The International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) is an international learned society and research organisation that promotes scholarly study of the relationships between the natural sciences and the world's religious traditions. Founded in 2002 after a four-day conference in Granada, Spain, the Society elects Fellows through peer nomination and brings together natural scientists, historians, philosophers, theologians and educators to support interdisciplinary learning and research in an international and multi-faith context.
ISSR's inaugural President was the theoretical physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, who was succeeded by the cosmologist George Ellis; both received the Templeton Prize, an early indication of the calibre of the Society's leadership. The Society is governed by an executive committee chaired by a President elected from among the Fellowship, and its day-to-day administration is led by an Executive Secretary and assistant director. Members hold the post-nominal letters FISSR (Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion); the inaugural cohort of 97 founding Fellows included five Fellows of the Royal Society.
The Society's principal activities are research projects funded by major foundations, an annual or biennial international conference, publication programmes (including the ISSR Library and an annual international Book Prize), public statements on issues at the science-religion interface, and the curation of the Boyle Lectures on Science and Religion, which it has co-organised with the London church of St Mary-le-Bow since the series' modern revival in 2004. Although headquartered in the United Kingdom, registered in England as a charity, ISSR's Fellowship is global, drawing scholars from Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
ISSR has issued public statements on contentious questions at the science-religion boundary, most notably a 2008 statement on intelligent design, which the Society concluded was "neither sound science nor good theology."
History
Foundation and the Granada conference The Society was established in 2002 from the express intention of John Templeton in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. His John Templeton Foundation created the legal and operational framework which bore the Society. ISSR took shape after a four-day inaugural conference held in Granada, Spain - a city which, as the Society notes on its own publications, "until the late 15th century was the centre of peaceful discourse between scholars of Judaism, Christianity and Islam." The choice of Granada reflected an explicit aspiration that the new Society engage the sciences in dialogue with multiple religious traditions rather than with Christianity alone.
Founding fellowship The first cohort of Fellows numbered at 97 and included five Fellows of the Royal Society. The early Fellowship was multi-faith from the outset, and the founding contributors to the Society's first edited volume, Why the Science and Religion Dialogue Matters (Watts and Dutton, eds, 2006), included contributors John Polkinghorne, George Ellis, Holmes Rolston III and Fraser Watts writing from Christian perspectives; Carl Feit on Judaism; Munawar Anees on Islam; B. V. Subbarayappa on Hinduism; Trinh Xuan Thuan on Buddhism; and Heup Young Kim on Asian Christianity.
Subsequent development After the Granada conference, the Society held a sequence of major international meetings. A 2004 conference in Boston, "Creation: Probability and Law," culminated in a public lecture by three Templeton Prize-winning Fellows. A 2006 Cambridge conference, "Understanding Humans in a Scientific Age," gave rise to the edited volume Human Identity at the Intersection of Science, Technology and Religion (Murphy and Knight, Ashgate, 2010). In 2009 the Society convened "Evolution, Religion and Suffering" at the University of Cambridge; in 2010 it marked the eightieth birthday of its founding President with a "God and Physics" conference at St Anne's College and the Clarendon Laboratory, at the University of Oxford. Subsequent meetings were held in Sharjah (2011, jointly with the British Council and the American University of Sharjah), Loccum (2012), Baltimore (2013), Vienna (2015, with Sigmund Freud University), Puebla (2017, with Latin-American partners), Oxford (2017, with the Ian Ramsey Centre), Lyon and Pretoria (2018), and through joint programming with the American Academy of Religion in the United States, which continues today and shared on the ISSR YouTube channel.
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the Society to develop digital formats for its public lectures and conferences. From the 2021 Boyle Lecture onward, under the management of the assistant director, Anthony K Nairn, recordings have been released through the ISSR YouTube channel and followed by live online discussion panels with the Lecturer, Respondent, and an expert panel.
Mission and aims The Society describes itself as "dedicated to advancing education through interdisciplinary learning and research in the fields of science and religion, broadly understood." In a statement on the Society's homepage, the current President, theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen, characterises ISSR's purpose as "to be a scholarly society that promotes rigorous research on and balanced understandings of two central cultural forces of yesterday and today," noting that Fellows examine the science-religion relationship "from the perspective of many different disciplines, from physics and biology to psychology and the social sciences onwards to theology and philosophy." The Society's stated aim is "to include in our membership the leading figures around the world concerned with science and religion, and to advance the exploration of their interface for the benefit of all."
