Reconciling Science and Religion

Reconciling Science and Religion PDF Author: Peter J. Bowler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226068595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists—including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists—tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion—and efforts at reconciling the two—are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues.

Reconciling Science and Religion

Reconciling Science and Religion PDF Author: Peter J. Bowler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226068595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists—including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists—tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion—and efforts at reconciling the two—are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues.

How to Relate Science and Religion

How to Relate Science and Religion PDF Author: Mikael Stenmark
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802828231
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Stenmark (philosophy of religion, Uppsala University, Sweden) replaces the paradigm of science and religion as opposing perspectives with a conciliatory model. He lays out the central issues of the debate between these two powerful cultural forces and shows what is at stake for the advancement of human knowledge, then demonstrates how science and r

The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion

The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion PDF Author: Peter Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521712513
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book explores the historical relations between science and religion and discusses contemporary issues with perspectives from cosmology, evolutionary biology and bioethics.

Reality’s Fugue

Reality’s Fugue PDF Author: F. Samuel Brainard
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271080558
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Science, religion, philosophy: these three categories of thought have organized humankind’s search for meaning from time immemorial. Reality’s Fugue presents a compelling case that these ways of understanding, often seen as competing, are part of a larger puzzle that cannot be rendered by one account of reality alone. This book begins with an overview of the concept of reality and the philosophical difficulties associated with attempts to account for it through any single worldview. By clarifying the differences among first-person, third-person, and dualist understandings of reality, F. Samuel Brainard repurposes the three predominant ways of making sense of those differences: exclusionist (only one worldview can be right), inclusivist (viewing other worldviews through the lens of one in order to incorporate them all, and thus distorting them), and pluralist or relativist (holding that there are no universals, and truth is relative). His alternative mode of understanding uses Douglas Hofstadter’s metaphor of a musical fugue that allows different “voices” and “melodies” of worldviews to coexist in counterpoint and conversation, while each remains distinct, with none privileged above the others. Approaching reality in this way, Brainard argues, opens up the possibility for a multivoiced perspective that can overcome the skeptical challenges that metaphysical positions face. Engagingly argued by a lifelong scholar of philosophy and global religions, this edifying and accessible exploration of the nature of reality addresses deeply meaningful questions about belief, reconciliation, and being.

Reconciling the Bible and Science

Reconciling the Bible and Science PDF Author: Lynn Mitchell
Publisher: Booksurge Publishing
ISBN: 9781439240090
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Reconciling the Bible and Science acknowledges the Bible as the word of God, demonstrates why there is no conflict between the Bible and science, and shows readers how to accept both.

Faith Versus Fact

Faith Versus Fact PDF Author: Jerry A. Coyne
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143108263
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
“A superbly argued book.” —Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion The New York Times bestselling author of Why Evolution is True explains why any attempt to make religion compatible with science is doomed to fail In this provocative book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions. Coyne is responding to a national climate in which more than half of Americans don’t believe in evolution, members of Congress deny global warming, and long-conquered childhood diseases are reappearing because of religious objections to inoculation, and he warns that religious prejudices in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable “truth” by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science. Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm—to individuals and to our planet—in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in. Praise for Faith Versus Fact: “A profound and lovely book . . . showing that the honest doubts of science are better . . . than the false certainties of religion.” —Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

The Believing Scientist

The Believing Scientist PDF Author: Stephen Barr
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467445967
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Elegant writings by a cutting-edge research scientist defending traditional theological and philosophical positions Both an accomplished theoretical physicist and a faithful Catholic, Stephen Barr in this book addresses a wide range of questions about the relationship between science and religion, providing a beautiful picture of how they can coexist in harmony. In his first essay, "Retelling the Story of Science," Barr challenges the widely held idea that there is an inherent conflict between science and religion. He goes on to analyze such topics as the quantum creation of universes from nothing, the multiverse, the Intelligent Design movement, and the implications of neuroscience for the reality of the soul. Including reviews of highly influential books by such figures as Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Francis S. Collins, Michael Behe, and Thomas Nagel, The Believing Scientist helpfully engages pressing questions that often vex religious believers who wish to engage with the world of science.

The Material Image

The Material Image PDF Author: Donald H. Wacome
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1978703910
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
In The Material Image, Donald H. Wacome sets out to reconcile the Christian faith and contemporary science by embracing, rather than evading, its naturalistic implications. The sciences are our best way to know ourselves and the world we inhabit, Wacome argues, but this does not make belief in miracles unreasonable. The sciences reveal that we are fully material beings, the product of unguided natural selection. God created human persons for the vocation of sharing in the everlasting Triune life and work, but this creation does not involve design. The mind is the embodied, socially situated brain. There is no immaterial soul; we are the material image of our transcendent Creator. This materialist conception does not preclude the resurrection of the body. The freedom that matters for the human creature is compatible with our being governed by the laws of nature. Morality and religion are natural, merely human, legacies of our evolutionary history, which God employs in pursuit of fellowship with us. Christians can faithfully and enthusiastically welcome the image of human beings given in contemporary science.

Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

Truth and Tension in Science and Religion PDF Author: Varadaraja V. Raman
Publisher: Beech River Books
ISBN: 0979377862
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
"An examination of the frameworks of science and religion that provides a multi-cultural view of how they affect our perception of the truth"--Provided by publisher.

Belief in God in an Age of Science

Belief in God in an Age of Science PDF Author: John Polkinghorne
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300174101
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
John Polkinghorne is a major figure in today’s debates over the compatibility of science and religion. Internationally known as both a theoretical physicist and a theologian—the only ordained member of the Royal Society—Polkinghorne brings unique qualifications to his inquiry into the possibilities of believing in God in an age of science. In this thought-provoking book, the author focuses on the collegiality between science and theology, contending that these "intellectual cousins" are both concerned with interpreted experience and with the quest for truth about reality. He argues eloquently that scientific and theological inquiries are parallel. The book begins with a discussion of what belief in God can mean in our times. Polkinghorne explores a new natural theology and emphasizes the importance of moral and aesthetic experience and the human intuition of value and hope. In other chapters, he compares science’s struggle to understand the nature of light with Christian theology’s struggle to understand the nature of Christ. He addresses the question, Does God act in the physical world? And he extends his ideas about the role of chaos theory, surveys the prospects for future dialogue between scientific and theological thinkers, and defends a critical realist understanding of the activities of both disciplines. Polkinghorne concludes with a consideration of the nature of mathematical truths and the links between the complementary realities of physical and mental experience.