Life and work
Education and early career
Southgate trained originally as a research biochemist, completing a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. Following postdoctoral research he later undertook theological training, subsequently becoming a lay chaplain at the University of Exeter, where he was invited to begin teaching the science–religion debate for the Department of Theology.
Academic career
Southgate has taught at the University of Exeter since 1993 and was appointed Professor of Christian Theodicy in 2018. His research interests include the problem of suffering in evolution, the concept of divine glory in the natural world and in religious poetry, the science of the origin of life, and pastoral responses to tragic events in church congregations.
Southgate taught for the South West Ministry Training Course (now Spiritus College) from 2001-17, serving as Principal from 2013. He is a former editor of Reviews in Science and Religion. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and has served on the editorial advisory board of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.
Theology
Southgate's work, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil, examines the theological challenge posed by suffering and extinction in the evolutionary process. The book has been described as seminal in the field of evolutionary theodicy.
Southgate gave the 2014 Sarum Lectures on divine glory, the 2016 Gowland Lecture on science and poetry, and the 2022 Boyle Lecture on natural evil.
Southgate has appeared as a contributor on the Closer to Truth public television series on science, philosophy, and religion.
Southgate's research and teaching was honoured with a special issue of the journal Zygon in September 2018.
Poetry
Reviewers of Southgate’s poetry comment:
(of his verse biography of TS Eliot) Professor Frances Young writes of ‘the extraordinary originality and generative power of the book’.
(of ‘Rain falling by the River’) Dr Mark Oakley writes: ‘Southgate’s poems are not for a church of the warm shallows. They are serious, sometimes wry, always reverential… Though the snow has indeed begun to thaw in Southgate’s poetry, fighting both illusion and disillusion through faith, we can still see our breath in the cold air and feel the draw of home.’
(of Easing the Gravity Field: poems of science and love) John Arthur Nunes writes: ‘sheer delight permeates this encounter with tangible things, terrible things, true things;
