Concept
Karl E. Peters
Overview
Karl Edward Peters (6 June 1939 - 12 February 2025) was a professor emeritus of religion at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, and former adjunct professor of philosophy, University of Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut and adjunct professor of religion and science, Meadville Lombard Theological School, Chicago. He also is the former editor and then co-editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, and is a founder, organizer, and first president of the University Unitarian Universalist Society in central Florida. His scholarly research and teaching focuses on issues in science and religion, including the concept of God and evolution, epistemology in science and religion, world religions and the environment, and religious and philosophical issues in medicine.
Peters has been for many years a member and lecturer at the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, where he has been active in the development of Religious Naturalism. He has six times served as co-chair of the annual conference.
2014 - Science and Religion in a Globalizing World
2011 - Doing Good, Doing Bad, Doing Nothing: Scientific and Religious Perspectives
2005 - Varieties of Spiritual Transformation: Scientific and Religious Perspectives
1997 - The Evolution of Morality
1992 - Global Ecology and Human Destiny
1986 - Free Will: Is It Possible and Is it Desirable?
1978 - The Future of the Child: Religious and Scientific Perspectives
Peters' current focus in on developing a Christian Religious Naturalism.
He died in 2025.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The confession of impotence, the abandonment of the programmatic intent is due to identification of the ideal with metaphysical fact, to the hypostasis of the ideal. With Christianism, that being a philosophy operating as a religion, world-weariness made the apology unnecessary and converted the hypostasis into the basis of that program of complete surrender of the attempt to master the problems of existence upon…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
States what Karl E. Peters is.
In this sense a man is a “free thinker” if he is not a Christian or a Mussulman or a Buddhist or a Shintoist or a member of any of the other bodies of men who accept some inherited orthodoxy. In Christian countries a man is called a “free thinker” if he does not decidedly believe in God, though this would not suffice to make a man a “free thinker” in a Buddhist country. I do not wish to minimize the importance of…
Bertrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda
States what Karl E. Peters is.
This was the primary cause of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the industrial revolution. It was also, very directly, the cause of the decay of dogmatic religion. The study of classical texts and early Church history, Copernican astronomy and physics, Darwinian biology and comparative anthropology, have each in turn battered down some part of the edifice of Catholic dogma, until, for almost all thinking and…
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
Close in meaning to Karl E. Peters; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Doctor of Philosophy
- United States
- Columbia University
- Chicago
- Institute on Religion in an Age of Science
Place in the tradition
Part of Religious naturalism.