won both Hugo
and Nebula awards for the best science fiction novel of the year, as
did its sequel, Speaker for the Dead (1986), the first time two
major science fiction prizes had been captured in successive years by
a single author. Mr. Card’s first sequence was the Worthing Chronicle,
and following the Ender series, he wrote The Tales of Alvin Maker, whose
hero is loosely based on the life of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. The
series explores themes in American history. The fifth novel in the sequence,
Heartfire, won Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, France’s highest
science-fiction award. The author broke new ground with The Homecoming
Saga, a retelling of the first part of the Book of Mormon as
science fiction. Mr. Card has written a historical novel, Saints
(1988), on the founding of Mormonism, contemporary novels, and several
books on writing. His How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990)
was awarded a Hugo for non-fiction. A new science fiction novel, Ender’s
Shadow (TOR, 1999), is the author’s most recently published work.
He writes a regular column for Beliefnet.com, an online religious forum.
Jack
Cohen is a biologist who had helped science fiction writers
in the design of alien creatures and ecologies. His present position
as a consultant at Warwick University bridges the ecosystems unit of
the biology department and the Mathematics Institute. With the mathematician
Ian Stewart, he is inventing new ways of seeing reproduction and evolution.
A graduate of London University, Dr. Cohen earned a Ph.D. in biology
at the University of Hull in 1957 and spent the next two years as a
Medical Research Council post-doctoral fellow at the University of Birmingham
Medical School where he developed a new technique for the transplantation
of the components for growing hairs and for the culture of epidermal
cells. In 1959, he was named a lecturer in embryology at the University
of Birmingham. He became a senior lecturer in animal reproduction in
1968,
a post he held until his retirement twenty years later. In 1974, Dr.
Cohen was named a fellow of the Institute of Biology and awarded the
senior degree of the doctor of science. He has been a research fellow
at Harvard University and the Rosi and Max Varnon Visiting Professor
at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. His theory of sperm redundancy
has provided a firm foundation for the diagnosis and treatment of a
number of human infertility problems, and he has consulted on in
vitro fertilization in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United
States. A former vice president of the Linnean Society and former chairman
of the editorial board of Biologist, he has been the editor-in-chief
of Speculations in Science and Technology for the past five years.
Dr. Cohen is the author of some ninety scientific papers and has written
seven books, including the widely used text Living Embryos (1963,
1967, and 1981) and two volumes (with Stewart) on the evolution of mind,
language, and culture, The Collapse of Chaos (1994) and Figments
of Reality (1997). His most recently published work (with Stewart
and Terry Pratchett) is The Science of Discworld, a science tie-in
with a popular science fiction television series. Upcoming books with
Stewart include Wheelers, a science fiction novel that Time-Warner
will publish in the fall, and Stop Working and Start Thinking: A
Guide to Becoming a Scientist (with Graham Medley), which Stanley
Thornes will bring out in October. Dr. Cohen also is working on a new
volume on reproduction for Cambridge University Press.
Professor
of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University, Simon
Conway Morris has devoted his research life to the study
of the 520-million-year-old Burgess Shale, found between two peaks in
the Canadian Rockies, and related fossil-rich formations. In his most
recent book, The Crucible of Creation (1998, Oxford University
Press), he re-interprets the soft-body fauna found in fissile rock as
evincing the preeminent role of convergence in evolution. His demonstration
that many of the fantastic Burgess Shale animals are related, albeit
remotely, to modern forms supports the theory that similar solutions
are found to the same kind of environmental challenges in independent
lines and places and impugns as seriously incomplete the reductionist
viewpoint that the present-day world arises as the result of chance
past events. A graduate of the University of Bristol, where he took
first-class honors in geology, Dr. Conway Morris went on to Cambridge
and studied at Churchill College with Harry Whittington, the first re-interpreter
of the Burgess Shale, on a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
Studentship. He was elected a research fellow of St. John’s College
in 1975 and received his Ph.D. in evolutionary paleobiology the next
year. Appointed a lecturer in earth sciences at The Open University
in 1979, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer four years later and
was promoted to his current chair in 1995. Dr. Conway Morris is a fellow
of the Royal Society. He has held research grants from the society as
well as from the Nuffield Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation, the
NERC, the National Geographic Society, and the Leverhulme Foundation.
He has delivered numerous invited lectures throughout the United Kingdom,
Europe, Asia, Canada, and the United States and is the author of some
ninety research papers. Dr. Conway Morris has served as editor of five
books. The first version of his study of the Burgess Shale and the rise
of animals, Journey to the Cambrian (1997), was printed in Japanese
and has been re-printed seven times. He contributes frequently to general
magazines and encyclopedias and to radio and television programs on
science.
