When Science & Christianity Meet (review)

More than twenty years ago, David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, both of them professors in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, edited an important work in which an international group of eighteen distinguished historians published essays on the relationship between Christianity and science from the time of the early church up to the twentieth century. That work, God and Nature (1986), explicitly rejected the commonly held thesis that science and Christianity have generally coexisted in a state of conflict or warfare. Building on the success of that earlier volume, the two men later edited the work here under review, this time offering twelve case histories covering some of what they call "the most notorious, most interesting, or most instructive instances of encounter between these two powerful cultural forces" (p. 4). Once the essays were drafted, the editors organized a conference that brought together the authors with a roughly equal number of teachers and college students for the sole purpose of ensuring that the essays had attained the desired level of accuracy and accessibility. The final product, which includes more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and eleven pages of annotated bibliography, has admirably met the editors' goals. In particular, the format of "case histories" allowed the contributors to avoid sweeping, questionable generalizations and oversimplifications and to focus instead on the uniqueness of each case, with its specific historical actors, agenda, and social and cultural context.

The issues examined in the twelve essays are arranged in chronological order, with the opening piece dealing with the ways in which Augustine of Hippo in the fourth and early fifth century and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth thought the natural sciences could serve as "handmaidens" of theology and religion. There follow studies of the Galileo affair, the rise of a mechanistic understanding of the universe in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the ways in which eighteenth-century natural philosophers understood the nature of forces such as gravity and electricity, the effect of modern geology on Christian interpretations of the biblical narratives of creation and the Noachic deluge, debates over the antiquity of the human race, the varied responses to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the possibility of miracles, the response of Christians in the United States to Freudian psychoanalysis, the way in which the Scopes trial became part of the fabric of American culture, and the gradual transition from "godly natural philosophy" to "naturalistic modern science" since the time of the Scientific Revolution.

In this short review, it is not possible to discuss each of these essays; instead, I will briefly comment on three that struck me as especially noteworthy. Lindberg's "Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos" is a masterful summary of the Galileo affair. By studying the case in its seventeenth-century European context, an era of increasing religious and political absolutism, he is able to demonstrate that Galileo's condemnation was a product "not of dogmatism or intolerance beyond the norm, but of a combination of more or less standard (for the seventeenth century) bureaucratic procedure, plausible (if ultimately flawed) political judgment, and a familiar array of human foibles and failings" (p. 60).

In "Science, Miracles, and the Prayer-Gauge Debate," Robert Bruce Mullin of the General Theological Seminary in New York City examines the way in which the Protestant Reformation affected the earlier, traditional understanding of miracles and prayer and thereby led to the kind of controversy that emerged three centuries later when the English physicist John Tyndall attacked belief not only in miracles but also in those acts of "special providence" in which God was believed to act in a hidden way in the regular course of nature. While developments in modern physics have led many scientists to question Tyndall's strictly deterministic model of the universe, Mullin notes in his conclusion that within the past four decades there has emerged a new scholarly debate over...