It happened on NOVEMBER 21

1768

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in Breslau. A German philosopher, he was an exponent of theological Enlightenment. He elaborated a rational interpretation of Christianity as a religion that expresses human aspirations, and he considered Christianity the highest point among the various historical forms of religious experience.

1996

Abdus Salam died in Trieste, the same place where he founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. In 1979, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for their theoretical calculations regarding the mediating role of bosons in electroweak interaction. A Muslim, he organized conferences on science and faith.

INTERS.org

Readings on Freedom of Research

Introduction to readings, by Stefano Oliva

John Henry Newman, Christianity and Scientific Investigation. A Lecture Written for the School of Science (1855)

Michael Polanyi, The foundations of academic freedom (1947)

John Paul II, Address to Scientists and Students in the Cologne Cathedral (1980)

A. Einstein, On Freedom, in Out of my Later Years (1950)

Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti,The Autonomy of the Sciences and Freedom of Research (2002)

Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science

The Encyclopedia, published by the Centro di Documentazione Interdisciplinare di Scienza e Fede operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, provides new, scholarly articles in the rapidly growing international field of Religion and Science (ISSN: 2037-2329). INTERS is a free online encyclopedia.

Anthology and Documents

To emphasize and spread relevant documents within the scientific community, this section provides key materials concerning the dialogue among science, philosophy and theology.

Special Issues

We offer here a selection of comments and documents on special issues in Religion and Science, collected for anniversaries and/or for the relevance of the topics.

Websites on Science and Religion

Articles of Historical Interest

A selection of book reviews from "Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology" (ISSR & ESSSAT)

2009

Documents for the 2009 Anniversary:
International Year of Astronomy
and II Centenary
of Darwin’s birth

in italiano

Break time

Science friction

Ideas

The concept of law is so well established in science that until recently few scientists stopped to think about the nature and origin of these laws; they were happy to simply accept them as "given." Now that physicists and cosmologists have made rapid progress toward finding what they regard as the "ultimate" laws of the universe, many old questions have resurfaced. Why do the laws have the form they do? Might they have been otherwise? Where do these laws come from? Do they exist independently of the physical universe?

P. Davies, The Mind of God (London: Simon & Schuster,1992), p. 73.