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Technology and Culture 43.3 (2002) 654-656



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Book Review

The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition:
An Encyclopedia


The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Gary B. Ferngren. New York: Garland, 2000. Pp. xxi+586. $150.

Over the last generation, historians of science have moved beyond the Whiggery and religious apologetics that have skewed the conversation on "science and religion" for more than a century. Turning aside traditional theses that presume an essential "relationship" of science and religion, recent scholarship has shown instead just how bewilderingly diverse and subtle has been the historical interplay of Western scientific and religious traditions. The "complexity thesis," as this approach has come to be known, has informed case studies galore as well as numerous syntheses limited to [End Page 654] specific themes or historical contexts. General overviews of the field as a whole, however, have been limited to one or two anthologies and to John Hedley Brooke's heroic but dense survey, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991). The work under review meets a pressing need by offering the most topically comprehensive and yet accessible overview of this scholarship available in a single volume, but with content only incidentally germane to the history of technology.

The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition does everything that a reference work of this type should. It assembles a stellar cast of more than eighty leading scholars from a variety of intellectual disciplines (just under half of whom hail from the history of science and medicine) and presents 103 articles in a neat, coherent organization consisting of ten thematic sections. The first four deal with the field's intellectual and religious foundations, including virtually every relevant "-ism" and "-ology" imaginable. The latter six sections each treat one of the broad branches of the natural sciences, as well as "Psychology and Medicine" and "The Occult Sciences." For the articles, the editors enjoined thoroughness over thrift, a value exhibited even in the bibliographies, which often number two dozen entries or more. Article lengths range from two to just over ten of the book's handsome twin-columned pages. Most come to around five and are thus easily consumed at a casual sitting. Almost without exception, the articles offer stimulating content presented with insight and clarity.

The book's chief virtue, however, lies in its breadth of coverage. All the familiar episodes in the historical interplay of science and religion from classical antiquity to the present receive ample consideration. But the book sparkles most in its display of the expansion of the field beyond conventional preoccupations with "mainstream" Christendom and with the dual heritage of the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. Readers will find entire articles and numerous discussions treating Judaism, Islam, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity as well as such "alternative" religious movements as Mormonism, Adventism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the New Age.

Some of the most scintillating pieces roam around the fringes of modern science; examples include "The Plurality of Worlds and Extraterrestrial Life," "Geocentricity," and "Flat-Earthism." Other innovative essays dwell on sciences rarely considered in connection with religion, such as meteorology, chemistry, electricity, and geography.

But alas, for all the book's expansive breadth, readers of this journal will be disappointed not to see their interests more conspicuously represented. There is no article on "technology and religion," nor does the term "technology" appear in the index. No historians of technology appear among the book's multidisciplinary corps of authors. Indeed, throughout the text scarcely more than half a dozen works from the history of technology are even cited. Donna Haraway and David Noble are both mentioned in an article on gender, but neither the emphasis of the former on the clash of [End Page 655] "cyborg" culture with "natural" categories inherited from Christianity nor the recent argument of the latter regarding the "religion of technology" is anywhere noted.

Nevertheless, technological themes do emerge in the text with greater frequency than these discouraging signs suggest. For example, the well-known...

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