 Freeman
J. Dyson, the English-born American physicist, is widely
recognized for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics and the
theory of interacting electrons and photons — and perhaps even better
known for his creative speculations on subjects ranging from space travel
to extraterrestrial civilizations. An engaging author, widely sought-after
lecturer, and an unusually conscientious citizen of the world, he has
been for half a century a persistent scientific and political gadfly
in the most positive sense of the word. He went to Cambridge University
from Winchester College, and after civilian service doing operations
research at the headquarters of the RAF Bomber Command during World
War II, he took his B.A. in mathematics at Cambridge in 1945. A fellow
at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1946-47, he was a Commonwealth Fellow
at Cornell University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
for the next two years. After another two years as a research fellow
at the University of Birmingham, he became a professor of physics at
Cornell in 1951. Two years later, he returned to the Institute for Advanced
Study where he was a professor of physics until 1994 when he became
professor emeritus. He has been a visiting professor at Yeshiva University
and the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. During the
late 1950s, Dr. Dyson helped design the nuclear reactor, Triga, and
the Orion space ship at General Atomic Laboratories in San Diego, California.
He originated the idea for what is known as the “Dyson sphere,” a hypothetical
shell of artificial material that an advanced civilization of intelligent
beings with an expanding population might build around a parent star.
The “colonists,” he suggested, would be able to capture almost all of
the energy released by the star in the form of electromagnetic radiation,
which would then be re-radiated as infrared radiation making the star
visible to infrared telescopes. Dr. Dyson served as chair of the Federation
of American Scientists in 1962-63 and was a member of the National Research
Commission on Life Science from 1989 to 1991. The recipient of honorary
degrees from seventeen American and European colleges and universities,
including Princeton, Oxford, and the Federal Institute of Technology
(ETH) in Zurich, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, as well as a foreign associate
of the French Academy of Sciences and an honorary fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge. Among his other honors are a dozen major science
prizes, including the Enrico Fermi Award of the U. S. Department of
Energy. Last month, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress
in Religion. The author of nearly 300 scientific papers, he also has
been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic
Monthly, and The New York Review of Books. His capacity for
luminous exploration of the intellectual challenges and moral dilemmas
of modern science first came to the attention of the general public
in 1979 when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commissioned him to write
a memoir of his life in science, Disturbing the Universe. He
won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction in 1984 for
his powerful plea for international control of the world’s nuclear arsenal,
Weapons and Hope. In his probing Origins of Life (1986),
he suggested careful scrutiny of the notion that life began twice.
Infinite in All Directions (1988), an explanation of what past and
recent scientific theories tell us about the beginning of the universe,
its present state, and its likely destiny, won the Phi Beta Kappa Award
in Science. His latest book is Imagined Worlds (Harvard University
Press, 1997).
A
medievalist who edits the flagship journal, Foundation: The Review
of Science Fiction, Edward James
is a professor of history at the University of Reading where he directs
the university’s master’s degree program in science fiction. A graduate
of Solihull School, he studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, and took
first-class honors in history. He continued his education at Oxford’s
Institute of Archaeology and was awarded a Ph.D. in archaeology in 1975.
Dr. James began his teaching career at University College, Dublin, as
a lecturer in medieval history. He joined the faculty of the University
of York in 1978 and was named senior lecturer in 1986. He served as
co-director and then director of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies
before accepting his Reading professorship in 1995. A fellow of both
the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries, Dr.
James is also a member of the York Archaeological Trust and Council
of the Science Fiction Foundation. He is the author of six books, including
Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1994), the editor or
co-editor of three others, most recently The Parliament of Dreams:
Confrerring on Babylon 5 (Science Fiction Foundation, 1998), the
translator of an early medieval Latin text, and has contributed chapters
to more than thirty volumes, as well as publishing numerous articles
in academic journals. He has just completed Britain in the First
Millennium, a book for Edward Arnold’s series, Britain in Europe.
A Leverhulme Research Fellowship enabled him to begin research on a
gazetteer of Merovingian burial sites in France, which he plans to finish
next year and publish on the World Wide Web. He is also working on a
study of utopian thought in modern science fiction.
James
P. Mackey, the Thomas Chalmers Professor Emeritus of Theology
at the University of Edinburgh, approaches dominant movements in contemporary
Christian theology from the perspective of contemporary philosophy.
He also has been deeply involved in research on Celtic Christianity
for more than a decade. A graduate of the National University of Ireland,
where he took first-class honors in philosophy and received a Bachelor
of Arts degree, he earned a licentiate in philosophy, a bachelor of
divinity degree, a licentiate in sacred theology, and a doctor of divinity
degree from the Pontifical University in Maynooth, Ireland. He received
a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion from The Queen’s University of
Belfast in 1965. Beginning his academic career as an assistant lecturer
in Hebrew and Old Testament at Maynooth, he went on to teach philosophy
at the Queen’s University and then dogmatic theology at St. John’s College,
Waterford. Appointed associate professor of systematic and philosophical
theology at the University of San Francisco in 1969, he was promoted
to professor in 1973, a post he held until accepting the Chalmers Professorship
at Edinburgh six years later. Dr. Mackey was formerly dean of Edinburgh’s
Faculty of Divinity and, from 1995 to 1998, founding director of its
Graduate School in Divinity. He has been a visiting professor at The
Catholic University of America, the University of California at Berkeley,
and Dartmouth and delivered numerous invited lectures in the United
Kingdom, the United States, Europe, China, Australia, and South Africa.
