Paul L. Allen,

Dean & Professor of Theology,

Corpus Christi College

Critical Realism: An Enduring Epistemology for Science and Theology

Wednesday, January 27 at 4:00 p.m.

Abstract

Critical Realism emerged as a way of thinking about knowledge in the mid twentieth century. After disillusionment with positivism and straightforward empiricism, critical realism (CR) established itself as a way that many scientists and scholars think about how knowledge is won and progress achieved. This realization came with an associated insight that reality is made up of different strata of reality: molecular, biological, psychological and spiritual, rather than a picture of reductionism of various entities to simple parts. Borrowing from the historian of science Ernan McMullin, the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan and several other thinkers, I want to affirm two things about CR: 1) it best describes how to affirm reality in judgments whilst conceding the variety of historical paradigms that have affected how we know things to be true. 2) CR can help us understand how to do theology, notably with respect to scriptural testimony and doctrinal claims that were written and formulated in different cultures and in accord with different assumptions than our own. 

Biography

Dr. Paul Allen specializes in systematic theology, the science-theology dialogue and theological anthropology. He taught at Concordia University prior to coming west. His publications include his doctoral dissertation, published as Ernan McMullin and Critical Realism in the Science-Theology Dialogue and (with Peter M.J. Hess), Catholicism and Science. More recently, he has written Theological Method: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T & T Clark, 2012) as well as articles in journals such as Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Heythrop Journal of Theology and Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosphie.

Protecting Democracy from the Outside

John Owen

Wednesday, November 18 @ 4:00 p.m.

Taylor Professor of Politics

Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

Senior Fellow, Miller Center of Public Affairs

University of Virginia

Abstract

Three decades after its supposed permanent global triumph, democracy is in trouble nearly everywhere.  In the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, constitutional self-government is on the back foot, as polarization destroys societal trust and anti-liberal populist movements and leaders gain power.  Autocracy is becoming even more entrenched in the two giants, China and Russia. Some other countries proclaim the desire to be more like them.  Once seen as an inevitability, democracy now appears a fragile achievement. In world politics, there is an evolutionary dynamic which the international environment selects for some types of state.  Since World War II, the United States and other mature democracies have deliberately tried to preserve democracy at home by shaping the international environment through a liberal-internationalist foreign policy.  In the language of evolutionary theory, they have engaged in niche construction, altering their environment to “select for” constitutional self-government, and “select out” authoritarianism.  They enjoyed great success, but in recent decades, the niche has actually come to undermine democracy, favoring autocracy.  Liberalism itself has been transformed from its earlier classical forms to a cosmopolitan version that seeks to erase all barriers to economic and social interaction in the name of individual fulfillment.  Such cosmopolitan liberalism has provoked a cultural and economic backlash that acts to jeopardize constitutional democracy itself.  China and Russia meanwhile are constructing their own niches, reshaping the international order to select for autocracy.  Defending democracy from the outside will require a reformed liberal internationalism that will de-polarize electorates, restore solidarity among democracies, and be less inclusive of authoritarian regimes.  As the most powerful constitutional democracy, the United States retains the most important role in this reformation.

Biography

John M. Owen is Ambassador Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the Miller Center of Public Affairs, at the University of Virginia.  Owen is author of Confronting Political Islam (Princeton, 2015), The Clash of Ideas in World Politics (Princeton, 2010), and Liberal Peace, Liberal War (Cornell, 1997), and co-editor of Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (Columbia, 2011).  He has published scholarly papers in the European Journal of International Relations, European Journal of International Security, Global Policy, International Organization, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, International Politics, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, and several edited volumes.  His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Hedgehog Review, The Hill, The Washington Post, National Interest, The New York Times,and USA Today.  He is a former Editor-in-Chief of Security Studies; he serves on its editorial board and that of International Security.  Owen has held fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, the Free University of Berlin, and the WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center.  He is a recipient of a Humboldt Research Prize (2015).  He holds an AB from Duke, an MPA from Princeton, and a PhD from Harvard.  In Fall 2020, he is a Visiting Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of British Columbia.

