When Science and Christianity Meet (review)

The history of the relationship between science and religion has been the focus of a growing number of books and collections in the almost twenty years that have elapsed since the publication of the present editors' earlier volume, God and Nature.¹ Like its predecessor, the book under review starts by distancing itself from the warfare metaphor used to characterize the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century and the first seven decades of the twentieth. More recent scholarship has tended to focus on the interaction—often positive—between the two areas rather than their conflict.

The well-written essays in this book cover material from the Middle Ages through the post-Darwinian debates, highlighting science in the medieval Church, the trial of Galileo, the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century, the history of the earth and the book of Genesis, various aspects of the debates about evolution, the Scopes trial, and secularization. Most of the essays are clear, and the excellent, annotated bibliography mentions many important readings.

The first five articles deal with the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern period. The remaining seven chapters deal with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the English-speaking world. In these respects, the present volume differs from its predecessor, which devoted a larger proportion of articles to the early periods and considered a wider range of linguistic venues. This difference mirrors changes in the history of science, a field in which the center of gravity has moved forward in time from the period of the scientific revolution to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Although the essays in this book largely avoid the clichés of the warfare metaphor, they tend to treat science and religion as separate entities with a history of encounters. There is little consideration of the ways in which each area has penetrated the other and informed its concepts or ways of thinking. The volume would have been enriched by discussions of how the historical approaches of Charles Lyell's geology and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution reflect the influence of biblical narrative rather than the Greek emphasis on harmony and form or how nineteenth-century biblical scholarship reflects the application of scientific and empirical methods to all areas of intellectual life.

Nevertheless, Lindberg and Numbers have produced a useful collection, which does not replace their earlier volume but makes much of its content accessible to a wider, less specialized audience.