This book grew out of a symposium held in the Consistorial Hall of Copenhagen University on 17–19 August 2006 under the aegis
of the John Templeton Foundation and the Copenhagen University Research Priority Area on Religion in the 21st Century. The
aim of the conference was to explore fundamental concepts of matter and information in current physics, biology, philosophy
and theology with respect to the question of ultimate reality.
We, the editors and co-chairs, arranged the symposium ‘God, Matter and Information. What is Ultimate?’ in close collaboration
with Dr Mary Ann Meyers, the Director of the Humble Approach Initiative under the John Templeton Foundation. The Humble Approach
supports cutting-edge interdisciplinary research, insofar as it remains sensitive to disciplinary nuances, while looking for
theoretical linkages and connections. Such studies are especially needed in areas of research that are central to the sciences,
pertinent for a contemporary metaphysics, and yet are difficult to conceptualize and present in overview.
We are grateful to Mary Ann Meyers for her ongoing enthusiasm and expertise, and to the John Templeton Foundation for sponsoring
the symposium so generously. We also want to thank the Editorial Director of Cambridge University Press, Dr Simon Capelin,
for his assistance and encouragement in the publication of this book, and the anonymous peer reviewers who supported it. Lindsay
Barnes and Laura Clark of the Press have set the editorial standards for this volume and worked in close collaboration with
graduate student Trine-Amalie Fog Christiansen at Copenhagen University, who worked as a research assistant on this book and
time and again showed her analytical skills. We owe thanks to her, and to Mikkel Christoffersen for assisting in the last
phase of the production and for preparing the index.
With two exceptions, all papers grew out of the Copenhagen symposium. We asked Professor Philip Clayton to write a brief philosophical
history of the concept of matter, with special emphasis on modernity, and we thank him for doing this so swiftly and well.
We also wanted to include the programmatic article of the late evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, ‘The Concept of
Information in Biology’ (
Philosophy of Science 67(2), June 2000); we acknowledge the journal for giving us the permission to reprint this article as Chapter
7 of this volume.
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Arthur Peacocke who, sadly, died on 21 October 2006. Arthur Peacocke was part of
the group, but because of his illness he could not attend the conference, so his paper was discussed in his absence. Chapter
12 in this volume is one of the last works from his hand. Peacocke’s research in biochemistry and in the intersection of theology
and science is highly regarded, and his intellectual testimony can found in his posthumous
All That Is: A Naturalistic Faith for the 21st Century (Fortress Press, 2007). But for many of us, Arthur was not just a great scholar, but a mentor, a fellow-inquirer, and a friend
who continued to listen, explore, and ask for more. We are indeed indebted to Arthur for his personal combination of rigour
and generosity.