Science and Religion
John Hedley Brooke offers an introduction and critical guide to one of the most fascinating and enduring issues in the development of the modern world: the relationship between scientific thought and religious belief. It is common knowledge that in western societies there have been periods of crisis when new science has threatened established authority. The trial of Galileo in 1633 and the uproar caused by Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) are two of the most famous examples. Taking account of recent scholarship in the history of science, Brooke takes a fresh look at these and similar episodes, showing that science and religion have been mutually relevant in so rich a variety of ways that no simple generalizations are possible.
- A fresh look at the difficulties of the coexistence of science and religion
- Reveals the subtlety, complexity and diversity of the interaction between science and religion without bias
- A wide-ranging study that does not assume specialist knowledge
Reviews & endorsements
'[John Hedley Brooke] has given us a brilliant, perceptive, subtle, nuanced analysis, which will permanently alter the way scholars and the informed lay public view the relations of science and religion.' David C. Lindberg, Metascience
'… arguably the most important historical analysis of science and religion since Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom (1898).' Ronald L. Numbers, Metascience
Product details
May 2014Paperback
9781107664463
576 pages
213 × 137 × 33 mm
0.8kg
43 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Interaction between science and religion: some preliminary considerations
- 2. Science and religion in the scientific revolution
- 3. The parallel between scientific and religious reform
- 4. Divine activity in a mechanical universe
- 5. Science and religion in the enlightenment
- 6. The fortunes and functions of natural theology
- 7. Visions of the past: religious belief and the historical sciences
- 8. Evolutionary theory and religious belief
- Postscript: science and religion in the twentieth century
- Bibliographic essay
- Sources of quotations
- Index.