Gifford Lectures Revisited:

Reflections of Seven Templeton laureates

— British Academy, London 2012

Gifford Lectures Revisited: Reflections of Seven Templeton Laureates. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/70422

An event of interviews and lectures, honoring the seven living persons who have both given the Gifford Lectures and been awarded the Templeton Prize, held June 1, 2012, at the British Academy, London. 43 mins. 33 secs.

Natural and cultural history on Earth is a cybernetic process, a creative generate-and-test process, resulting in our planetary wonderland of biodiversity. With the emergence of humans, endowed with unique cognitive faculties, including language and the transmission of ideas from mind to mind, this creative genesis occurs in novel and even more spectacular ways. Humans are the only species that reflects on where we are, who we are, and what we ought to do. Cybernetics generates caring, increasingly in sentient life. This cybernetic process is also cruciform. Life is suffering through to something higher. Life has its logos, its logic, its history; life has its pathos. Life is in prolific and pathetic. The fertility is close-coupled with the struggle. Biologists find life perpetually regenerated; theologians find life perpetually "redeemed." Both in the divine Logos once incarnate in Palestine and in the life incarnate on Earth for millennia before that: "Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."

Rolston is first interviewed by Simon Burton and then gives a talk.

Photograph featuring Dr. Rolston and other Templeton laureates. Left to right: Charles Taylor (2007 laureate, Catholic philosopher, McGill University, Canada), Freeman Dyson (2000 laureate, physicist, Princeton University), John Polkinghorne (2002 laureate, physicist and Anglican priest, Cambridge University), John Barrow (2006 laureate, cosmologist, mathematician, Cambridge University), Ian Barbour (1999 laureate, physicist, Carleton College), Holmes Rolston (2003 laureate, philosopher, Colorado State University),and Martin Rees (2011 laureate, astrophysics, cosmology, Cambridge University).