Governance
Structure ISSR is led by a President, elected from among the Fellowship, and an executive committee. The Society's day-to-day operations are administered by an Executive Secretary, Fraser Watts, and the assistant director, Anthony K Nairn.
Current officers (as of 2026) The Society's officers, drawn from its public Officers page, are listed below.
Leadership
President - Niels Henrik Gregersen Vice-president - Edward Larson Programs Officer - Nancy Howell
Executive
Ron Cole-Turner Jeffrey Schloss Shoaib Malik Berry Billingsley Noah Efron Ignacio Silva Kate Rigby Bethany Sollereder Josh Reeves
Past presidents
John Polkinghorne (founding President) George Ellis Sir Brian Heap John Hedley Brooke (2008—2011) Michael J. Reiss Niels Henrik Gregersen (current)
Policies The Society published a Code of Conduct and is, as of early 2026, developing further policies on research integrity and misconduct, data protection, risk management, whistleblowing, anti-fraud and bribery, and travel and subsistence. The executive committee undertakes to review these policies every two years.
Fellowship
Election and post-nominal letters Election to Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion is by nomination only. Successful nominees become entitled to use the post-nominal letters FISSR upon completion of the ISSR nomination. The society also recognises a senior category of honorary fellows, who use the post-nominal HonFISSR.
Nomination criteria The Society's published criteria recognise four pathways to nomination: significant contributions to science-and-religion scholarship; excellence in one of the constituent disciplines combined with sustained engagement in science-religion dialogue; organisational and entrepreneurial work in the field; and outstanding promise demonstrated by early-career scholars.
Size, disciplinary and geographic distribution ISSR has nearly 450 Fellows across the globe. Members are drawn from natural sciences (e.g. physics, astronomy, biology, neuroscience), psychology and the social sciences, history and philosophy of science, philosophy, theology and religious studies, and education research. The Society notes geographic representation including South Korea, India, Hong Kong, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more. Although many founders worked from a Christian background, the Fellowship has from the outset included all faith traditions and non-belief frameworks, including Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and atheist scholars.
Honorary fellows ISSR currently has twelve honorary fellows, several of which are Templeton Prize laureates and senior figures from international science and theology areas of research.
Examples include:
Francisco Ayala John Hedley Brooke Francis S. Collins Marcelo Gleiser Martin Rees Michael Reiss Holmes Rolston III
Deceased fellows The Society maintains a record of deceased Fellows. Among them are the physicist Ian Barbour, widely regarded as a founder of the modern science-and-religion field; the historian of astronomy Owen Gingerich (Harvard University); the sociologist Peter Berger (Boston University); the cosmologist John D. Barrow (Cambridge); the climate scientist Sir John Houghton, founding co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I; the physicist of nuclear and complex matter Tom McLeish (Durham and York); the philosopher of physics Bernard d'Espagnat; the geneticist R. J. ("Sam") Berry (UCL); the statistician David Bartholomew (LSE); the historian of science David Lindberg; the Catholic theologian Denis Edwards; and the Pamplona-based natural philosopher Mariano Artigas, among others.
Notable currently active fellows (selection)
Denis Alexander John Hedley Brooke Nancy Cartwright Philip Clayton Andrew Davison Celia E. Deane-Drummond Ilia Delio Marius Dorobantu Robin Dunbar John H. Evans Robert Geraci Ursula Goodenough John F. Haught Terence Keel Robert Lawrence Kuhn Joanna Leidenhag Shoaib Malik Alister McGrath Nancey Murphy Arthur Petersen Robert Pollack Robert John Russell Jennifer Wiseman
Activities and programmes
The Boyle Lectures
Since 2004 ISSR has been integrally involved in the modern Boyle Lectures on Science and Religion, held annually at the Christopher Wren church of St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside in the City of London. The original Boyle Lectures were a series of sermons delivered at several London and Westminster churches following their endowment in 1692 by the natural philosopher Robert Boyle; that original series ran until around 1730, after which only sporadic Boyle Lectures were given.
The modern Lectures are administered by the Board of the Boyle Lectures together with the Rector and Churchwardens of St Mary-le-Bow, with ISSR taking the central role in management and operation. The format consists of a Lecture delivered by a prominent figure in the sciences or in religion, followed by a Response from a figure of equal standing. Since the 2021 Lecture by Tom McLeish, delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic, ISSR has hosted the "Digital Boyle Lecture" on YouTube, followed by a live online discussion panel led by the ISSR President.
The lecturers since the revival have been as follows.