(A Few More) Essential Reads in the History of Science and Christianity
As I continue to plod along on my hobby horse regarding the history of Science and Christianity debunking the so-called "Warfare thesis", I've had the opportunity to read through some more gems which I wanted to share. Moreover, I have been so busy reading this year I've come down with a severe case of writer's block lately, and figured this might make an easy attempt to ease myself back into writing. I've made recommendation lists before on this subject (here and here, and specifically focusing on interpretation of Galileo here) and I stick by all of those selections, but I won't repeat them (though I would add Peter Harrison's The Territories of Science and Religion which came out after those lists, but made my general favorite reads of 2015, and Martin Rudwick's Earth's Deep History which was one of my favorite reads last year).
Occasionally, I receive a bit of pushback regarding why focusing on historiography is so important. Surely, it is said, more headway could be made if we focused on constructive solutions for the here and now? But this is to make a false dichotomy. We carry histories with us, they shape our presuppositions, our goals, our passions, our thoughts. Perhaps no better recent example of how history shapes thought in these areas could be mustered than Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern which won, among many prizes, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, a top prize from the Modern Language Association, and netted in addition a whopping $735,000 from earning the Holberg Prize. Yet, its history is a huge pile of junk. You don't have to believe me. Listen to the experts: here, here, here. How this slipped (swerved?) past so many "expert" committees is yet another testament to the need for some basic historical education.
On this list I am limiting myself to books I've read recently dealing with the history of science and Christianity, not necessarily their relations today, or with philosophy of science per se (though of course ultimately these things are not totally separable). I am also limiting myself to what would (at least in theory) be more immediately relevant to those interested in the topic. For example, I have read several works which make interesting cases for using how the "monstrous" and monsters were perceived and categorized in any given era as a good index or barometer for how nature and supernature are being defined and juxtaposed. But, unless you are just inherently fascinated by monsters like I am, these selections may be a bit too circuitous a route to the topic at hand. Thus I leave them and similar works off the list. At any rate, those that do appear here are in no particular order. Enjoy!
Note: A few of you will no doubt ask: "why is there nothing on Darwin or evolution here?" Fear not! I thought about including some on this present list, but there have been so many good and relatively recent historical studies that I am going to put them into their own list - coming soon!
1.) Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1995), 176pp.
Alejandro Amenábar's recent film Agora repeated ad absurdum the oft-told tale of how the beautiful, precocious Greek female philosopher and scientist Hypatia was cut down in the Fifth century by a Christian mob stupefied by their regressive dogma. In his short essay "Hypatia Reassembled" (91-95) David Bentley Hart rightly takes to task such popular nonsense. In his earlier work, Atheist Delusions (ignore the bombastic title, this is a wonderful historical study) Hart attacks this idea more at length, and does so by citing this work by Maria Dzielska (245n.9). This is, in my humble opinion, the definitive word on the Greek philosopher. She cannot be so easily used as an icon for the supposed historical war of science and Christianity. "Over the last two centuries," says Dzielska, "all have used the figure of Hypatia to articulate their attitude toward Christianity" (101). But she is in fact not a figure so easily assimilated to our modern narratives (101-109). Yet, like Galileo, they seem to continue.
2.) Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropologists & The Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 256pp.
Apart from having a wonderful title, this is to my knowledge the first study on the relationship that Christianity had to the emerging field of anthropology. Larsen was quite taken aback by reading a line about the faith of one George Frederick Holmes, which had weathered the storms of Higher Biblical criticism, but crumbled by encounter with "Lubbock and Tyler." Larsen wondered "what faith-destroying powers did these anthropologists have?" (2) Indeed, there is a general impression that as a field, anthropologists had a generally hostile bent to faith. While there were certainly aspects of this, Larsen's fascinating study shows how while there was certainly widespread animosity, there was a surprising amount of leading anthropologists who did their work as believers (223). Larsen is too good of a historian to simply swing from the myth of warfare to one of harmony between the fields of anthropology and Christianity. Nonetheless his wonderful study complicates the narrative in a previously untold manner.
3.) Larry Witham, The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion - The Story of the Gifford Lectures (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 358pp.
More journalistic in tone than many offerings on this list (in a good way), this is an utterly fascinating telling of the history of The Gifford Lectures. For those who don't know, founded by Lord Gifford's request in his last will and testament (along with generous funds), the lectures are devoted to essentially any topic pertaining to advancing natural theology and the knowledge of God. These were not meant to be a specifically "Christian" project, and its aims have been interpreted fairly broadly. In fact, as Sarah Coakley noted in her own Gifford lectures, it has become something of an ongoing joke these days for presenters to open with the original stipulations of Gifford's will, only to note that times have changed and move on from there). The prestigious lectures have hosted presenters as diverse as the American philosopher William James, to the theologian Karl Barth, to the scientist Simon Conway Morris. I really cannot recommend this book enough. It is bristling with insights, witty anecdotes, and told in a breezy and engaging style. What is better: the overall thesis is that the Gifford Lectures provide a ready-made barometer for how the science and religion dialogues have changed this century.
