Professor Peter Harrison, will be discussing religious influences in the early proceedings of the Royal Society in the Faraday Institute’s termly public lecture today, Thursday February 4 at Emmanuel College.

The 1663 charter of the Royal Society declares that its activities shall be devoted “to the glory of God the Creator, and the advantage of the human race”. Yet other documents associated with the early Royal Society note that its fellows scrupulously avoided "meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls”.

In the 350th anniversary year of the Royal Society, Professor Harrison’s lecture, entitled “Religious Influences in the Founding of the Royal Society” will consider these contradictory founding statements, and offer an account of the roles which religion did, and did not play, in its pursuits and aspirations.

Professor Harrison is Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively in the area of cultural and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

He is the author of The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge, 2007). He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge, 2010) and will deliver the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 2010-11. Professor Harrison is a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

The Faraday Institute of Science and Religion is an academic research enterprise based at St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge. The Institute has several aims: The first is to conduct scholarly research into and publish research on the subject of science and religion along with invited groups of experts.) (They) also provides short-term courses, seminars and lectures on science and religion.

The lecture is free and open to the general public. The lecture starts at 5.30pm, Queen's Lecture Theatre, Emmanuel College.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.