Hartsville, SC – The annual Lois Walters Coker Lecture Series at Coker College presents Dr. Holmes Rolston III, world-renowned philosopher, clergyman and scientist whose exploration of biology and faith has helped foster religious interest in the environment, on Monday, March 15 at 7:30 p.m. in the Charles W. Coker Auditorium in Davidson Hall. Rolston, the 2003 winner of the $1 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, will discuss “Genes, Genesis and God.” Admission is free and the public is invited to attend.

The Colorado State University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Rolston is an international lecturer on the environment, religion and bioethics. He is the author of six acclaimed books, including Genes, Genesis and God (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and he is a National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Scholar.

“The genesis of life on Earth is keyed to genes, located in organisms in evolutionary ecosystems,” says Rolston. “This biological information originating over time displays a cumulative creativity that, although described by science, is nowhere an implication of biological theory. Such genesis invites an account of God as the Ground of Information.”

An ardent environmentalist, Rolston is at the center of what he describes as “the scientific and philosophical debate about order and disorder, randomness and probability, actualities and possibilities…over the evolutionary epic.”

Rolston has guest-lectured at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, Bucharest, Kyoto and other universities world-wide, as well as at international conferences on the environment. He has served as a consultant for dozens of conservation and policy groups, including the U. S. Congress and a Presidential Commission, and he is founder and associate editor of Environmental Ethics, a refereed professional journal.

The Lois Walters Coker Lecture Series was established at Coker College in 2000 by the family of the late Mrs. Robert Coker (1910-2001) in order to support a nationally known speaker in science, history or public affairs at the college. Previous speakers have been Senator Elizabeth Dole, biologist and author Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Dr. Nancy Randolph on Council of Social Work Education, and journalist and Iraq expert Sandra Mackey.

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