4.) Steven Shapin and Simon Schaeffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), 448pp.
While I personally have only just come to read this, from what I can tell it is widely considered to be an epoch-defining book in the field of the history of science. It certainly deserves that reputation. As strange as it might seem given how often we hear of the merits of the Scientific Revolution, the history of science is still a relatively young discipline. It was often thought that as cumulative, timeless truth, science really had no history. Or if there was a history to be told, it was narrating it in a manner now pejoratively termed "Whig History" in which the story made where we are now seem like the inevitable march of history (and any other pathways as ignorant missteps). Shapin and Schaeffer frame their subject in the thick descriptions of society, culture, personal taste, aesthetics, and theology. They narrate the rise of the place of experiment in science by highlighting the debates that took place between Robert Boyle (for experiment) and Thomas Hobbes (against experiment, to put it crudely). Experiment seems to us to take a natural place in the scientific endeavor, but that artificially produced conditions could show us the course of nature generally was far from obvious. Indeed, even the political theology of the two men came to bear: Boyle wanted a "democratic" solution to ease the distemper of debate by allowing experiment as an objective standard for the Royal Society. for Hobbes, civil war flowed from any endeavor that did not ensure absolute compulsion (306, 152). At stake for these men (again, among other things) was not just the nature of science, but the very notion of proper political order.
5.) Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (New York: Penguin, 2005), 320pp.
I am recommending this one mainly because it is such a charming and fascinating read. Owen Gingerich is Emeritus astronomer and historian of science at Harvard. Due to many interpreting the condemnation of Galileo as the status quo for the Catholic Church, the fact that Copernicus' On the Revolution of the Spheres made no such ruckus when it was printed over eighty years earlier meant to many that it was simply not read widely. Gingerich proves this wrong by, over the course of nearly forty years, visiting every extant first and second edition copy. By tracing the marginal notes, Gingerich figures out who owned it, who read it, when, and where. What he discovers is that there was a wide network of scholars reading Copernicus' book, and that even among Catholic owners post-Galileo, no one cared much about the condemnation. They considered Galileo's fate "an Italian affair" and widely ignored the (already quite minimal) redaction of Copernicus' book required by the Index. Gingerich is a scholar of rare caliber, a man of letters, and a fine writer. This book is fascinating not just for the history it rewrites, but also as one feels they are hobnobbing with great minds through Gingerich's many stories of the twists and turns it took to visit every copy of Copernicus' masterwork.
6.) Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 576pp.
The sprawling first volume of a projected five-volume series (I believe the third was just recently released), I have rarely encountered someone who handles so masterfully the continuities and transitions between scholasticism and the scientific revolution. The only other work on this level to my mind is Edward Grant's equally fantastic God and Reason in the Middle Ages. What makes this work by Gaukroger even more helpful than many comparable works is that it isn't simply a description, but ventures a thesis. Showing how instrumental Christianity was to the Scientific Revolution, Gaukroger also notes (echoing the thesis of Michael Buckley) that far from warfare between science and revelation, there developed an unhealthy merging of the two. As such the projects of theology and science merged, the "two books" (scripture and nature) appeared to become one volume. And so when the culture changed, so too was a theology too closely wedded to the sciences as a physical (as opposed to metaphysical) theory, discarded (507-508).
7.) H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 680pp.
Despite its sprawl (and the absolutely atrocious decision to use endnotes, which is especially vexing given a volume of this size) this is a surprisingly readable book. While I read through it, it would also be profitably used simply as a reference guide. It traces the historiography of the scientific revolution from its beginnings up until just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Frankly if you are thinking about looking into the history of science, this is a necessary resource. It has done so much legwork I found myself irritated I had not run into this volume sooner. If you are looking for something slightly less bulky and more up to date, Steven Shapin's fantastic (though almost too brief) The Scientific Revolution will cure what ails you (and it has a wonderful bibliographic essay that helps to hunt down further sources).
8.) Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016), 488.
