You Tube Theology

“A million alien gospels: life on planets around other suns”

The Revd Prof Andrew Davison
Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, UK.

(Recorded in the Well during the Helios exhibition – 30th April, 2025)

Since we first detected a planet around another sun in 1995, it has become clear that the universe is full of habitable planets. What should Christian theology make of that? Andrew Davison, the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, will recount the surprisingly long history of Christian thinking about extraterrestrial life and show how it relates to some of the main themes in Christian belief, such as Jesus, creation and revelation, and sin and redemption.

Prof Davison read Chemistry at Oxford as an undergraduate and then researched for a DPhil in Biochemistry. He undertook further PG studies at Cambridge University in Theology and Religious Studies. After ordination and various theological teaching and research roles, he was appointed the Starbridge Lecturer (later professor) in Theology and Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 2014, followed by a visiting fellowship at Princeton’s Center for Theological Inquiry; before his present appointment to Oxford in Sept 2024.

As the Starbridge Professor at Cambridge, Prof Davison was a founding member of the Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe, and he is the author of Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Find out more about Prof Davison here:
https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/revd-prof-andrew-davison
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Davison_(theologian), or through the QR code in the video.