After World War II, the United States faced a considerable challenge: How would communications continue in the aftermath of a nuclear war? The solution proposed was a network of computers that had no central authority and were capable of almost infinite message rerouting. This system, known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), debuted in 1969. Telenet, the first commercial version of the ARPANET, appeared in 1974. In 1979 the first network-wide discussions groups were up and running as USENET. But before cyberspace could become readily navigable, hypertext, the World Wide Web, and search engines had to be developed. The first point-and-click way of navigating Internet files, known as gopher, was released in 1991, and the same year the first computer code of the World Wide Web debuted in the relatively innocuous newsgroup alt.hypertext. Thus, the rich global communications medium called the Internet was born.

By the mid-1990s several science and religion organizations had a basic presence on the World Wide Web. Typically this consisted of information about the organization and its upcoming events and programs. One of the first sites of this kind was a web site for the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (www.iras.org). Online discussion on science and religion topics was initially confined to private email distribution lists and various USENET newsgroups such as The Talk.Origins Archive (www.talkorigins.org), which covers the creation/evolution controversy.

The need to handle an ever increasing number of discussion participants led to the employment of listservs (managed email discussion lists), such as the Meta-lists, now Metanexus, which began operating in 1997. An "edited, moderated, and public listserv dedicated to promoting the constructive engagement of science and religion and to sharing information and perspectives among the diverse organizations and individuals involved in this interdisciplinary field," by 2002, Metanexus had over six thousand subscribers in approximately sixty countries.

By their second generation, many web sites had incorporated some basic science and religion content in addition to the organizational information. Initially the content was preexisting text made available in plain electronic form, but there has been a constant evolution in the sophistication with which the web has been used to present science and religion content.

In 1998, the Counterbalance Foundation based in Seattle, Washington, in conjunction with the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) in Berkeley, California, developed a suite of interactive topics specifically for the web. Initially available at the web site for the PBS/New River Media documentary television program Faith and Reason, (www.pbs.org/faithandreason) the content was also accessible from www.ctns.org and www.counterbalance.org. This suite was tailored to the web in three ways: It included extensive use of hypertext linking, a writing style that allowed the reader to visit topics in any particular order, and use of streaming audio. These features allowed readers from diverse backgrounds to approach the same content and follow different paths through it. The availability of streaming audio opened up the appeal of science and religion topics to a still broader audience.

In 2000, Counterbalance combined the CTNS content with new material, including the textbook God, Humanity, and the Cosmos (1999) edited by Christopher Southgate, to create the Meta-Library. The Meta-Library is a single shared location that provides content to several science and religion sites, most notably www.metanexus.net. As of 2002, the Meta-Library had over one hundred hours of interactive video material and thirty thousand links in the text material.

By mid-2002, the web was home to a variety of sites on science and religion that were diverse both in terms of approach and services offered; the Yahoo! directory contained links to dozens of web sites on evolution and creation alone. Some science and religion sites were still primarily informational, such as those of the American Scientific Affiliation (www.asa3.org), the American Association for the Advancement of Science site for DoSER (Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion; www.aaas.org/spp/dser), and the National Academy of Science's site on science and creationism (www7.nationalacademies.org/evolution). Others web sites offered both information and discussion. Exemplars are the Access Research Network (www.arn.org), which discusses Intelligent Design theory, and Metanexus. Furthermore, such undertakings as Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.net) and the Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org) guaranteed that the classic texts of luminaries such as Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Alfred Russel Wallace were available to the global public. In summary, persons all over the planet had access a vast repertoire of information on science and religion.

The future holds several possibilities. The web will continue to be an effective medium through which science and religion organizations can reach out to both the academic and broader community. Increase in fast "broadband" access to the web will allow sites to become progressively richer and more interactive, and will provide more video, including interviews and conference presentations (available both live and archived for later access), real-time chat rooms, tutorials, and so on. The content will no doubt broaden in scope, reaching beyond the core sciences and core religions, and become available in languages other than English. The conversation will also become more "world-wide" as the cost of computer equipment and web access allows smaller institutions and local societies to make use of the medium. In addition, an increasing number of distance education courses in science and religion will likely become available. However, the socalled digital divide must also be considered. While the dialogue between science and religion is certain to have a bright future on the Internet, participation in this part of the conversation will remain restricted to that small fraction of the global community with access to the necessary technology. This is likely to remain a real issue into the far future.

See also INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; SCIENCE AND RELIGION, PERIODICAL LITERATURE

STACEY AKE
ADRIAN M. WYARD