Professor Neil Spurway

Formerly Chair of the Science and Religion Forum

Neil has taught introductory Philosophy of Science courses to PhD and final-year BSc students in Glasgow throughout the last 45 years. He has also chaired the University's Gifford Lectureships committee, and edited the Centenary Series of those lectures on Nature, Environment and God (Blackwell 1993).

On retirement, he became editor of ESSSAT News, the members' journal of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology, only demitting office to become ESSSAT’s Vice President for Conference, responsible for the XIIIth European Conference on Science and Theology (Edinburgh, 2010), on the theme ‘Is Religion Natural?’

He has also Chaired the UK’s Science and Religion Forum, and has just completed a term as President of the Scottish Church Theology Society.

Publications

Genetics and Molecular Biology of Muscle Adaptation (with H. Wackerhage) was published by Elsevier in 2006.

Neil has also edited four of the Science and Religion Forum's conference proceedings, all from Cambridge Scholars' Publishing:

Creation and the Abrahamic Faiths (2008)
Theology, Evolution and the Mind (2009)
Laws of Nature, Laws of God? (2015)
Forty Years of Science and Religion (with L Hickman, 2016)

He writes particularly on the implications of evolutionary thought for theology.

Lecture titles

Science and Religion in the Third Millennium
Does a finite age for the universe point to divine creation? Do quantum indeterminacy, the immanent God suggested by Darwinian thought, the suffering implied by natural selection, or the apparently material substrate of mind, encourage us to embrace or reject a theistic view of the universe?
Taking Darwin Seriously
Darwinian thought implied the immanence of God in nature, but the pain inherent in natural selection also challenges simplistic views of God’s power, and calls us back to the suffering love of Jesus on the cross.
The Evolution of Mind, and its Implications for Theology
Our mental powers must be as directly the products of natural selection as our physical characteristics. What does this imply for our ability to form valid concepts of non-terrestrial existence, and the nature of deity?