Reconciling Science and Religion

by Bowler, Peter J.

• ISBN13: 9780226068589
• ISBN10: 0226068587
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists--including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists--tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion--and efforts at reconciling the two--are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues.

Author Biography

Peter J. Bowler is a professor of the history of science at the Queen's University of Belfast. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Life's Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life's Ancestry, 1860-1940, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction: A Legacy of Conflict?	1	(24)
Confrontation, Cooperation, or Coexistence?
Victorian Background
Science and Religion in the New Century
PART ONE THE SCIENCES AND RELIGION	25	(166)
The Religion of Scientists	27	(32)
Changing Patterns of Belief
Scientists and Christianity
Scientists and Theism
Method and Meaning
Science and Values
Scientists Against Superstition	59	(28)
Science and Rationalism
Religion without Revelation
Marxists and Other Radicals
Science, Religion, and the History of Science
Physics and Cosmology	87	(35)
Ether and Spirit
The New Physics
The Earth and the Universe
Evolution and the New Natural Theology	122	(38)
Science and Creation
Evolution and Progress
The Role of Lamarckism
Darwinism Revived
Matter, Life, and Mind	160	(31)
The Origin of Life
Vitalism and Organicism
Mind and Body
Psychology and Religion
PART TWO THE CHURCHES AND SCIENCE	191	(138)
The Churches in the New Century	193	(22)
The Challenge of the New
The Churches' Response
The New Theology in the Free Churches	215	(29)
Precursors of the New Theology
Campbell and the New Theology
Modernism in the Free Churches
Anglican Modernism	244	(43)
Modernism and the New Natural Theology
Charles F. D'Arcy
E. W. Barnes
W. R. Inge
Charles Raven
The Reaction Against Modernism	287	(42)
Evangelicals against Evolution
Liberal Catholicism
The Menace of the New Psychology
Science and Modern Life
Theology in the Thirties
Roman Catholicism
PART THREE THE WIDER DEBATE	329	(78)
Science and Secularism	331	(31)
Against Idealism
Popular Rationalism
The Social Reformers
Religion's Defenders	362	(45)
From Idealism to Spiritualism
Creative and Emergent Evolution
Evolution and the Human Spirit
Progress through Struggle
The Christian Response
Epilogue	407	(14)
Biographical Appendix	421	(8)
Bibliography	429	(42)
Index	471