Review Essay Science and Religion

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_full_journalsubtitle: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period _full_abbrevjournaltitle: ESM _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 1383-7427 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1573-3823 (online version) _full_issue: 1 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien J2 voor dit article en vul alleen 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (rechter kopregel - mag alles zijn): Science and Religion _full_is_advance_article: 3 _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0

Science And ReligionEarly Science and Medicine 24 (2019) 283-288 283

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Review Essay ∵

Science and Religion

Kathleen Crowther University of Oklahoma, Norman [email protected]

Gary Ferngren (2017) (ed.), Science and Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press), pp. 496, $32.95, ISBN: 9781421421728

In the fall of 2001, a year before the first edition of Gary Ferngren’s edited col- lection of essays on Science and Religion came out, I taught a freshman history seminar titled “Science and Religion.” In the first week of class, several of my students opined that science and religion must be at odds because they required diametrically opposed ways of thinking. Science required its practitio- ners to question everything, to distrust authority and to accept nothing that could not be proven. Religion, on the other hand, required its adherents to have unquestioning faith and to accept doctrine on the basis of authoritative texts and people. Some of them referred to the class as “science versus religion.” I was prepared for this, having held similar views myself as an undergraduate, and I believe that by the end of the semester, they were able to see that science and religion have had, and continue to have, a complicated and multi-faceted relationship. Very little has changed since then. Each new group of students comes in convinced that there is an essential conflict between science and religion. Whether or not they have read John William Draper’s His- tory of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), they have imbibed the notion that the history of science is an epic battle between “two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the com- pression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.” (vi) While the “conflict thesis” of Draper and his contemporary Andrew Dickson

White (A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom [1896]) has long since been discarded by historians of science, it retains a tenacious hold on the popular imagination. But if the popular view of the relationship between science and religion has not changed much in the sixteen years since the first edition of Science and Religion, the scholarship on the topic has ex- panded dramatically. A second revised edition of this standard teaching text is therefore timely. Like the first edition, the second contains a set of essays, writ- ten by experts, that provide clear, concise summaries of a great deal of scholarship, that are well-suited to introducing undergraduates to the wealth of scholarship on these topics. The volume is divided into six sections. Part I, “Science and Religion: Con- flict or Complexity?,” consists of a single essay on “Science and Religion” by Stephen Weldon that provides a historical and historiographical overview of the conflict thesis. Part II has four essays on “The Premodern Period.” In the first, “Aristotle and Aristotelianism,” Edward Grant and Craig Martin summarize Aristotle’s natural philosophy, pointing to those aspects of Aristotle’s thought that would prove problematic for Christian, Jewish and Muslim think- ers, namely Aristotle’s insistence on the eternity of the world and the mortality of the soul. But Grant and Martin also point out that “Aristotle believed in a divine spirit, or God,” (26) and although Aristotle’s God was not the Abrahamic creator God or part of the Greek pantheon, Aristotle was hardly a modern atheist avant la lettre. Essays on “Early Christian Attitudes toward Nature,” by David Lindberg and Gary Ferngren, and on “Medieval Latin Christendom” by Michael Shank and Lindberg demonstrate that “On balance, the story of science and Christianity in the Latin Middle Ages is one not of suppression but of laissez-faire, if not support and encouragement.” (65) The final essay, Alnoor Dhanani and Glen Cooper’s piece on “Islam,” fits awkwardly in this section. They cover science and views of science in the Islamic world from the founding of Islam in the seventh century to the reception of Darwin in the nineteenth. The huge time scope of the essay does not really allow the authors to grapple with the “decline thesis,” the idea that science in the Islamic world declined after about 1200 as a result of suppression by religious authorities. As Dhanani and Cooper note, this thesis is no longer tenable, but the topic of decline (if, when and where) is still hotly disputed by scholars, making it dif ficult to summarize the issue for an undergraduate audience in a single essay devoted to science and Islam between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. Part III contains five essays on “The Scientific Revolution”: “The Coperni- can Revolution” (Owen Gingerich), “Galileo Galilei” (Richard Blackwell and Michael Shank), “Early Modern Protestantism” (Edward Davis), “Isaac Newton”

Early Science and Medicine 24 (2019) 283-288