Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T13:40:56.113Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Christianity and the sciences

from PART I - CHRISTIANITY AND MODERNITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Nicolaas Rupke
Edited by
Sheridan Gilley  and
Brian Stanley
Sheridan Gilley
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Brian Stanley
Affiliation:
Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge
Get access

Summary

Cognitive dissonance about cosmogony

Among the different possible approaches to Christianity and the sciences is that of the Christian conduct of science, involving a study of Christian scientists, their scientific accomplishments, and the importance of religious upbringing and beliefs for the character of scientific subjects and theories. This approach was followed as early as the closing decades of the period 1815–1914, when a Lutheran theologian at the Universityof Greifswald, Otto Zöckler (1833–1906), produced his two-volume Gottes Zeugenim Reich der Natur (1881), and when from the Catholic side Das Christentum und die Vertreter der neueren Naturwissenschaft (1903; English trans. 1911; new edition 1995), by the Jesuit church historian Karl Alois Kneller (1857–1942), was published. Yet apart from a number of biographical studies of individual Christian scientists, ‘few attempts to pursue this link between religion and science’ have been made since. The majority of studies of ‘Christianity and the sciences’ have focused on the converse, namely the impact of scientific discoveries and theories on Christian beliefs, in particular on biblical hermeneutics and the question of the historicity, inerrancy and literal-versus-symbolic meaning of Genesis. Nearly all the primary sources of the period of this chapter as well as the secondary ones, up to the present day, have been preoccupied with what James Moore – following Leon Festinger – has called the ‘cognitive dissonance’ that developed between the ‘Mosaic cosmogony’ and the scientific study of origins – of the universe, of life and of humankind.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 164 - 180
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akenson, D. H., The Church of Ireland: ecclesiastical reform and revolution, 1800–1885 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).Google Scholar
Baltzer, J. B., Die biblische Schöpfungsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867, 1872), vol. i.Google Scholar
Bowler, Peter J., The eclipse of Darwinism: anti-Darwinian evolution theories in the decades around 1900 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
Bowler, Peter J., The non-Darwinian revolution: reinterpreting a historical myth (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Brooke, John Hedley, Science and religion: some historical perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Corsi, Pietro, Science and religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican debate, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daum, Andreas, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19.Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwis- senschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit 1848–1914 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998).Google Scholar
Delitzsch, F., Commentar über die Genesis, 4th edn (Leipzig: Dörffling and Franke, 1872).Google Scholar
Deluc, J. A., Lettres physiques et morales sur l’histoire de la terre et de l’homme, 5 vols. (The Hague: Detune, and Paris: Duchesne, 1779), vol. v.Google Scholar
Ellegård, Alvar, Darwin and the general reader: the reception of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the British periodical press, 1859–1872 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990, reprinted from the 1958 original).Google Scholar
Ferngren, Gary B. (ed.), The history of science and religioninthe western tradition: an encyclopedia (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000).Google Scholar
Gillispie, Charles C., Genesis and geology: a study in the relations of scientific thought, natural theology, and social opinion in Great Britain, 1790–1830, new edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996; 1st edn 1951).Google Scholar
Greene, Mott T., ‘Genesis and geology revisited: the order of nature and the nature of order in nineteenth-century Britain’, in Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.), When science and Christianity meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Gregory, Frederick, Nature lost? Natural science and the German theological traditions of the nineteenth century (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Haeckel, E., Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874).Google Scholar
Kippenberg, Hans Gerhard, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaft und Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1997).Google Scholar
Kraus, Hans-Joachim, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments (Neukirchen: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins, 1956).Google Scholar
Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.), God and nature: historical essays on the encounter between Christianity and science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Lindberg, DavidWhen science and Christianity meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Livingstone, David N., Darwin’s forgotten defenders: the encounter between evangelical theology and evolutionary thought (Grand Rapids and Edinburgh: Eerdmans and Scottish Academic Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Livingstone, David N., Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molloy, G., Geology and revelation, 2nd edn (London: Burns and Oates, 1873).Google Scholar
Moore, James R., ‘Geologists and interpreters of Genesis in the nineteenth century’, in Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.), God and nature: historical essays on the encounter between Christianity and science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Moore, James R., The post-Darwinian controversies: a study of the Protestant struggle to cometo terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mullin, Robert Bruce, ‘Science, miracles, and the prayer-gauge debate’, in Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.), When science and Christianity meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Nelson, G. Blair, “Men before Adam!”: American debates over the unity and antiquity of humanity’, in Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.), When science and Christianity meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Numbers, Ronald L., ‘Science and religion’, Osiris 1 (2nd series) (1985). The creationists: the evolution of scientific creationism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).Google Scholar
Numbers, Ronald L., Darwinism comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Paine, M., Physiology of the soul and instinct, as distinguished from materialism (New York: Harper and Bros., 1872).Google Scholar
Reusch, F. H., Nature and the Bible, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Clark, 1886), vol. ii.Google Scholar
Riper, A. Bowdoin, Men among the mammoths: Victorian science and the discovery of human prehistory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Roberts, Jon H., Darwinism and the divine in America: Protestant intellectuals and organic evolution, 1859–1900 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Rudwick, Martin J. S. ‘The shape and meaning of earth history’, in Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.), God and nature: historical essays on the encounter between Christianity andscience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Rupke, Nicolaas A., Richard Owen: Victorian naturalist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Rupke, Nicolaas A., The great chain of history: William Buckland and the English school of geology (1814–1849) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).Google Scholar
Russell, Bertrand, Religion and science, new edn (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1961; 1st edn 1935).Google Scholar
Schweitzer, A., Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, 2nd edn (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1913).Google Scholar
Soulimani, Andrea Alaoui, Naturkunde unter dem Einfluss christlicher Religion. Johann Andreas Wagner (1797–1861): Ein Lebenfür die Naturkunde in einer Zeit der Wandlungen in Methode, Theorieund Weltanschauung (Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2001).Google Scholar
Trimmer, J., Practical geology and mineralogy (London: J. W. Parker, 1841), ch. 3.Google Scholar
Turner, Frank M., ‘The Victorian conflict between science and religion: a professional dimension’, Isis 69 (1978).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Turner, Frank M., Contesting cultural authority: essays in Victorian intellectual life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vogt, C., Vorlesungen über den Menschen, 2 vols. (Giessen: I. Ricker, 1863), vol. ii.Google Scholar
White, A. D., A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (New York: Dover republication, 1960), vol. i.Google Scholar
Young, Robert M., Darwin’s metaphor: nature’s place in Victorian culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×