UC Santa Barbara

The program will take place at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the site of a highly-successful Templeton Research Lectures program for the last three years. UCSB offers an atmosphere of unmatched academic excellence, diversity, and collaboration in which to promote the scholarly study of science and religion. Among the top 1.5 percent of all universities and colleges in the United States and Canada by virtue of its membership in the 63-institution Association of American Universities, UCSB is one of the top two American public research universities, according to a 1997 Graham-Diamond Study based on per capita faculty productivity and scholarship. UCSB’s distinguished faculty currently includes winners of three recent Nobel Prizes (two in chemistry and one in physics), a National Medal of Technology, and a National Medal for the Humanities; two recipients of the National Medal of Science; Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellows; and numerous members of prestigious professional organizations ranging from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. UCSB has 33 endowed chairs, with more slated for formal approval. UCSB was listed in a Newsweek report as one of twelve “hot colleges” in the United States, with programs such as Physics, Religious Studies, and Environmental Science and Management given special mention.

The program is sponsored by UCSB’s prestigious Department of Geography. Ranked as one of the top four Ph.D. geography programs in the United States, and the leading department at UCSB in terms of extramural funding per faculty member, the Geography Department is housed in the Division of Math, Life, and Physical Sciences. Its twenty-three faculty perform research in three broad areas: Earth System Science, Human-Environment Relations, and Modeling, Measurement, and Computation. Their interests in cognitive science, concepts of nature, and natural science intersect strongly with the program; several Geography faculty serve on the program steering committee.

Geography as a discipline is well suited to serve as a home for the program, for two primary reasons. First, of the four historical traditions of geography—earth science, regional analysis, nature-society analysis, and spatial analysis (Pattison 1990)—the earth science and nature-society traditions offer important insights into questions concerning nature, science, and religion. For instance, one of the most important books ever written on Western concepts of nature, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Glacken 1967), was authored by a geographer; Traces contains significant reference to scientific and religious dimensions of nature (e.g., the longstanding question of design) dating from antiquity to the eighteenth century. Another geographer, David Livingstone, has authored a number of publications on science and religion, and coedited Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (Livingstone, Hart, and Noll 1999).

But there is an even more fundamental reason why geography is particularly well suited for the program: its considerable scholarly breadth. Unlike virtually any other contemporary discipline, geography spans the entire intellectual spectrum, from physical and life science to behavioral and social science to the humanities. In particular, the relationship between the physical and human branches of the discipline has been an important theoretical concern (Douglas 1986; Stoddart 1987; Unwin 1992). Geographers are thus ideally equipped to facilitate the broadly interdisciplinary dialogue necessary to explore the intersection of nature, science, and religion.

Program financial administration is overseen by UCSB’s Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research (ISBER), which successfully administered UCSB’s Templeton Research Lectures series. The Office of Instructional Consultation is providing oversight for educational development and evaluation, along with UCSB Extension; the Instructional Resources division is coordinating website development and television production. Publicity is coordinated by UCSB’s Office of Public Affairs; the Public Events office is organizing all lectures and other public events.

Douglas, Ian. 1986. The unity of geography is obvious…. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 11:459-463.
Glacken, Clarence J. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian shore: Nature and culture in Western thought from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Livingstone, David N., D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll. 1999. Evangelicals and science in historical perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pattison, William. 1990. The four traditions of geography. Journal of Geography 89 (5):202-206.
Stoddart, David R. 1987. To claim the high ground: Geography for the end of the century. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 12 (3):327-336.
Unwin, Tim. 1992. The place of geography. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.