Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew 1st Edition by Ronald L. Numbers (PDF)

Description

As past president of both the History of Science Society and the American Society of Church History, Ronald L. Numbers is uniquely qualified to assess the historical relations between science and Christianity. In this collection of his most recent essays, he moves beyond the clichés of conflict and harmony to explore the tangled web of historical interactions involving scientific and religious beliefs. In his lead essay he offers an unprecedented overview of the history of science and Christianity from the perspective of the ordinary people who filled the pews of churchesor loitered around outside. Unlike the elite scientists and theologians on whom most historians have focused, these vulgar Christians cared little about the discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. Instead, they worried about the causes of the diseases and disasters that directly affected their lives and about scientists preposterous attempts to trace human ancestry back to apes. Far from dismissing opinion-makers in the pulpit, Numbers closely looks at two the most influential Protestant theologians in nineteenth-century America: Charles Hodge and William Henry Green. Hodge, after decades of struggling to harmonize Gods two revelationsin nature and in the Biblein the end famously described Darwinism as atheism. Green, on the basis of his careful biblical studies, concluded that Ussher’s chronology was unreliable, thus opening the door for Christian anthropologists to accommodate the subsequent discovery of human antiquity. In Science without God Numbers traces the millennia-long history of so-called methodological naturalism, the commitment to explaining the natural world without appeals to the supernatural. By the early nineteenth century this practice was becoming the defining characteristic of science; in the late twentieth century it became the central point of attack in the audacious attempt of intelligent designers to redefine science. Numbers ends his reassessment by arguing that although science has markedly changed the world we live in, it has contributed less to secularizing it than many have claimed. Taken together, these accessible and authoritative essays form a perfect introduction to Christian attitudes towards science since the 17th century.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐There’s zero chance that Mr. Numbers has a clue what he’s talking about. In his dismissal of the birthing thesis of science from Christianity, he reveals that he hasn’t even read the back covers of the books he’s referenced.For instance, on page 4 of this book Mr. Numbers writes “the claim that Christianity gave birth to science–most glaringly, it ignores or minimizes the contributions of ancient Greeks” while at the same time citing Reijer Hooykaas’s

⭐as one of the books with this supposedly flawed thesis. Yet the back cover of Hooykaas’s Religion and the rise of Modern Science provides the conclusion of the text as “‘metaphorically speaking, whereas the bodily ingredients of science may have been Greek, its vitamins and hormones were biblical.'”Besides complaing about the lack of understanding of ancient Greek contributions, Numbers also whines about Rodney Stark’s and Reijer Hooykaas’s lack of understanding of Islamic contributions to modern scientific thought. As one who has actually read some of Aydin Sayili’s

⭐and A. I. Sabra’s

⭐(1981 Cambridge University Press), I don’t get the sense that Numbers is at all a fellow traveler in trying to unravel the origins-of-science connections between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (even in merely cultural as opposed to a doctrinal basis).In fact in this book Numbers appears to be picking up slogans and broad conceptual strokes from 50 years ago such as those found in Richard Westfield’s book

⭐, which even Westfield himself has backed away from. With a surprisingly and obviously shallow religious framework almost surely rooted in poorly resolved personal issues with his own 7th-day-Adventist-view-of-creation background, Numbers proceeds to bolster his weak and ultimately junk scholarship through silly appeals to mindless newspaper and TV press headline grabers and soundbites.

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