Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew
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As past president of both the History of Science Society and the American Society of Church History, Ronald L. Numbers draws from his unique experience to assess the historical relations between science and Christianity. In this collection of his most recent essays, he moves beyond the cliches of conflict and harmony to explore the tangled web of historical interactions involving scientific and religious beliefs.In his lead essay he offers an unprecedented overview of the history of science and Christianity from the perspective of the ordinary people who filled the pews of churches-or loitered outside. Unlike the elite scientists and theologians on whom most historians have focused, these "vulgar" Christians cared little about the discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. Instead, they worried about the causes of the diseases and disasters that directly affected their lives and about scientists' seemingly preposterous attempts to trace human ancestry back to apes.
Far from dismissing opinion-makers in the pulpit, Numbers closely looks at two the most influential Protestant theologians in nineteenth-century America: Charles Hodge and William Henry Green. Hodge, after decades of struggling to harmonize God's two revelations-in nature and in the Bible-in the end famously described Darwinism as atheism. Green, on the basis of his careful biblical studies, concluded that James Ussher's chronology of the universe's creation was unreliable, thus opening the door for Christian anthropologists to accommodate the subsequent discovery of human antiquity. With one essay devoted to each of these two theologians, Numbers shows how they helped shape further developments in the interaction between science and religion.
In "Science without God" Numbers traces the millennia-long history of so-called methodological naturalism, the commitment to explaining the natural world without appeals to the supernatural. By the early nineteenth century this practice was becoming the defining characteristic of science; in the late twentieth century it became the central point of attack in the audacious attempt of "intelligent designers" to redefine science. Numbers ends his reassessment by arguing that although science has markedly changed the world we live in, it has contributed less to secularizing it than many have claimed.
This important collection of essays from a distinguished scholar clarifies the history of science and Christianity by examining the intersection of laypeople, theologians, and overarching trends in American culture and thought.
Reviews
"Once again Ronald Numbers opens the story of evolutionary thought in America to a wide audience. He has the capacity to lead readers to unexpected conclusions and to demonstrate that many of our most cherished assumptions about the debate over science and religion, the reception of evolution, and the reading of the Bible in the light of science and science in the light of the Bible must be re-examined and rethought. In this volume he is especially sensitive to the thinking of figures who have long remained unexamined. To read Numbers's scholarship is to come to the most welcome if unexpected experiences of historical enlightenment." --Frank M. Turner, Yale University, author of John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion
About the Author(s)
Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and Medicine, University of Wisconsin.
