This Evening Public Lecture was delivered during the week of the Pastor's Conference 2010. Model-building plays an important role in science, and we can use model-building in thinking about the relationship between Genesis 1-3 and evolutionary history. The models are human constructs, not the data itself - ways of helping different types of narrative to come into conversation with each other. This is not concordism, where attempts are made to (inappropriately) impose scientific meanings on to a theological text – more like a conversation between two disciplines: science and theology.

Dr. Denis Alexander is the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, UK. Dr Alexander is also a Senior Affiliated Scientist at The Babraham Institute, Cambridge, where he supervises a research group in cancer and immunology, and where for many years he was Chairman of the Molecular Immunology Programme and Head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signalling and Development. Dr Alexander was previously at the Imperial Cancer Research Laboratories in London (now Cancer Research UK), and prior to that spent 15 years developing university departments and laboratories overseas, latterly as Associate Professor of Biochemistry in the Medical Faculty of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Dr Alexander was initially an Open Scholar at Oxford reading Biochemistry, before obtaining a PhD in Neurochemistry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

Dr Alexander writes, lectures and broadcasts widely in the field of science and religion. Since 1992 he has been Editor of the journal Science and Christian Belief, and currently serves on the UK Committee of Christians in Science and as one of the founding fellows of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is the author of Rebuilding the Matrix - Science and Faith in the 21st Century and of Can we be sure about anything? Science, faith, and postmodernism.