Respondent: Tyler Chamberlain’s research interests sit at the intersection of philosophy and political science.  He is particularly interested in early modern political thought, conservatism, and the Classical Realist tradition in International Relations.  Tyler’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Canadian Political Science Review and The Canadian Journal of Political Science.”

Karl Mannheim 1942: “With the coming of the Renaissance and Liberalism, Christianity failed to remain the basic ferment and integrating force in social life… The spiritualization and regulation of human affairs, public and private, has gradually been left to the competing institutions in society… This secularization produced a stimulating variety of human experience… But the fact that the competing value systems cancelled each other out led to the neutralization of values in general. This is one of the reasons why liberal society at its present stage is handicapped in resisting the spiritual and political challenge coming from the totalitarian states… A liberal and competitive economy and its society can function quite well with neutralized values as long as there is no threat from within or without which makes a basic consensus imperative… [in which case] liberal education for intelligent partisanship… must gradually be replaced by a new education for responsible criticism, wherein consciousness of the whole is at least as important as awareness of your own interests… Such a new morality can only be achieved if the deepest sources of human regeneration assist the rebirth of society”.

Tolstoy predicts the current epidemic of fake news: “The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become” (The Kingdom of God is Within You – 1893).

https://ubcgfcf.com/foundations-of-democracy-agape-love/

Professor Benjamin Perrin

Associate Professor UBC Law

Senior Fellow MacDonald-Laurier Institute for Public Policy

Confronting Modern-Day Slavery: Human Trafficking in Canada

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 at 4 p.m.

Woodward (IRC) Room 1

120101_003 Audio  File

Abstract

Modern-day slavery is one of the most egregious human rights violations of our time. Human trafficking involving sexual exploitation and forced labour occurs around the world – including here in Canada. Professor Perrin will present the main findings from his study on human trafficking in Canada, including the shocking prevalence of Canadian women and girls as victims, and discuss how our country is responding to this hidden national tragedy.

Biography 

Benjamin Perrin is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Law and a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute for Public Policy. He is one of Canada’s leading authorities on human trafficking and author of Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking (Penguin, 2011), which was named one of the top books of the year by the Globe and Mail. Prof. Perrin has served as Special Advisor in the Office of the Prime Minister and Senior Policy Advisor to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. The U.S. State Department has recognized him as a “hero” acting to end modern-day slavery.

He received a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Calgary in 2001, a Juris Doctor from the University of Toronto in 2005, and a Master of Laws (with honours) from McGill University in 2007. He was called to the Bar in Ontario in 2007 and the Bar in British Columbia in 2010. Professor Perrin is an internationally recognized researcher and advocate for victims of crime. The Governor General of Canada and victims’ groups have also recognized him for his work to combat human trafficking and child sexual exploitation. Professor Perrin is the recipient of the Wilson-Prichard Award for Community and Professional Service from the University of Toronto. He is co-editor of Human Trafficking: Exploring the International Nature, Concerns, and Complexities (CRC Press, 2012), and editor of Modern Warfare: Armed Groups, Private Militaries, Humanitarian Organizations and the Law (UBC Press, 2012). He is also the author of numerous law review articles and book chapters, and regularly provides commentary in the media. Prior to joining UBC, he was a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, judicial intern at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, assistant director of the Special Court for Sierra Leone Legal Clinic (which assisted the Trial and Appeals Chambers), senior policy advisor to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, and executive director of a non-governmental organization that combats human trafficking.

Losing My Religion: The Reformation Era and the Secularization of Knowledge?

Wednesday, October 17, 2012  @ 4:00 p.m.  Woodward, Room 5, UBC

How did theology go from being “queen of the sciences” to exclusion from the secularized academy?  Standard narratives point to the emergence of modern science and critical humanistic scholarship as the keys to the eventual secularization of knowledge.  But as Brad Gregory argues in his new book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, the eventual secularization of knowledge was more paradoxical: it was a long-term result of the unresolved doctrinal disagreements that followed from the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and the political privileging of theology in the confessionally divided universities of early modern Europe.  This insulated theology from new knowledge and set it up in the modern era for an institutional fall from which it has never recovered.

