And So It Goes

Being a religious leader is hard: Having the authority to tell people (of the same faith traditions) what should be considered right and wrong is always going to rile some up. We feel strongly about our values. Likewise, trying to explore consonances between evolutionary and theological ethics won’t sit well with some religious folk. I hope that if the dissertation is read in its entirety, such individuals might at least understand the intent behind it and appreciate the pains taken…

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Researching this portion of the dissertation acquainted me with the writings of Tim Lewens, philosophy professor at the HPS department in the University of Cambridge. He became my MPhil supervisor when I went there to further my graduate studies (2016-2017). One more main part to go before the conclusion. 4. Assessing the Levels of Certainty Required for Science The literature on the broad topic of evolutionary ethics is vast. The debates concerning the legitimacy of the enterprise stretch back to…

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For context, read the description in Part 1. In this part, we move on to the second part of the dissertation, which is about meta-ethics and some philosophy of biology. Researching this portion of the dissertation stoked my interest in philosophy of biology and planted the seeds for my eventual move to the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) department at the University of Cambridge to further my graduate studies in 2017. Researching this and the next part of the…

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The components of the master’s degree at the University of Oxford include two essays (one on Edward Wilson and the other on Intellectual Humility), one dissertation (which will be included in these forthcoming series of posts), a written exam that cannot be reproduced here, and one oral defense of any aspect of the above essays. The master’s dissertation that I’m posting here is about the potential synergistic relationship between evolutionary and theological ethics. Sounds abstruse, but if you invest effort…

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Intellectual humility (and related concepts) entered the public consciousness following several public intellectuals’ coverage if it in the latter half of the last decade. They include Adam Grant’s Think Again, Julia Galef’s Scout Mindset, David Robson’s Intelligence Trap, and Steve Pinker’s book on rationality. The foregrounding work, which included conceptualizing the term and ensuring construct validity happened earlier. It was at this time that intellectual humility was the subject of my essay on its relationship with religious belief (i.e., American…

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Having extensively researched aspects of evolutionary theory, including the work of Edward O. Wilson, for my Durham master’s thesis, I chose to devote my first assessable essay for the MSt in Science and Religion at the University of Oxford (2016) to making an original contribution to understanding Wilson’s intellectual biography. An important figure in evolutionary theory, Wilson was among the first to apply evolutionary theory to social and cultural contexts without degenerating into social Darwinism. People know him as the…

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After completing the master’s in theology and religion at Durham University (2014-2015), I moved to the University of Oxford to pursue a specialization in science and religion with the Faculty of Divinity’s (now called Theology and Religion) science and religion MSt program (2015-2016).   Oxford was the first (and only) place I encountered individuals who possessed unparalleled such raw intelligence (processing speed) and capacity for abstraction (in undergraduate philosophy classes) that I wondered if we were the same species. In…

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This is the fifth and final part of the master’s thesis on science and religion at Durham University (2015). It took close to 12 months to complete and submit the paper, and I was immensely grateful to my supervisor Professor Wilkinson for seeing me through the whole process successfully. He warned that science and religion type essays tend not to grade well, because, theologians tend to be intellectually tribalistic about their discipline. Thankfully, I managed to get decent results which…

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The fourth part of the master’s thesis on science and religion at Durham University (2015) is where I explore consonances between the doctrine of sin and the evolutionary social sciences. It’s the crux of the thesis. Stitching together two fields of inquiry typically yields interesting and useful insights. It may be career suicide for an academic, but since a strict academic career was not the path for me, I chose to pursue less-trodden pathways between established roads. Serious and sustained…

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The third part of the master’s thesis on science and religion at Durham University (2015) describes the doctrine of sin common to the great Christian traditions. I leveraged my training in biblical languages and prior research from all my other essays. And I combined these with a study of the doctrine by contemporary theologians at the cutting edge. The point of describing a nuanced and robust doctrine of sin was to find resonances between it and modern social scientific accounts…

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