Winifred E. Weter Faculty Award Lecture for Meritorious Scholarship Est. 1975
The annual Winifred E. Weter Faculty Award Lecture for Meritorious Scholarship provides a public platform from which the claims of the liberal arts in the Christian university are espoused. Delivered each year by a SPU faculty member selected by the Faculty Affairs Committee, the Weter Lecture honors Winifred E. Weter, SPU professor emeriti of classics. Her teaching career spanning 40 years (1935-75) exemplifies a life of Christian character and integrity. Her love for the study of classical languages and literature inspired a similar enthusiasm in thousands of her students, and this lecture continues that tradition of inspiration. .
To listen to past Weter Lectures visit our University iTunes.
The 2010 Winifred E. Weter Lecture
The Chemical Constraints on Creation:
Natural Theology and Narrative Resonance
Benjamin J. McFarland, Associate Professor of Biochemistry
Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Demaray Hall 150
Benjamin J. McFarland, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Seattle Pacific University. The McFarland research group investigates what happens when the chemical interactions that bind proteins together are altered, optimized, or removed. They also use diverse chemical techniques to interrogate the changed proteins to understand the binding interaction and to design and build new protein therapeutics. Currently they are reshaping two proteins that, when they come together, incite an immune response against cancer. Dr. McFarland's articles have appeared in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Molecular Biology, Structure, Immunity, and others, of with student co-authors. His lab's most recent publication can be found on BMC Research Notes.
In the 2010 Winifred E. Weter Lecture, Dr. McFarland will describe how the periodic table of the elements and the laws of thermodynamics provide chemical constraints on how life could happen, to the point that we can know much of the procedure of creation. This gives the picture of a vast, deep, old universe in which life is constrained to follow a logical sequence of chemical development, a chemical creation story with many of the dramatic elements of narrative often found in books and movies. Dr. McFarland will tell this story in the context of scripture and the Christian community in order to help build a renewed, limited natural theology. This chemical sequence is not necessarily antithetical to the Biblical account, nor must it represent a "separate but equal" non-overlapping magisterium. Rather, it tells a distinct yet complementary story of creation from a unique viewpoint, one that can be integrated in a "dual vision" of nature and revelation.