The interdisciplinary conference Entanglement or Separation? Contextual Investigations in Science and Religion will take place in the coastal city of Koper, Slovenia from 15th to 17th May 2025.
Conference Programme
Thursday, May 15
17:00 Registration
17:30-18:00 Welcome
18:00-19:00 First Keynote Lecture
Niels Henrik Gregersen "Ecology1, Ecology2, and Ecology3: Narratives of entanglement and disentanglement"
Friday, May 16
9:00-10:30 Short papers
Alina Therese Lettner "Stepping Into The Quantum, Breaking Habits of Mind – A Buddhist appraisal of the
neurotheological entanglements between science and religion in spiritual healing"
Gorazd Andrejč "A Critique of the New Ontological-Ethical Interpretations of Quantum Physics"
Tibor Hrs Pandur "Nikola Tesla's Mechanistic Model of 'Human Energy' in Light of New Textual Evidence"
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:00 Second Keynote Lecture
Todd Weir "Disentangling Science and Religion with Conceptual History: The case of 'worldview'"
12:00-13:30 Lunch + break
13:30-15:00 Short papers
Anders Skou Jørgensen "Zhuangzi, Contextualism, and Skepticism in Contemporary Ethology"
Nadja Furlan Štante "Ecofeminist Epistemology Bridging Separation and Promoting Entanglement of
Religion and Science"
Kevin Smith "William James’ Pragmatist Intertwining of Science and Religion"
15:00-15:30 Coffee break
15:30-16:30 Book launch: Lenart Škof, God in Post-Christianity (SUNY, 2024), with discussants Ted Peters and Niels Henrik Gregersen
16:30-17:00 break
17:00-18:00 Third Keynote Lecture
Ted Peters “Ten Models of War, Truce, and Partnership”
Saturday, May 17
9:00-10:00 Short papers
Giuseppe Cuscito "From Flat Earth To Ancient Aliens: the Bible as a “scientific” source in the 21st century"
Lenart Škof "Prolegomena to Re-enchanted Theology"
10:00-10:30 Coffee break
10:30-11:30 Fourth Keynote Lecture
Noreen Herzfeld “Where the Rubber Hits the Road: Technology as meeting point for science and religion”
11:30-12:30 Discussion and closing
The conference venue is the ZRS Koper Centre for Humanities, located in a historic Tiepolo-Gravisi Villa in Koper, Slovenia: https://www.zrs-kp.si/en/centre-for-humanities/
Due to additional funding available, there will be no attendance fees for attending, or presenting at, this conference. The tea/coffee during breaks will be provided by the hosting institution, ZRS Koper. While the Call for Papers is already closed, you can still contact Dr. Gorazd Andrejč (g.andrejc[at]rug.nl) and Professor Noreen Herzfeld (NHerzfeld[at]csbsju.edu) with any questions regarding attendance of the conference without paper presentation.
Conference theme and description
This conference is providing a space to present and debate recent research in different disciplines – including but not limited to philosophy, theology, religious studies, sociology, anthropology and history – on the topic of the entanglement and/or separation of science and religion. The papers are addressing the conference theme from different domains of science and any religious or spiritual perspective, either historically or in the present context and/or practice of a particular scientific discipline or religion.
In a recent blog for the International Society for Science and Religion, Fraser Watts discusses new trends in science and religion, such as decreased interest in harmonizing science and religion and “more interest in how they can both contribute to human flourishing”, as well as a new focus on the “scientific study of how the relationship between science and religion is approached and perceived” (Watts 2025). Another significant trend, we suggest, has been an ever-stronger emphasis on the ‘intertwinement’ and ‘entanglement’ of science, religion, and technology (c.f. Harrison & Tyson 2022, Kotva 2022, Him Ip 2022, Alexander 2020, Fehige 2023). While the central questions that informed the science and religion field in the 1990s and early 2000s were about ways in which the methods or knowledge of a particular scientific sub-field (e.g. biological evolution, cosmology, quantum physics) could or should be related to religion and theology, a more recent trend has been to argue that religious ideas and values, such as the idea of divine creation (Coecklebergh 2015) and the religious “longing for transcendence” (Herzfeld 2022) are inseparably intertwined with the aims and practices of modern science and technology. In this emerging picture, one that goes beyond the ‘dialogue’ model of science and religion, the two domains often appear enmeshed and inseparable.
A much smaller trend is a renewed interest in ‘separation’ and ‘independence’ models of science and religion no longer based on Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA (e.g. Andrejc 2023; Hassani 2024). In what sense can, and in what sense should (if they should), the practices, reasoning, claims and methods of science be separate from religious values, beliefs, and practices? How does the context of scientific practice today, where scientific procedures are increasingly delegated to machines, relate to religious or spiritual practices, beliefs and values? How do the relations between the scientific and the religious/spiritual now differ from those of the past, if at all?
These questions will be discussed at the conference not only from philosophical as well as theological perspectives, but also in the context of new research that focuses primarily on particular sciences, addressing both contemporary and historical case studies.
This conference is organized by the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the Science and Research Centre of Koper, Slovenia. It is a part of the research programme Constructive Theology in the Age of Digital Culture and Anthropocene, funded by Slovenian Research Agency (ARIS; programme code: P6-0434).