Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge the gracious support of the University of
California, Santa Barbara, for sponsoring our Science, Religion, and
the Human Experience lecture series from January 2001 through
May 2003, and the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation in
providing primary financial assistance for this three-year adventure
in ideas. Public institutions of higher education and private philan-
thropic organizations serve quite different agendas, but the success-
ful collaboration of UCSB and the John Templeton Foundation is ev-
idenced by the consistently strong university and community
participation our lecture series enjoyed, and the wide range of schol-
arly viewpoints that were presented and discussed.
Special thanks are due to Billy Grassie and the Metanexus Insti-
tute for ably administering the Templeton Research Lectures Series
on the Constructive Engagement of Science and Religion, of which
UC Santa Barbara was an initial awardee. Charles Harper, executive
director of the John Templeton Foundation, Pamela Thompson, vice
president for communications, and Paul Wason, director of science
and religion programs, provided frequent and abundant support.
We were grateful to receive dedicated and high-quality adminis-
trative and logistic support at UCSB via the College of Letters and
Science, the Office of Institutional Advancement (in particular, the
Public Affairs Office, Office of Public Events, and Office of Develop-
ment), the Office of Instructional Resources, and the Institute for
Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research. Support spanned the
entire campus, from the Institute for Theoretical Physics to the In-
terdisciplinary Humanities Center, and included a diverse faculty