Lectures - 2006 Overview In Search of Truth

Richard D. Lamm (Friday, June 9 at 7:00 pm)

Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver, and the former three-term Governor of Colorado (1975-1987).

Richard Lamm joined the faculty of the University of Denver in 1969 and has, except for his years as Governor, been associated with the University ever since. Lamm has appeared on virtually every national news program, including Buchanan & Press (MSNBC), Larry King Live and Inside Politics (CNN), Today (NBC), Meet the Press (NBC), ABC's Good Morning America, Lehrer NewsHour (PBS), and CBS's Face the Nation. His editorials have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, as well as in a number of academic and medical journals. While Governor, Lamm wrote or co-wrote six books: A California Conspiracy, Megatraumas: America in the Year 2000, The Immigration

Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America, Pioneers & Politicians and The Angry West. His two latest books are: The Brave New World of Healthcare and Two Wands, One Nation: an Essay on Race and Community in America. Lamm was an early leader of the environmental movement, and was President of the First National Conference on Population and The Environment.

In Friday's session, "The Brave New World of Public Policy," Mr. Lamm will discuss issues of public policy, it is never static, it is always in flux. The retirement of the baby boomers, climate change, our changing demography, all these and more make for a challenging future. The only constant will be change.

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Dr. Robert Mann (Thursday, July 13 and Friday July 14 at 7:00 pm)

Chair of the Physics Department at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He has published over 200 articles in scientific journals, and has given over 150 invited talks.

Dr. Robert Mann is an affiliate member of the newly-established Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and has served on several academic and scientific advisory boards, including two grant selections committees of the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Ontario College of Graduate Studies, and the Institute for Quantum Computing. His research interests are in black holes, quantum gravity, particle physics, quantum information, chaotic phenomena, and the relationship between science and religion. He is a Templeton Course Prize winner for his course on "Faith & Science Faith."

In Thursday's session Dr. Mann will discuss the long-standing goal of physics, which has been to unify all of the phenomena of nature into one complete and coherent

picture. Such a goal - if realized - would yield the ultimate theory of everything. In this lecture he will describe what is involved in constructing a theory of everything, and discuss to some extent string theory, today's most promising candidate to this end. He will then turn to the theological implications of this endeavor.

Friday's session will address the theoretical work on the theory of everything and recent scientific observations in cosmology that suggest a new task: explaining why there is something rather than everything. Dr. Mann's will explore his antidote the "altiverse: a set of possible alternatives that logically exist but are not physically realized."

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Jeremy Adams (Friday, August 11 at 7:00 pm and Saturday, August 12 at 10:00 am)

Author Of: Multicultural New Orleans, Joan of Arc: Her Story, Condemned to Repeat It, The "Populus" of Augustine and Jerome: A Study in the Patristic Sense of Community.

Jeremy Adams was educated at Jesuit High School, New Orleans; Georgetown College, Washington, D.C.; Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass. (A.B. magna cum laude in history, 1955); Harvard University (A.M., 1961; Ph.D. in history, 1967). He was a Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, from 1974 - 2004. Since 2004 he has been an Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor.

His bibliography of published writings includes 6 books and more than 40 scholarly articles. He has also lectured throughout the world. He was Resident Professor, S.M.U. in Spain (Madrid & Toledo), Oxford, and Paris and director in Spain (Madrid and Toledo) and Paris. Dr. Adams is currently rewriting his cultural history book, "Multicultural

New Orleans," from a post- Katrina perspective.

In Friday's session Dr. Adams will discuss Cicero's intention to synthesize the best Greek philosophies of his day, and to provide his native Latin a philosophical vocabulary it had never developed. Most of this ambitious project was done in periods of Cicero's retirement from political life, but these periods were too brief for him to achieve that goal. Success would come over the next two millennia.

Saturday's session will focus on the Ciceronisms of the Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, and even Modern eras: politics, ethics, and literary culture - even maybe chivalry?

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Dr. Michael Shermer (Friday, September 15 at 7:00 pm)

Publisher, Skeptic magazine, columnist Scientific American, bestselling author and the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com), the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the co-host and producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown.

He is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin's Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God.

Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He was a college professor for 20 years (1979-1998), teaching psychology, evolution, and the history of science at Occidental College, California State University Los Angeles, and Glendale College.

In Friday's session "Why Darwin Matters: The Case for Evolution and Against Intelligent Design," historian of science Michael Shermer diffuses these fears by examining what evolution really is, how we know it happened, and how to test it. Shermer then discusses what science is through a brief history of the evolution-creation controversy from the Scopes "Monkey" trial of 1925, through the U.S. Supreme Court case of 1987, to the ongoing trials today, demonstrating clearly how and why creationism and Intelligent Design theory are not science. Dr. Shermer also builds a powerful case for evolution as the scientific theory that most closely parallels the Christian model of human nature and the conservative model of free market economics.

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