The founding editor of Studies in World Christianity: The Edinburgh
Review of Theology and Religion and a member of the advisory editorial
board of Cosmos, he also has served as an associate editor of Herder
Correspondence, Concilium, and Horizons. He was general editor
(with J.D.G. Dunn) of the SPCK monograph series Biblical Foundations
of Theology (1985-1991). The author of some sixty journal articles,
he has contributed chapters to twenty-two books, edited five volumes,
and is the author or co-author of a dozen other books. His scholarly
work has been translated into six languages. Dr. Mackey’s most recent
study, The Critique of Theological Reason, will be published
by Cambridge University Press in the autumn.
The
moral philosopher Mary Midgley read
classical greats at Oxford and holds an honorary doctor of letters degree
from the University of Durham. She was appointed a lecturer at the University
of Reading in 1949. After her marriage the next year to fellow-philosopher
Geoffrey Midgley, an interest in animal behavior, together with observations
she made about the behavior of her own children, led her to a decade-long
study of evolution, including the new literature in sociobiology and
ethology, in an effort to understand the continuity between human beings
and the rest of nature. She took up teaching again in 1960 at the University
of Newcastle upon Tyne, where she became a senior lecturer. Her first
book, Beast and Man (1978), has been hailed as a classic analysis
of humanity’s place in the order of things. It defends a philosophical
conception of human nature and criticizes narrowly scientific explanations
of why people act the way they do at the same time it attacks moral
theories that ignore the relations of ethics to nature and fail to evaluate
scientific discovery. A subsequent series of eight books, written after
her retirement in 1980 and concerned with such issues as the relations
of men and women to their non-human environment, the sources of morality,
and the distortions afflicting science when put into the place of religion,
have won Dr. Midgley a wide readership. Her latest study, Utopias,
Dolphins and Computers (Routledge, 1996), proposes a use for philosophy
in solving a range of contemporary problems involving education, feminism,
animal rights, and artificial intelligence. In all her work, Dr. Midgley
takes a wholly practical, common sense approach leavened by a deep respect
for imaginative vision.
Mary
Doria Russell is a paleoanthropologist whose science fiction
novels, The Sparrow (1996) and Children of God, have won
six major awards. The books, set in the twenty-first century and concerned
with the first contact between human beings and intelligent extraterrestrial
life, weigh the risks and benefits of a belief in God and examine the
role of religion in the lives of people, from atheist to mystic. Drawing
on both the Catholicism of her youth and her knowledge of science, Dr.
Russell, a convert to Judaism, writes about a Jesuit expedition to an
alien culture on Alpha Centauri that turns into a spiritual odyssey
for the lone survivor of the failed mission. The Sparrow was
a book-of-the month selection of two American book clubs and garnered
the Arthur C. Clarke Prize, The British Science Fiction Association
Award, and The James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. Children of God
won the Cleveland Council for the Arts Literature Prize, the John W.
Campbell Award, and the American Friends of the Library Readers’ Choice
Award. Before turning to writing, Dr. Russell taught a variety of anthropology
courses at two of her alma maters, Northeastern University and the University
of Michigan, and a clinical gross anatomy course at Case Western Reserve
University. Her research included work on craniofacial biomechanics
and the archeological sequelae of cannibalism. A graduate of the University
of Illinois, she earned a master’s degree in social anthropology from
Northeastern in 1976 and a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Michigan
in 1983. She is now completing a third novel, a historical thriller
about the Jewish underground in Genoa during the Nazi occupation of
Italy. A Thread of Grace will be published by Villard/Ballatine
in 2001.
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A
panel discussion, open to the public and featuring Gregory Benford,
Stephen R. L. Clark, Jack Cohen, and Freeman Dyson, takes place
at half after six o’clock on Monday evening, the 26th, at the
Royal Society for the encouragement of arts, manufacture &
commerce. Andrew Sawyer, science fiction librarian at the University
of Liverpool, has put together an exhibit of manuscripts and memorabilia
related to the life of Olaf Stapledon, which is on view at the
RSA.
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The
Humble Approach Initiative
Contact Mary ann Meyers, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
A
Program of the John Templeton Foundation
300 Conshohocken State Road, Suite 500
West Conshohocken, PA 19428
610.941.2828 Fax 610.825.1730
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