Events Calendar

Dean Zimmerman - "Explaining the Cosmos: Can the Philosopher Help?"

Why is there anything at all, and why a cosmos even remotely like ours?  Grand questions like these never cease to generate wonder - and, sometimes, confusion.  Answers to them offered by popular science and popular religion generally prove to be a mixed bag.  Recently, scientists and popularizers of science have drawn our attention to wondrous discoveries about the shape of the cosmos, and suggestive new theories about the universe’s origins; while religious apologists have revived some ancient but still appealing arguments for the existence of God.  But these attempts to address the big questions of “life, the universe, and everything” often gloss over subtleties that turn out to be important.  Sometimes they dress up a philosophical confusion in flashy rhetoric.  Philosophers can help uncover these subtleties and confusions, even if we can do no better in providing universally satisfying answers to these questions. 

Dean Zimmerman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, home to what has long been ranked one of the top five philosophy departments in the world. While at Rutgers, Dr. Zimmerman has been won multiple million-dollar Templeton Foundation grants, including a grant to found and direct the Rutgers Center for Philosophy of Religion and a grant to further scholarly work in the growing field of “Science-Engaged Philosophical Theology”.  Dr. Zimmerman has published dozens of influential articles within the fields of contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of religion, and his work is notable for its engagement with contemporary science.  He has also been an editor for many books, including Persons: Human and Divine (Oxford University Press, 2007); twelve volumes of the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (a leading venue for work in contemporary metaphysics); and several volumes of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (a leading venue for work in contemporary philosophy of religion).  Dr. Zimmerman has given lectures and keynote addresses at universities across the globe, including most recently the 2023 Swindel Lecture in Philosophy of Religion at Biola University.