eBook

Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew

Numbers, Ronald L

2007

Overview

This book moves beyond the clichés of conflict and harmony to explore the tangled web of historical interactions involving scientific and religious beliefs. The lead chapter offers an overview of the history of science and Christianity from the perspective of the ordinary people who filled the pews of churches or loitered around outside. The book closely looks at two of the most influential Protestant theologians in 19th-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 Ussher's chronology was unreliable, thus opening the door for Christian anthropologists to accommodate the subsequent discovery of human antiquity. This book 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 19th century this practice was becoming the defining characteristic of science; in the late 20th century it became the central point of attack in the audacious attempt of intelligent designers to redefine science. The book ends the 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.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: Church history / History / History of Christianity / Modern period, 1500 / Religion and Science
• ISBN: 9780195320374, 0195320379, 0195320387, 9780195320381