Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives

Description

The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991). Almost two decades on, Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives revisits this argument and asks how historians can now impose order on the complex and contingent histories of religious engagements with science. Bringing together leading scholars, this volume explores the history and changing meanings of the categories 'science' and 'religion'; the role of publishing and education in forging and spreading ideas; the connection between knowledge, power and intellectual imperialism; and the reasons for the confrontation between evolution and creationism among American Christians and in the Islamic world. A major contribution to the historiography of science and religion, this book makes the most recent scholarship on this much misunderstood debate widely accessible.

Thomas Dixon is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The Invention of Altruism (2008) and From Passions to Emotions (Cambridge, 2003). Geoffrey Cantor is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the University of Leeds and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London. He is the author of Quakers, Jews, and Science (2005). Stephen Pumfrey is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Lancaster University. He is the author of Latitude and the Magnetic Earth (2002), winner of the British Society for the History of Science Dingle Prize.

'Every student of science and religion will find this book informative, useful, and stimulating.' Theological Book Review '... there is a great deal here to interest and stimulate the general reader as well as the academic specialist.' The Expository Times 'These days, whenever the words 'science' and 'religion' are brought together, they are likely to conjure up other words like 'debate', 'conflict', and 'inevitable'. That set of associations, real or imagined, is the underlying subject of this remarkable book. It distills an enormous amount of scholarship relating to a fascinating set of subjects of contemporary importance in the form of well-researched and nicely written set of essays brought together in honor of the British historian John Hedley Brooke. It celebrates his work in redefining, one might almost say, defining away, the notion of conflict between science and religion.' Science and Education