The two-hour discussion, sponsored by the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, also featured science writer and author John Horgan and Brian Davies, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at Fordham and author of The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (Continuum International, 2006) Peter Steinfels, co-director of the Center on Religion and Culture, served as the forum’s moderator.

In his speech to a standing-room-only crowd at Pope Auditorium, Haught called upon the works of a wide range of intellectuals from the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., to scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi to address the seemingly contradictory notion raised by Charles Darwin and further explored by Albert Einstein that a universe governed by laws of science cannot include the kind of a personal god embraced by all major Western religions.

“After Darwin, certainly it’s possible to believe in a personal God,” Haught said. “But is it possible to do it honestly, with intellectual integrity, in an age of science?”  Einstein believed not, but Haught proposed that mathematician A.N. Whitehead’s notion of beauty as the ultimate purpose for creation and de Chardin’s embrace of a Noosphere, or “sphere of human thought,” show how faith and religion compliment, rather than compete with, science.

The event was the latest in the Center on Religion and Culture’s Headline Forum series exploring questions arising at the intersection of religion and culture. The center’s next event will be a discussion between Steinfels and José Casanova, Ph.D., professor sociology at the New School University, on the meaning of secularization and its impact. That forum will be held Dec. 5 at 6 p.m. at McNally Auditorium on the Lincoln Center campus.

Do these realities undermine any plausible notion of a personal God? John Haught, Ph.D., a leading theologian specializing in issues pertaining to science, cosmology, evolution, ecology and religion, will address that question on Tuesday, Nov. 6, at a forum open to the public at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus.

Haught is author of many books, including God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Westview Press, 1999) and the forthcoming God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. A Senior Fellow, Science and Religion, at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, he previously chaired Georgetown’s theology department.

On Tuesday, he will be questioned by two other thinkers with contrasting perspectives: John Horgan, a science writer acclaimed for his skeptical books The End of Science and Rational Mysticism, and Brian Davies, a professor of philosophy at Fordham and author of The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil.

The event is the latest in a series of Headline Forums sponsored by the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture in its programs exploring questions arising at the intersection of religion and culture. The forum will be held from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. in Pope Auditorium in the Lowenstein Center, 113 West 60th St.