Henry “Fritz” Schaefer, a computational and theoretical chemist, will speak at Southwestern College on Thursday, April 8, at 7 p.m. in the Beech Science Center room 104.  There is no admission charge.
           
Schaefer will present broad view of how religion and science relate to one another.  His talk is titled “The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking, and God.”
           
“His talk traces the development of Big Bang Cosmology, the intersection of the research and thoughts of Stephen Hawking, with the possibility of God’s existence and what the high probability that the universe came into existence under precise conditions might have on religious belief and the relationship of religion and science,” says Mike Harper, assistant professor of philosophy at Southwestern College.
           
Schaefer is the author of a large number of scientific publications, and was the 6th most cited chemist from 1981 to 1997 and the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Schaefer was once a fellow for the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, which is now defunct, and a signer of the Discovery Institute's anti-evolution letter, “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism.”
           
Schaefer has earned several awards through the years.  He was awarded the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry in 1979 for the development of computational quantum chemistry into a reliable quantitative field of chemistry and for prolific exemplary calculations of broad chemical interest.  In 1983 he received the Leo Hendrik Baekeland award for the most distinguished North American chemist under the age of 40. In 1992 he was awarded the Centenary Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, London, with a citation that included "the first theoretical chemist successfully to challenge the accepted conclusion of a distinguished experimental group for a polyatomic molecule, namely methylene."
           
In 2003, Schaefer received the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry and the Ira Remsen Award of Johns Hopkins University. He was honored with the $10,000 Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in 2005 by the University of Wisconsin's Theoretical Chemistry Institute, joining a distinguished list of some of the best-known scientists in the field.
           
Schaefer is the third of four lecturers to come to Southwestern to speak on the topic of creation and evolution this semester.  Jay Labov spoke on March 10, Niall Shanks spoke on March 22, and Keith Miller will speak on April 19.
           
For more information, contact Charles Osen at (620) 229-6295.