This wonderful tale kept me company as an audio book on my morning commutes. Fantastic and enthralling, it serves as an excellent reminder that the perception of a war between science and religion is sometimes reinforced by conflicts between science and philosophy at the turn of the century. What is time? Einstein famously argued that the standard of time could be discerned by the measurement of light. Much as Shapin and Schaefer's Leviathan and the Air Pump, here Canales outlines that such a decision was not free from political, personal, and even theological decisions. For in some sense Einstein replicates a problem that Plotinus saw with Aristotle: how can a measurement of time work when all measurement occurs in time? Can time really be reduced to our measurements, which seem to snip its flow into pieces? Given the success of Einstein's theory, this debate was largely lost from historical memory despite the fact that, as Canales expertly displays, it was on everyone's mind for the first half of the Twentieth-century, from Heidegger to Bohr.
Occasionally, I receive a bit of pushback regarding why focusing on historiography is so important. Surely, it is said, more headway could be made if we focused on constructive solutions for the here and now? But this is to make a false dichotomy. We carry histories with us, they shape our presuppositions, our goals, our passions, our thoughts. Perhaps no better recent example of how history shapes thought in these areas could be mustered than Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern which won, among many prizes, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, a top prize from the Modern Language Association, and netted in addition a whopping $735,000 from earning the Holberg Prize. Yet, its history is a huge pile of junk. You don't have to believe me. Listen to the experts: here, here, here. How this slipped (swerved?) past so many "expert" committees is yet another testament to the need for some basic historical education.
On this list I am limiting myself to books I've read recently dealing with the history of science and Christianity, not necessarily their relations today, or with philosophy of science per se (though of course ultimately these things are not totally separable). I am also limiting myself to what would (at least in theory) be more immediately relevant to those interested in the topic. For example, I have read several works which make interesting cases for using how the "monstrous" and monsters were perceived and categorized in any given era as a good index or barometer for how nature and supernature are being defined and juxtaposed. But, unless you are just inherently fascinated by monsters like I am, these selections may be a bit too circuitous a route to the topic at hand. Thus I leave them and similar works off the list. At any rate, those that do appear here are in no particular order. Enjoy!
Note: A few of you will no doubt ask: "why is there nothing on Darwin or evolution here?" Fear not! I thought about including some on this present list, but there have been so many good and relatively recent historical studies that I am going to put them into their own list - coming soon!
Alejandro Amenábar's recent film Agora repeated ad absurdum the oft-told tale of how the beautiful, precocious Greek female philosopher and scientist Hypatia was cut down in the Fifth century by a Christian mob stupefied by their regressive dogma. In his short essay "Hypatia Reassembled" (91-95) David Bentley Hart rightly takes to task such popular nonsense. In his earlier work, Atheist Delusions (ignore the bombastic title, this is a wonderful historical study) Hart attacks this idea more at length, and does so by citing this work by Maria Dzielska (245n.9). This is, in my humble opinion, the definitive word on the Greek philosopher. She cannot be so easily used as an icon for the supposed historical war of science and Christianity. "Over the last two centuries," says Dzielska, "all have used the figure of Hypatia to articulate their attitude toward Christianity" (101). But she is in fact not a figure so easily assimilated to our modern narratives (101-109). Yet, like Galileo, they seem to continue.
Apart from having a wonderful title, this is to my knowledge the first study on the relationship that Christianity had to the emerging field of anthropology. Larsen was quite taken aback by reading a line about the faith of one George Frederick Holmes, which had weathered the storms of Higher Biblical criticism, but crumbled by encounter with "Lubbock and Tyler." Larsen wondered "what faith-destroying powers did these anthropologists have?" (2) Indeed, there is a general impression that as a field, anthropologists had a generally hostile bent to faith. While there were certainly aspects of this, Larsen's fascinating study shows how while there was certainly widespread animosity, there was a surprising amount of leading anthropologists who did their work as believers (223). Larsen is too good of a historian to simply swing from the myth of warfare to one of harmony between the fields of anthropology and Christianity. Nonetheless his wonderful study complicates the narrative in a previously untold manner.
More journalistic in tone than many offerings on this list (in a good way), this is an utterly fascinating telling of the history of The Gifford Lectures. For those who don't know, founded by Lord Gifford's request in his last will and testament (along with generous funds), the lectures are devoted to essentially any topic pertaining to advancing natural theology and the knowledge of God. These were not meant to be a specifically "Christian" project, and its aims have been interpreted fairly broadly. In fact, as Sarah Coakley noted in her own Gifford lectures, it has become something of an ongoing joke these days for presenters to open with the original stipulations of Gifford's will, only to note that times have changed and move on from there). The prestigious lectures have hosted presenters as diverse as the American philosopher William James, to the theologian Karl Barth, to the scientist Simon Conway Morris. I really cannot recommend this book enough. It is bristling with insights, witty anecdotes, and told in a breezy and engaging style. What is better: the overall thesis is that the Gifford Lectures provide a ready-made barometer for how the science and religion dialogues have changed this century.
