Rejoinder to Numbers and Larson

14 Historically Speaking November/December 2005 Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science," Studies in History andPhilosophy of Science 19 (1988): 365-389. 5 Ronald L. Numbers and Daniel P. Thurs, "The Scientific Idea," in Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams, eds., Encyclopedia ofAmerican Cultural and Intellectual History, 3 vols. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001), 3:141-49. 6 [W. G Ward], "Science, Prayer, Free Will, and Miracles," Dublin Review 8 (1867): 255-298, quotation on 255. 7 Ronald L. Numbers, "Science without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs," in Lindberg and Numbers, eds., When Science and Christianity Meet, 265-285. 8 Ronald L. Numbers, "Charles Hodge and the Beauties and Deformities of Science," in John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead, eds., Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal ofHis Life and Work (William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 77-102. 9 Stephen G Alter, William Dwight Whitney and the Science ofLanguage (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 98-100, 138; William D. Whitney, "Is the Study of Language a Physical Science?" North American Review 101 (1865): 434-474. 10Daniel Patrick Thurs, "Science in Popular Culture: Contested Meanings and Cultural Authority in America, 1832-1994," Ph.D. dissertation , University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004. 11Herbert Butterfield, The Origins ofModern Science, 1300-1800, rev. ed. (G Bell and Sons, 1957; first published in 1949). 12Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life ofFrancis Bacon (Hill and Wang, 1999), 439. 13Johannes Kepler, Myserium Cosmographicum: The Secret ofthe Universe, trans. A. M. Duncan (Abaris Books, 1981), 55-57; Frank E. Manuel, Issac Newton, Historian (Harvard University Press, 1963), 260; and Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 16601750 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), xxviii, quoting Joseph Glanville. I am grateful to Robert S. Westman for bringing the Kepler quotation to my attention. 14One discovers little about popular views in John Hedley Brooke's influential Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1991) or—I regret to say—in the two collections I have coedited with David C. Lindberg, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science and When Science and Christianity Meet. Slightly more inclusive is Gary B. Ferngren et al., eds., The History ofScience and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 2000). 15This account ofpopular science and religion is based on Ronald L. Numbers, "Science and Christianity among the People: A Vulgar History," in Amanda Porterfield, ed., Modem Christianity to 1900, vol. 6 ofDenis R. Janz, ed., A Peoples History ofChristianity, 7 vols. (Augsburg Fortress, in press). 16Robert S. Westman, "The Astronomer's Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study," History ofScience 18 (1980): 105-147. 17Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992 (University of California Press, 2005), 72. For an excellent account ofpopular Copernicanism, see Rienk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception ofthe New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575-1750 (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2002). 18 1 am happy to say that John Hedley Brooke and I are editing a collection of historical essays on science and religion that looks at many religious traditions. Rejoinder to Numbers and Larson William R. Shea ^ onald Numbers and Edward Larson have been both perceptive and kind. I am grateful for their responses, each of which points out some ambiguities in my essay and offers the opportunity to sort out and clarify the issues. I shall begin with Numbers's suggestions and then move on to Larson's comments. I am pleased that Numbers should stress, in a personal and therefore more interesting way, the fact that it is generally impossible to know the religious orientation of recent historians writing about the relationships (I accept Numbers's plural) between science and religion . I see this as a clean bill of health for the profession, for ifthere is anything that historians want to avoid it is the projection of their own concerns onto the past, thereby unwittingly collapsing the distance between past and present. To recuperate a lost world of thought, we need a blend of faith and agnosticism . We have to believe that we can enter that world, and we have to be skeptical lest...