Los Alamos Faith and Science Forum returns for summer series

Los Alamos’ Faith and Science Forum will open its thirteenth summer season June 10 at Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church, bringing discussions of the multiverse, genetics and goodness back to Kelly Hall on Trinity Drive. The series runs Wednesdays through August 12 and is built around dinner, presentation and discussion, a format that keeps the evening closer to a community conversation than a one-way lecture.

The forum will again meet in Kelly Hall at Trinity on the Hill, 3900 Trinity Drive, with a light dinner at 6 p.m., presentations at 6:30 p.m., and question-and-answer sessions followed by table discussion. That structure has helped the forum endure in a county where science is not just a profession but part of the civic identity. In Los Alamos, where scientists, engineers, clergy and neighbors often share the same public spaces, the appeal is not only the subject matter but the chance to test ideas in the open without reducing the evening to a debate.

This year’s theme reaches directly into some of the most provocative questions at the edge of faith and research. The forum said the 2026 season will explore humanity’s deepest questions, including the finely tuned constants of the universe, the possibility of a multiverse, whether religion helped early humans survive, whether human behavior can be traced to genetics, whether senses can be cross-wired during religious experience, and the origin of goodness. July presentations will use Lord Martin Rees’s Just Six Numbers as a framework for the discussion of cosmic constants.

The multiverse conversation will be approached from a Christian perspective, and the forum said the Haarsmas, who also took part in the group’s 2015 summer series, will be part of that conversation. The season will open June 10 with James Carroll leading “Introduction to Religious Studies from a Scientific Perspective,” signaling that the lineup is meant to move back and forth between scientific and theological lenses rather than favor one audience over the other.

The forum’s archives show this is no one-off experiment. It called 2025 its 12th season and 2024 its 11th, and it traced its second summer discussion series to 2015, when Deborah and Loren Haarsma’s Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design helped anchor the talks. The group also says it offers year-round discussions for members who join its mailing list, extending the forum’s reach beyond a single summer calendar.