Public Lectures

With Denis Alexander

You’re invited to Regent's 2025 Evening Public Lecture series! Join us in the chapel or tune in online to explore theology, culture, and much more with this year’s summer faculty.

To livestream this and other Evening Public Lectures, visit us at rgnt.net/live.

About the Lecture

When people hear the word “evolution,” they often think that this biological theory involves only chance and random processes. This lecture will argue that this idea is mistaken. Others suggest that evolutionary history necessarily unfolds without any ultimate purpose. This lecture will show that recent biological data do not support such an idea. In practice, nearly everyone lives their daily lives with the idea that they have some purpose in life. Christians do the same. In fact, it turns out that the evolutionary story fits very well with the Christian belief that God has a purpose for the world in general and for us in particular.

About the Speaker

Dr. Denis Alexander is the Founding Director (Emeritus) of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge, where he is Emeritus Fellow of St. Edmund’s College. He is a past chair of the Molecular Immunology Programme and Head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signalling and Development at The Babraham Institute, Cambridge. He also previously served at the Imperial Cancer Research Laboratories in London (now Cancer Research UK) and spent fifteen years developing university departments and laboratories overseas, latterly as Associate Professor of Biochemistry in the Medical Faculty of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, where he helped to establish the National Unit of Human Genetics. From 1992 to 2013 he was editor of the journal Science and Christian Belief; he also served as a member of the executive committee of the International Society for Science and Religion. 

Dr. Alexander is teaching Current Issues in Science & Theology from May 26 to May 30 as part of Regent’s 2025 Summer Programs.