The Scholarship & Christianity in Oxford (SCIO) organization has chosen Samford University professor Steve Donaldson to participate in its “Bridging the Two Cultures of Science and the Humanities” project in Oxford, England.

The program, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, fosters in participants the interdisciplinary skills and understanding central to the study of science and religion.

Donaldson, a mathematics and computer sciences professor, is a co-founder and senior fellow of Samford’s Center for Science and Religion. “It’s a great opportunity, personally, but also for Samford to have somebody in this program,” he said of the SCIO honor.

In the summers of 2015 and 2016, Donaldson will join 25 other participants from universities around the world for seminars in Oxford, and will work on an original research project. The two month-long seminars will include lectures by eminent scholars in science and religion, mentoring, tutorials and cultural activities related to the study of science and religion.

Donaldson’s proposed project will build upon the Center for Science and Religion’s ongoing, Templeton-funded exploration of neural evolution, but will allow him to focus more intently on the questions of cognition and consciousness that interest him most.

“If you’re going to have a relationship with God it’s going to somehow be built around the fact that you’re an intelligent, conscious being,” Donaldson said as he described his proposed SCIO project. He wonders at what point the creatures humans once were became capable of the divine/human relationship, how evolution might continue to change humans and change that relationship, and what role new technology might play in advancing both evolution and religion. “There are some deep theological questions that spin out of the science,” he said.

Donaldson will address some of those questions through publication of his SCIO project, but he hasn’t decided if he will write journal articles or a book. To help him in the process, the SCIO honor also includes funding to support a research assistant at Samford. Donaldson has selected freshman University Fellows honors student Sarah McGhee for that role. He said the psychology major will help with literature research, culling the large amount of published information he will evaluate for his project.