On Sunday, November 8, 2026, Melbourne time (Saturday, November 7, in the United Kingdom and the United States), I presented online at COSAC 2026, the fifteenth biennial conference of ISCAST, “Entangled Worlds: Seeking Understanding Through Faith and Science,” held in Melbourne and online.
The paper
“Beyond the Bridge, Across the Globe: A Decentralized Model for Science-Engaged Theology for Entangled Worlds”
Printed in the conference program as “Beyond the Bridge, Across the Globe: A Decentralized ‘Starlink’ Model for Science-Engaged Theology and Its Chinese Qi-Pneumatological Node.”
Abstract
The field of science and religion still pictures itself as a bridge—a single span joining two fixed banks—and the metaphor has quietly universalized one Western, centralized conversation. I argue that the field’s future lies not in a better bridge but in a different topology: a decentralized constellation of contextual dialogues, networked yet irreducibly plural, which I have called the Starlink model. I then run one node through it. Retrieved from Tang-dynasty Jingjiao, a Chinese qi-pneumatology reframes creation not as a bounded object but as a field of the Spirit’s activity, meeting field-theoretic accounts of nature on their own ground. With Philip Clayton (2009), I claim fit and coherence rather than entailment: physics constrains theology weakly, and weakly is enough. Such a node is the diverse gift an “after science and religion” field requires—science-engaged theology done beyond the Western academy, pastorally rooted, and generously entangled.
The abstract above is the one submitted to the conference.
Event
- COSAC 2026, “Entangled Worlds: Seeking Understanding Through Faith and Science,” the fifteenth biennial ISCAST conference
- Melbourne, Australia, and online
- Sunday, November 8, 2026, 9:00–9:30 a.m. AEDT (Saturday, November 7, 10:00–10:30 p.m. GMT): 20 minutes plus 10 minutes of discussion
- Presented online (Room 1)
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