Public Lecture Series 2013: Modern Science is Incompatible with Believing in God

Chair: Professor Dany Nobus
Speakers: Terry Young, Ian Kill, Clare Williams, Akram Khan

As a rational understanding of the formal mechanisms that rule our world, science is often considered to be something that cannot be combined with believing in the creative power of a divine agency. “God,” some scientists would say, “is just an acronym for the Genome Organizing Device, rather than the name of the Creator.” Yet what exactly is it in science that precludes believing in God? And instead of using science to disprove religion, shouldn’t we be looking for resonances and complementarities between the two? After all, even evolutionary theory does not seem to be able to come up with a robust answer to the question as to who or what is responsible for turning inorganic matter into organic life. And quite a few scientists seem perfectly capable of reconciling professional and religious values, without this fundamentally affecting their everyday work. Maybe Richard Feynman was right when he stated that much more can be known about the world than we will ever be able to prove. 

Speaker profiles 

Terry Young

Professor Young joined Brunel as Chair of Healthcare Systems after a career in industry which spanned research through to strategy in broadband businesses.

Having undertaken his PhD research in laser spectroscopy, he started his industrial career in 1985, designing and modelling photonic devices, and his research career developed to embrace many aspects of wideband system design and application analysis, yielding more than 30 journal and conference publications and eight patents.

Moving from project and line management into business development and then into corporate technology strategy, he took a special interest in information architectures for aerospace and defence, and then focused on healthcare systems.

His industrial experience of healthcare involved, firstly, a spell of device-oriented business development to identify ways of applying advanced technology to medical problems. This was followed by two years’ work with teams across the UK and in the US to develop business and service models for information-based healthcare systems. During this time he researched a nationwide IS architecture for healthcare.

In 2001 Professor Young joined Brunel University and has focused on the question of value in care delivery. To this end, he is currently the Principal Investigator of two major research collaboratives, one focused on medical devices and one on healthcare services. Both engage with industry and the public healthcare sector. MATCH (the Multidisciplinary Assessment of Technology Centre for Healthcare) is cited in the HITF report and focuses on value-based decision-making by medical device companies and governmental assessment agencies. RIGHT (Research into Global Healthcare Tools) is researching towards the development of a framework tool that will support the use of simulation and modelling by service delivery practitioners. Between them, they involve the universities of Birmingham, Brunel, Cambridge, Cardiff, Cranfield, Nottingham, Oxford Brookes, Southampton and Ulster, and are supported by grants, industrial and other funding in excess of £5.5M.

Professor Young's recent publications address healthcare technology in terms of commercial and investment decisions and also with respect to organisational aspects of uptake and adoption.

Ian Kill

Dr Ian Kill is a Graduate of Portsmouth Polytechnic (BSc) and of the University of Sussex (DPhil). His interest in ageing research began during his pre-doctoral work in the laboratory of Professor Sydney Shall (winner of the 2005 Cohen Medal).

From 1990 to 1995, Dr Kill was a Research Fellow in the laboratory of Professor Chris Hutchison where he continued to work on cellular ageing and the cell biology of the nuclear lamins. From 1995-1997, Dr Kill was a lecturer in cell biology at Dundee University.

In 1997 he joined Brunel University as a lecturer in human cell biology. His current research into cellular ageing involves reconstructing young and old skin in culture and understanding the cellular basis to the premature ageing diseases Hutchinson Gilford Progeria Syndrome and Werner Syndrome. In 2001, Dr Kill was appointed as Senior Lecturer.

In 2006 Dr Kill became the Director of the Centre for Cell and Chromosome Biology and in 2007 he became co-founder and Deputy Director of the Brunel Institute for Ageing Research. His work has been supported by the MRC, CRC, Royal Society, FEBS, BBSRC and Sparks. 

Clare Williams

Having previously worked as a nurse and health visitor for 22 years, Professor Williams was awarded her PhD in Sociology in 1998. Following 10 years at King’s College London, she joined the Department of Sociology and Communications at Brunel in 2011, where she is also Deputy Head of School (Research) for the School of Social Sciences.

In 2007, whilst at King’s, she helped establish and became the Director of the Centre for Biomedicine and Society. Although her interests are diverse, she is essentially a qualitative medical sociologist. Her research focuses on four inter-related areas: the sociology of biomedical ethics; gendered experiences of chronic illness; the sociology of medical/scientific professions; and the development of new medical technologies, particularly those which are seen as morally contested. Her current research, funded by a five year Wellcome Trust Strategic Award, explores the social, medical, scientific and ethical aspects of innovations in biomedicine.

Professor Williams is particularly interested in the connections between the scientific laboratory and patient treatment in the fields of reproduction, stem cell research, embryo donation and experimental neuroscience. She is also fascinated by the ways in which scientists and health practitioners reconcile their private, moral and professional perspectives – and how this affects their day to day work.  

Akram Khan

Professor Akram Khan is a world-leading researcher in the areas of fundamental and applied science. He has published extensively in a wide range of key academic journals. He has worked at most of the leading national laboratories in the world: DESY in Germany, CERN in Switzerland and SLAC in the USA.

He read Mathematics and Theoretical Physics for his Bachelor's degree at St Andrews University, taking his PhD in Experimental Particle Physics at University College London. Akram was a European Research Fellow at CIEMAT in Spain and at CERN in Switzerland, then a Senior Fellow at Edinburgh and Manchester Universities, going on to a faculty position at Stanford University, before joining Brunel University in 2003.

His recent research has been addressing the fundamental questions "What is the difference between matter and anti-matter?" and "What new exotic physics processes might help us to address the existing inadequacies of the Standard Model?" In the field of applied science, he is working on developing a novel particle cancer therapy machine in the UK, and on the next generation of internet technologies.