A three-year philosophy project funded by a $2.5 million research grant — the largest grant ever given to a Hillsdale College professor — concluded this August.

The project, led by Associate Professor of Philosophy Ian Church, was titled “Launching Experimental Philosophy of Religion” and aimed to kick start broad, interdisciplinary research in the area of experimental philosophy of religion, according to the project’s website. 

“The project is going to be making significant contributions to work on the cosmological argument, how we think about freewill and divine foreknowledge, the problem of evil, epistemology and religious beliefs,” Church said. “These are some of the core issues within the philosophy of religion.”

The grant for the project was a gift of the John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic group dedicated to funding research projects studying the intersections between philosophy, theology, and the sciences.  

“This kind of research grant is not very common at all at Hillsdale,” Church said. “These are the kinds of research grants that you typically see at research institutions.”

As the project’s principal investigator, Church led research with the primary team at Hillsdale and decided where to send the six subgrants contained in the grant’s $2.5 million. Church allocated funds to six teams made up of top scholars from Cornell University, University of Notre Dame, University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University, Stanford University, Yale University, and more. 

“Dr. Church is an administrative genius and a visionary when it comes to these kinds of projects,” said project collaborator and Assistant Professor of Philosophy Blake McCallister. “He’s a truly special figure.”

The Hillsdale team consisted of Church, McCallister, Project Administrator and Staff of Hillsdale College Cindy Hoard, Honorary Professor at St. Andrews University School of Divinity Justin Barrett, Arete Professorial Fellows Paul Rezkalla and Jim Spiegel, and a handful of undergraduate research assistants from the Hillsdale student body. 

“Launching Experimental Philosophy of Religion” is the third project funded by the John Templeton Foundation that Church has worked on while at Hillsdale. 

“I think my hair has grayed at an accelerated rate,” Church said. “But it’s good to see that it’s been successful. Hillsdale is sort of the epicenter of this new kind of research in experimental philosophy of religion.” 

Several of the project’s undergraduate research assistants have gone on to further their philosophy studies after working on the project. These research assistants include Long Nguyen ’23 — who co-wrote a paper with Church, McCallister, and Rezkalla as a part of his work on the project — and went on to study philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.

A project like this is helpful for undergraduate assistants who choose to further their education, Church said. 

“It’s rare, not only at a liberal arts college, to be involved in a major research institute project,” Church said. “Anything like this can really give someone an edge to get into a top program.”

The work for undergraduate assistants at Hillsdale could be arduous and included a mixture of scientific and literary methods. 

“I did a lot of data analysis and data visualization,” said senior Micah Miller, a previous student assistant on the project. “Dr. Church had us do a large-scale literature review, reading lots of academic papers with the intention of finding problems that would potentially be approachable by the experimental philosophy method.”

The student assistants said they found the work interesting. 

“It’s really cool to see innovation happening at Hillsdale and to be a part of it,” said senior Eli Hudson, a previous undergraduate assistant to the project. 

The project has also been an opportunity for the college to further its reputation as a serious institution across a wider circle of academia, McCallister said. 

“If we can show that we’re doing excellent work, that our faculty are serious scholars doing work that’s respected not just within the traditional Hillsdale-friendly circles but among the Yales and the Cornells and the Ivy Leagues, that could only bode well for Hillsdale in the long term,” McCallister said.