Nick Spencer and Peter Harrison | COSAC 2026 Conversations

A preview of COSAC 2026 with keynote speakers Peter Harrison and Nick Spencer. Hear them both at the Friday public lecture and the conference, 6–8 November in Melbourne and online: https://cosac.iscast.org/#register Recorded online ahead of ISCAST's 15th biennial Conference on Science and Christianity. Peter Harrison questions the common assumption that a scientific theory must be true because it works. Drawing on Aquinas, Copernicus and Newton, he argues that the modern sciences have aimed more at prediction and usefulness than at truth, and considers what that means for faith and science. Nick Spencer traces a tradition running from John Philoponus to Galileo and the priest and physicist Georges Lemaître, which holds that scripture is concerned with salvation rather than the workings of the heavens. Taking issue with Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria", he argues that science and religion do overlap on the question of what kind of creatures human beings are. Afterwards, they take questions from the audience. 0:00 Welcome 1:16 Getting to know Peter Harrison and Nick Spencer 16:46 Peter Harrison: Does science give us truth or usefulness? 33:50 Nick Spencer: Where science and religion overlap 48:59 Audience Q&A 58:58 Join us at COSAC 2026 Speakers: Peter Harrison is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland. He was previously the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford and subsequently an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. His most recent book is Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (Cambridge, 2024). Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos. He is the author of a number of books and reports, most recently, The Landscapes of Science and Religion (OUP, 2025), Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity (2024), and Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion (Oneworld, 2023). His next book, on Christianity and the Future of Welfare is due out with Cambridge University Press in 2026. Nick is host of the Theos podcast Reading Our Times, and outside Theos he is Honorary Professor at the World Religions and Education Research Unit, Bishop Grosseteste University; Visiting Research Fellow at St John's College, Durham; Visiting Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University College, London; and Fellow of the International Society of Science and Religion. He tweets infrequently @theosnick. ________________________________ DISCLAIMER ISCAST’s aim is to generate a constructive conversation and, while ISCAST is committed to orthodox Christian faith and mainstream science, speakers may come from a range of positions and do not represent ISCAST. ________________________________ FOLLOW ISCAST: Website: https://iscast.org/ Facebook:   / iscast   Instagram:   / iscast   LinkedIn:   / iscast