While I personally have only just come to read this, from what I can tell it is widely considered to be an epoch-defining book in the field of the history of science. It certainly deserves that reputation. As strange as it might seem given how often we hear of the merits of the Scientific Revolution, the history of science is still a relatively young discipline. It was often thought that as cumulative, timeless truth, science really had no history. Or if there was a history to be told, it was narrating it in a manner now pejoratively termed "Whig History" in which the story made where we are now seem like the inevitable march of history (and any other pathways as ignorant missteps). Shapin and Schaeffer frame their subject in the thick descriptions of society, culture, personal taste, aesthetics, and theology. They narrate the rise of the place of experiment in science by highlighting the debates that took place between Robert Boyle (for experiment) and Thomas Hobbes (against experiment, to put it crudely). Experiment seems to us to take a natural place in the scientific endeavor, but that artificially produced conditions could show us the course of nature generally was far from obvious. Indeed, even the political theology of the two men came to bear: Boyle wanted a "democratic" solution to ease the distemper of debate by allowing experiment as an objective standard for the Royal Society. for Hobbes, civil war flowed from any endeavor that did not ensure absolute compulsion (306, 152). At stake for these men (again, among other things) was not just the nature of science, but the very notion of proper political order.
I am recommending this one mainly because it is such a charming and fascinating read. Owen Gingerich is Emeritus astronomer and historian of science at Harvard. Due to many interpreting the condemnation of Galileo as the status quo for the Catholic Church, the fact that Copernicus' On the Revolution of the Spheres made no such ruckus when it was printed over eighty years earlier meant to many that it was simply not read widely. Gingerich proves this wrong by, over the course of nearly forty years, visiting every extant first and second edition copy. By tracing the marginal notes, Gingerich figures out who owned it, who read it, when, and where. What he discovers is that there was a wide network of scholars reading Copernicus' book, and that even among Catholic owners post-Galileo, no one cared much about the condemnation. They considered Galileo's fate "an Italian affair" and widely ignored the (already quite minimal) redaction of Copernicus' book required by the Index. Gingerich is a scholar of rare caliber, a man of letters, and a fine writer. This book is fascinating not just for the history it rewrites, but also as one feels they are hobnobbing with great minds through Gingerich's many stories of the twists and turns it took to visit every copy of Copernicus' masterwork.
The sprawling first volume of a projected five-volume series (I believe the third was just recently released), I have rarely encountered someone who handles so masterfully the continuities and transitions between scholasticism and the scientific revolution. The only other work on this level to my mind is Edward Grant's equally fantastic God and Reason in the Middle Ages. What makes this work by Gaukroger even more helpful than many comparable works is that it isn't simply a description, but ventures a thesis. Showing how instrumental Christianity was to the Scientific Revolution, Gaukroger also notes (echoing the thesis of Michael Buckley) that far from warfare between science and revelation, there developed an unhealthy merging of the two. As such the projects of theology and science merged, the "two books" (scripture and nature) appeared to become one volume. And so when the culture changed, so too was a theology too closely wedded to the sciences as a physical (as opposed to metaphysical) theory, discarded (507-508).
Despite its sprawl (and the absolutely atrocious decision to use endnotes, which is especially vexing given a volume of this size) this is a surprisingly readable book. While I read through it, it would also be profitably used simply as a reference guide. It traces the historiography of the scientific revolution from its beginnings up until just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Frankly if you are thinking about looking into the history of science, this is a necessary resource. It has done so much legwork I found myself irritated I had not run into this volume sooner. If you are looking for something slightly less bulky and more up to date, Steven Shapin's fantastic (though almost too brief) The Scientific Revolution will cure what ails you (and it has a wonderful bibliographic essay that helps to hunt down further sources).
This wonderful tale kept me company as an audio book on my morning commutes. Fantastic and enthralling, it serves as an excellent reminder that the perception of a war between science and religion is sometimes reinforced by conflicts between science and philosophy at the turn of the century. What is time? Einstein famously argued that the standard of time could be discerned by the measurement of light. Much as Shapin and Schaefer's Leviathan and the Air Pump, here Canales outlines that such a decision was not free from political, personal, and even theological decisions. For in some sense Einstein replicates a problem that Plotinus saw with Aristotle: how can a measurement of time work when all measurement occurs in time? Can time really be reduced to our measurements, which seem to snip its flow into pieces? Given the success of Einstein's theory, this debate was largely lost from historical memory despite the fact that, as Canales expertly displays, it was on everyone's mind for the first half of the Twentieth-century, from Heidegger to Bohr.
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