Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives

by Edited by Thomas Dixon , Geoffrey Cantor , Stephen Pumfrey

• ISBN13: 9780521760270
• ISBN10: 0521760275
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 new 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.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Categories	p. 21
'Science' and 'religion': constructing the boundaries	p. 23
Science and religion in postmodern perspective: the case of Bruno Latour	p. 50
Narratives	p. 69
Religion and the changing historiography of the Scientific Revolution	p. 71
The late Victorian conflict of science and religion as an event in nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural history	p. 87
Islam, Christianity, and the conflict thesis	p. 111
Evolution and Creationism	p. 131
Evolution and creationism in the Islamic world	p. 133
Understanding creationism and evolution in America and Europe	p. 153
The Politics of Publishing	p. 175
A global history of science and religion	p. 177
The Scopes trial beyond science and religion	p. 198
Science, religion, and the history of the book	p. 221
Ways Forward	p. 245
Sciences and religions: what it means to take historical perspectives seriously	p. 247
Simplifying complexity: patterns in the history of science and religion	p. 263
What shall we do with the 'Conflict Thesis'?	p. 283
Select bibliography	p. 299
Index	p. 311
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