In recent years, the relations between science and religion have been the object of renewed attention. Developments in physics, biology and the neurosciences have reinvigorated discussions about the nature of life and ultimate reality. At the same time, the growth of anti-evolutionary and intelligent design movements has led many to the view that science and religion are necessarily in conflict.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the relations between science and religion, with contributions from historians, philosophers, scientists and theologians. It explores the impact of religion on the origins and development of science, religious reactions to Darwinism, and the link between science and secularization. It also offers in-depth discussions of contemporary issues, with perspectives from cosmology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and bioethics.
The volume is rounded out with philosophical reflections on the connections between atheism and science, the nature of scientific and religious knowledge, and divine action and human freedom.
This book investigates
twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive
episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity,
aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local
particularity.
Among the events treated in When Science and Christianity Meet
are the Galileo affair, the seventeenth-century clockwork universe,
Noah's ark and flood in the development of natural history, struggles
over Darwinian evolution, debates about the origin of the human species,
and the Scopes trial. Readers will be introduced to St. Augustine,
Roger Bacon, Pope Urban VIII, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace,
Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Sigmund Freud, and many
other participants in the historical drama of science and Christianity.