Biography   http://history.nd.edu/faculty/directory/brad-s-gregory/

 Dr. Brad Gregory holds a PhD in History from Princeton University. His principal research interests center on Christianity in the Reformation era (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), including magisterial Protestantism, radical Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism approached comparatively and cross-confessionally. He is concerned to understand the long-term ideological influences and institutional consequences of the Reformation era on the making of the modern Western world, and to trace the postmodern condition back to the premodern world. Another of his areas of research and interest is methodology and theory in the understanding of religion and history. His publications include: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).
Co-editor, with Alister Chapman and J. R. D. Coffey, Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009)
”No Room for God? History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion,” History and Theory, 47 (2008): 495-519. Academic awards include the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2005,
and the Kaneb Teaching Award, College of Arts and Letters, Notre Dame, 2005

  Addendum: Please read at least the Introduction and Chapter Six  of Gregory’s book The Unintended Reformation before the lecture.

Dr. Gregory asks what propelled the West into its trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and he finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past. His analysis is as much about the present as the past; he identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not to disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.

 Find Gregory on YouTube

Further Graduate Student Dialogue http://ubcgcu.org

Comments on the Lecture by UBC Professors

I found his presentation well-delivered and clear. But I would put more explanatory power for the ending of Christendom in the shifting themes identified by sociologists like Peter Berger and philosophers like Charles Taylor. I don’t think the world we have lost since the Reformation could have been sustained by better magisterial efforts of theological faculties of universities in Europe and American. Gregory’s epistemological points in critiquing the hegemony of current naturalism in the physical sciences were certainly convincing, but hardly new. Historians tell stories, and Gregory’s story was superb.

George Egerton, Professor Emeritus History, UBC

This event was an intellectual treat. I have bought the book and am busily devouring it.
There are serious implications for our life as a conservative orthodox community which need airing more widely. My own church could usefully reflect on this with respect to the way in which schism has become a way of life for mainstream Protestantism.

Olav Slaymaker, Geography, UBC

Encouraging Note from Dr. Arnold Sikkema, PhD Physics from UBC

Thousands of students head off to university this fall with high anticipation to ply their future through higher education and skills training. Many will be a bit shocked to discover that major universities do not welcome through their gates their faith-based thinking. Is there any support for these students who respect scientific knowledge and have a strong faith?

During this past summer, a group of professors shared with me that they had established an introductory  course on Christianity at a public university.  Many students who took this course expressed surprise that it is possible to simultaneously be a Christian and an intellectually-fulfilled scholar. Especially in science, there is the widespread misconception that science has shown religion to be false or useless. However, many notable scholars worldwide provide articulate voices to the contrary. For example, the renowned Notre Dame Philosopher Alvin Plantinga in his important recent book Where the Conflict Really Lies (OUP, 2011), clearly demonstrates that there is  deep concord between the Christian worldview and contemporary science, while significant conflict between good science and naturalism/materialism.

The Canadian Scientific & Christian Affiliation (CSCA)  http://www.csca.ca/  is a lively organisation dedicated to promote mutually appreciative connections between science and the Christian faith, and to expose such intellectual dead ends as the conflict relationship model. This occurs within the scholarly and professional communities as well as in the church and society at large (confronting fears and misconceptions in both arenas). The Vancouver area has an active group, typically inviting one or more guest lecturers annually, hosting them at UBC, Regent College, as well as SFU, Trinity Western University and Redeemer Pacific. Our events are free and open to the public. This coming January 2013, we have invited Ian Hutchinson, a reputable Plasma Physicist from MIT. http://www.psfc.mit.edu/~hutch/

 Special Membership Note: Until the end of September, the CSCA is offering a 25% discount on membership. In addition, students can join free of charge. The association has much to offer, from scholarly resources to Christian fellowship. We encourage you to visit and become acquainted!

Arnold Sikkema, PhD Physics from UBC

Professor of Physics, Chair of Mathematical Sciences, Trinity Western University

Fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation, Vice President of CSCA